The First Few Rolls
In the last post I started talking a bit about the first experiences shooting with the Petri. I kept it pretty simple, sunny days with low judgment exposure situations (remember, no light meter) and simple, post card like compositions. I reflected on the sudden flashback of muscle memory of last shooting with a film 35mm camera. But there was more.
Though the Petri has telephoto and wide angle extensions, I shot with its fixed 45mm lens. Initially, I found it constricting, which made no sense to me. I had done a lot of shooting with a 25mm (50 mm eq) on the PEN F this spring, so if anything, I should have had a little more room to compose. It hit me recently, the PEN F is a MFT camera and the native aspect ratio it was created to shoot in was 4:3. The Petri, being a 35mm film camera has an aspect ratio of 3:2. That was it. The wider 3:2 aspect ratio was more than eating up the additional range the 45mm was giving me compared to the 50mm eq shot in 4:3. Problem solved. Geometry lesson learned. The geometry will return as theme again in a bit.
As I shot the first roll, it became more difficult to advance the film inside the camera, eventually I realized that the gears were tearing the threads of film. This was something else I came to remember about the Petri. The collecting roll and the advancing pins were geared together. When loading the film, I have to take a little extra time and align the two. The collecting roll can be adjusted when holding the pins static. The old Ricoh wasn’t like that, the collecting roll advanced the film, the pins advanced the frame counter.
In addition to the initial photo walk on the American Legion Mall downtown (Indianapolis) I took the Petri with me to photo club. The pandemic was a mixed blessing for the club. It disrupted our in person meetings, but in a good way. We have now started to meet outside around town with the goal of shooting pictures, not just showing off pictures we had taken in Isolation. We made visits to Butler University (where I am faculty), Crown Hill cemetery and Holiday Park. I was leading the walk at Butler so I didn’t shoot. I shot at Crown Hill and Holiday Park.
I had accumulated enough rolls to start processing. Nothing too exciting to mention here, those rolls were shot with the Ilford version of Plus X and I used basic Ilford chemicals. Distilled water makes a difference, something wish I knew that 30 years ago when I last processed. An extra rinse after the wash in needed, the wash in the Ilford workflow was not the equivalent of Photoflo in my earlier days. Dried the film and it was time to scan. I went middle of the line and bought a Wolverine Mini Titan scanner. The name is sort of a misnomer – it’s not really a scanner. Inside its body is a small camera that takes a picture of your back lit film. I wasn’t yet up to purchasing a true photo scanner for the task.
I loaded the digital images from the scanner into lightroom to make some final adjustments and edits. Mistakes in the darkroom were the bane of my existence back in the day. Processing film with Lightroom made the transition back to film a lot less frustrating. Film in my living environment tends to be a dust magnet (dogs and cats abound). Spot removal is a blessing. I do find myself editing back to a preference that is independent that the original media was film. I do some sharpening and noise reduction. But what of the grain you say? Wasn’t that part of the point? Yeah it is, but remember – I am not working in a dark room nor editing a high quality scan. I am working with a scanner that is a camera, not a scanner. That chunky digitization step is removing the characteristic grain we think of with B&W film. A conundrum to ponder for the future.
On top of the limitations of the scan, there were some other things I wasn’t thrilled with. The exposures were correct and the film developed properly, but I was expecting a little more dynamic range. I think I partially traced this back to adjustments in the scanner but more importantly I eventually changed the film I use. I was also a little upset with the skies. They were pale and became something I did brush strokes on to darken, though I never achieved delineation with the clouds. More on these last two thoughts in a future post.
I also started seeing the limits of the camera itself. I’m not disappointed though, it is a 60 year old device. Some of the images with back lighting have some foggy lens glare. It works for some images but not others. Though the lens had been cleaned on its exterior elements, a residue of time seems to have found its way into the lens packet and onto the interior elements. Nothing practical I can really do about that. It’s a quirk I will learn to work with, account for and compose around. Eventually it will be a unique feature of using this camera. I also noticed that side to side, the focus softened a bit. This wasn’t so much the case top to bottom. Another example of optical geometry using a 3:2 ratio with this camera’s 45mm glass.
Some of my favorite images from these three rolls are below. I hope you enjoy.