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Pretty cool man. If it's any consolation, most of the pics insee from reykjavik have grey flat light.

My wife's been and rates it among her favourite places.

Yeah. I think during the summer its a bit brighter and greener. The only problem with going in Summer is its 24hr daylight... I can't imagine living with that. Reminds me of that film Insomnia with Al Pacino lol

cool, I'd love to visit iceland.

Sigh, so many awesome places in Europe I want to visit. Nice pictures, I'm still amazed at the level of detail these Fuji cameras capture.

I went to a local motorsports event yesterday (drifting for those who are familiar), so I ran a roll through both the Canon A-1 and the T70 I bought a while back. Just to test them out, because I never had. Unfortunately it was ISO 200 film and it was very bright outside, and I had no ND filter, so a lot of them ended up overexposed. But they both work!

Also, it was Kodak Gold. I bought the cheapest thing available just for testing purposes. It's funny how this film, combined with these cameras, has THAT 80s look. I imagine that Kodak's consumer film hasn't changed much, if at all, since the time that these cameras were popular. I think I'll run a roll of Ektar through the A-1 to see how much of this look is the camera, and how much is the film.

those are pretty cool. amazing you were able to capture that fast action with a low-ish film speed like that. the exposure looks good to me. I think a low film speed like that should be well suited to bright sunlight photography. this is kodak gold 200 in bright direct sunlight:



does it look overexposed? yeah I guess it does, haha. anyway, I really think it's just the bright sunlight though, I don't think the film speed has much to do with it. technically a faster film should be worse because the camera has to accurately time to the millisecond a super fast shutter speed. old spring loaded shutters tend wear out and mess this up. an ND filter will just take the exact same picture but with a longer shutter speed (making action blurred and such), or larger aperture (lessening depth of field). if you want it not as bright you should just underexpose it.

Thanks! Those ones were exposed fine, it was actually a bit overcast at that point. But there were a lot that were completely blown out (that I didn't even bother to upload). And the exposure on the flowers look good to me, honestly. As for the action shots, it was still relatively bright, but it's all because I was panning. I had it set on shutter speed priority mode at 1/125 (for background motion blur). I was also using a 135mm prime, which is nice and light, really easy to pan with. When shooting motorsports with my digital setup, I sometimes can pull off shutter speeds as slow as 1/30

Anyway, I'm now a bit confused about how changing the ASA dial affects exposure on a film camera. Let's say I have an ISO 200 film, would increasing the ASA to ISO 400 underexpose or overexpose, given that shutter speed and aperture settings don't change?

The A-1 actually has an exposure compensation dial, which I tried to use, but on aperture priority mode, that just attempts to select a faster shutter speed. In direct sunlight at f/2.8, the meter on the A-1 was flashing at 1/1000, meaning that the maximum shutter speed (1/1000) wasn't fast enough to prevent over-exposure. I mentioned an ND filter because, if I wanted to force it to use a wider aperture for shallow DOF, I would need to force it to use a slower shutter speed.

Dillon wrote:Anyway, I'm now a bit confused about how changing the ASA dial affects exposure on a film camera. Let's say I have an ISO 200 film, would increasing the ASA to ISO 400 underexpose or overexpose, given that shutter speed and aperture settings don't change? speed.

It would underexpose by one stop, as the camera would "think" the film is one stop quicker than it actually is.

This can be fine if you then push the film when developing provided the film is okay to push. I often shoot Ilford HP5 at 800 or 1600, even though it says 400 on the box (Ilford advise that this is a nominal rating, that it suffers no ill effects from pushing). To do this I load the film as normal but set the dial to 800, say. The camera then shoots when step quicker than 400, allowing me to shoot one stop further into lower light. Then when developing I tell the guy to push it a stop and that I've shot it at 800 and it comes back fine because he leaves it in the tank for a wee bit longer to get all the details out of the film.

BacchusPaul wrote:

Dillon wrote:Anyway, I'm now a bit confused about how changing the ASA dial affects exposure on a film camera. Let's say I have an ISO 200 film, would increasing the ASA to ISO 400 underexpose or overexpose, given that shutter speed and aperture settings don't change? speed.

It would underexpose by one stop, as the camera would "think" the film is one stop quicker than it actually is.

This can be fine if you then push the film when developing provided the film is okay to push. I often shoot Ilford HP5 at 800 or 1600, even though it says 400 on the box (Ilford advise that this is a nominal rating, that it suffers no ill effects from pushing). To do this I load the film as normal but set the dial to 800, say. The camera then shoots when step quicker than 400, allowing me to shoot one stop further into lower light. Then when developing I tell the guy to push it a stop and that I've shot it at 800 and it comes back fine because he leaves it in the tank for a wee bit longer to get all the details out of the film.

I don't understand that either to be honest. If you're shooting fully manually then I don't see how the ASA dial would effect it. What else effects the exposure besides the aperture and shutter speed? I thought the ASA dial would only affect it if you're using some kind of auto mode.

Well actually, I wasn't shooting fully manual, almost never do unless I have to. I was using shutter priority for the action shots and aperture priority for the stills. The A-1 has the (somewhat-unique for its time?) feature of having both modes.

I was more asking from the purely mechanical side of things. If you set the ASA higher, the physical film speed is faster, regardless of what it's rated for. Which, I would think would let in less light, thereby underexposing. BUT if you do set the ASA higher, automatic modes force the meter to compensate. I think I need to just experiment with how ASA affects the meter in both manual and automatic modes.

What you do with the dial won't actually change anything mechanically or change what's going on with the exposure. It only affects how the meter (if you have one) or the auto-mode will work out what shutter speed or f-stop is suitable for the conditions and film speed you've told it you're using b

If you're doing everything completely manually then the asa dial does nothing, you wouldn't be using the auto-mode or meter or whatever anyway.

Ah yeah that's what I was thinking.

I need to get back into the film thing.

So ISO "speed" is a misnomer? For some reason I thought it literally changed the speed of how fast the film is moving Anyhow, I suppose it still stands to reason that I need to invest in some ND filters if I want to use wide apertures in broad daylight.

the film speed is the actual exposure speed rating of the physical film itself. an ISO 100 film has very fine grains of a smaller amount of silver in the film emulsion, an ISO 1600 film has larger grains and larger amount of silver in the film emulsion. an ISO 1600 film is highly light sensitive and the silver grains will react in very little time so it is said to have a fast film speed. an ISO 100 film is less light sensitive, the grains of silver will require more time to react to light exposure, so it is said to have a slow film speed.

the camera knows nothing about what film you've put inside it except for what you tell it via the ASA dial. the ASA dial sets the light meter reading to be appropriate for the film you've loaded. various auto and semi-auto modes use the light meter so they will be effected also. if you are shooting manually by matching the light meter reading, you're exposures will also be effected. the exposure compensation setting just offsets the ASA dial by however many stops you set it to.

also there are some cameras that don't have an ASA dial; they read the DX code on the film canister and automatically set the film speed.

ASA or ISO dials basically set the sensitivity of the lightmeter/auto-mode to light, in one stop increments.

The fastest speed on my camera is 1600. I keep wondering if I can shoot 3200 film in it by setting the speed at 1600 then underexposing by a stop. This makes sense, unless I think about too hard, then I break my brain with MATHS.

I have no real need to shoot at 3200 though. I'd just like to be able to.

Had a bit of a holiday and came across two old kodak adverts in a antiques shop


I thought they were pretty cool and as kodak is on the way out it would be important to keep.

Anyway just got home and hung one of them in my kitchen

That's great, I'm jealous

Has anyone here shot Ilford HP5 at ISO 1600? How hard was that to develop and what were the results like? I'm going to see a couple bands tonight and considering doing just that. The thing is, you can't get B&W film processed at the drug store mini-labs, they only do C-41. And I don't particularly want to pay for a lab to do it as they're a bit pricey. So I'm considering finally taking the plunge into home development. I just don't want to make it any harder than it has to be and risk destroying a perfectly good roll of film.

I have never shot hp5 any higher than 800 I think. But I am sure it would be fine I normally use tri-x at all iso's and it is supposed to similar. Shoot the roll and then shoot a roll normally develop that one first and when you have the hang of it developed the pushed film.

Hurb wrote:Anyway just got home and hung one of them in my kitchen

Love it!

Doesn't it say on the canister 400, 800 or 1600? I think there are three boxes and you tick which one you shot at, if that makes sense.

Yep, it sure does. I just wasn't sure about how well it actually works, since the box is labeled 400. But I searched for "HP5 1600" on Flickr and I'm liking the results.

Anyone know just how much the foam light seals around the mirror on old SLRs affect picture quality? Would it lead to blurry and/or overexposed photos? The seals in my AE-1 Program are completely gone, and my A-1's seals aren't great, either.