a short summer story

three days at tzia.one and a half rolls of quirky and really cheap b&w film. a short, gritty and totally capricious summer story. [minolta xd-7 | polypan f 50 | august 2012]

a story about restlessness

"some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up.those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. the other kind of story, it uses you up. the more you tell it, the stronger it gets. those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. are. will always be." [olympus xa | polypan f 50 | june/july 2012]

a journey to the past

digging through the archives, I stumbled upon a lot of small photo sets I have never posted in my blog - this film was one of the few black and white rolls I shot with the vivitar ultra wide & slim in the three years I've been using it - I now use it exclusively with colour film. these photos were shot on a single roll of polypan f 50, over the course of several mornings and afternoons I spent walking around my neighbourhood. not sure of the exact date (the wonders of a notoriously messy mind) but, judging from the other photos in the roll, it is may 2010. two years ago. my neighbourhood has certainly changed a lot since then.

alight

last friday was a wonderful sunny day, as opposed to the recent spell of bad weather we're having, and I decided that it should not be wasted. constantina had asked me for a portrait session a while back, so we arranged a little trip to the seaside. the winter seaside is always a nice place if you want big open spaces, while at the same time you can get full advantage of the setting sun. my speed graphic was stranded on the sidelines, resting on a service table somewhere in the netherlands (the repair went fine and the camera is now on its way back to athens), so Ι fell back to 135 and 120 film. the minolta xd-7 was already loaded with some polypan f 50, and I hadn't aired the bronica sq-a for a really long time, so I took it along.

we arrived at the seaside early, but the sunlight was too harsh and I really get baked in direct sunlight (my body has a blown fuse when it comes to high temperatures), so we relaxed in the shadow until the sun was two hours away from setting, and the light had become more mellow - the golden hour.

I am quite wide-angle and static when doing large format portraits, but the 35mm format allows for fast pace and extreme close-ups - I tend to default to tight portraiture in such occasions, getting the most out of the 50mm/f1.4 lens...

...of course I still have the wide-angle bug in me, and wide-angle lenses really like big open spaces...

...and back to cream-cheese-the-hell-out-of-the-background territory...

a couple of dogs were around, they weren't exactly friendly...

...the sun was getting lower by the minute...

...and when I finished the half-full roll in the minolta, I took out the bronica, loaded it up with a roll of ilford fp4+, fitted the zenzanon 150mm/f3.5 on it and I was back to square portraits after months of working with non-square formats...

I need to get these negatives to the darkroom - they will print nicely, and also contact sheets would be nice. 20-something images in the 35mm roll and 12 images in the medium format roll, almost all of them based on different aspects of the same face, they will make up good contact sheets.

time machine

...don't you just love it when you develop a roll of film months after it was shot and you see images that you had forgotten all about..? in may 2011 I was after an image for the lomography turns on time machine exhibition. the submission deadline was coming up fast and I had nothing that would fit the bill, so I decided to take the holga out for a session - I hadn't used the holga for some months. I asked dear Kalli to pose for some portraits, and she agreed.

of course, I can never do a photo session without carrying at least three cameras (I have to find a cure for this), so I brought along the minolta xd-7 fitted with the 50mm/f1.4 lens as well as a medium format pinhole camera.

we shot two medium format films and maybe half a roll of the polypan f 50 which was loaded in the minolta - I never seem to be able to finish a 36-frame roll in a single session. I developed the two medium format films in the following days, but the 35mm film wasn't finished - when I did finish it, a couple of weeks later, I was too bored to develop it by itself (small developing tanks can fit two 35mm films) so I left it in the cupboard, waiting to do for another roll of the same film - which, of course, I didn't do until October.

...we arrived at a beach near Rafina with a couple of hours until sunset - the low sensitivity of the film (50 ASA) meant that if I stopped down the aperture I would get nice blurry images...

...it was a glorious day (although not quite summer yet), quite windy, and the beach was totally empty. Kalli set out to get some seashells and I just followed her around with the camera...

...then I started setting up the scene I wanted - I had re-used the clock in a close up image a couple of years ago and now I wanted a scene with the clock in the foreground and Kalli fading away in the foreground...

...but since this was a lomography exhibition, I needed to make this image with the holga - this is the resulting medium format image, shot on fuji acros 100 - quite different because of the holga's bigger depth of field, the softness of its lens and the inherent low contrast of the film (fuji acros is a magnificent "slow" film)...

...the holga went back in the bag, its job done, and I continued fooling around with the shallow depth of field of the 50mm/f1.4 - the small 35mm format and this high-contrast, high-grain film make a nice combination against the setting sun.

I tried printing the last photo in the darkroom and it came out pretty nice - this film is a pleasant surprise, especially when you consider that it is a movie film, sold in 90 meter reels, quite thin (it has a polyester base) and costing something like 22€ for the 90m reel on ebay, resulting in a price of less than half a euro for a 36-frame roll.