from bad to worse

Far learning from previous mistakes, my two most recent rolls turned out to be disasters – I used the wrong scale on the light meter.

There’s not a lot to say – I got up early, collected Doug and his Yashica TLR and travelled to a great location, with glorious light – and then made a complete mess of it. In mitigation, I must say I was somewhat preoccupied compensating for the underexposing meter, so much so, that I completely went the wrong way – I reckon by about 6-7 stops, I’d forgotten I’d put the dark slide in the meter and used the low scale. I did wonder why the exposures seemed so long, but I was shooting at high F-numbers and the light was quite pallid. I should have realised that the readings were way off, but I’m really rusty shooting film and so even that morsel of commonsense was absent. Unfortunately I didn’t notice my error until after the final shot of the day – when it was too late to do anything about it. I got the lab to pull the processing a couple of stops, in the hope of being able to see an image and perhaps learn something for the day, but I knew they’d be irredeemable and I was right (at least I was right about something).

Anyway a few more of shots appear below, it’s quite clear they wouldn’t have been anything special, even if I had exposed them correctly. There’s not gallery for this lot.

I knew it was going to be some work, going back to film, but I didn’t expect to go so far backwards. I’ve got a long, long way to go before I start getting close to work I’m going to be happy with. So much for taking it slow and making pictures with more deliberation.

posted on 13 November 2010
category: photo links