Today was a glorious sunny winters day here in Oxford and I made good use of it by doing some photography with Tori during my lunch break. I had three different film cameras with me today and here are two shots from the Polaroid Land Camera I took (the b&w shots are drying in the darkroom overnight so they’ll follow at a later time). There’s something really nice about winter sunshine and how it can make colours pop, it can also be very harsh and contrasty so it’s a nice challenge to look at how the light is falling on your subject and how the smallest of movements can mean the difference between nice and not so nice. Tori was incredibly easy to photograph and I hope we can do some more photography with different cameras and film. There is zero retouching on these two images, no Photoshop fakery, no filters, no plugins, just straight scans from the film.
These two shots were made on Fuji FP100-C instant pack film that expired 9 years ago. When you store it carefully and pay attention to how you expose it it’s capable of creating some fantastic results. I tend to underexpose it by a stop which results in a darker print but a nice negative that can be recovered with bleaching the black carbon layer off. The negatives are much sharper than the prints and you also get 2 stops of more detail in the shadows compared to the print.
[Tech info:] Polaroid Land Camera 190, Fuji FP100-C (expired), recovered neg.
Hearing about the extra detail in instant negatives makes me hope those negatives of a gowned me in Oxford appear sometime! (though, it isn’t all that important in the end)
Ah, Gerard! Your negatives are safely buried in a mountain of negatives still waiting to be bleached. Unfortunately I didn’t label it so it’s a bit of pot luck as to when it will appear. Sorry about that 🙂