Happy Mistakes
About 9 years ago, I spent some time in Thailand photographing seascapes. At the time, I recently went back to film after shooting digital for a few years.
My metering technique was flawed at best, and all these slides were grossly underexposed. The interesting thing was that the massive underexposure brought out incredible colors.
No editing was done to any of these images…these are the straight scans.
That is one of the main reasons I shoot film, you are working with a living breathing entity. Had I been able to see my ‘mistake’ at the time, I would have immediately corrected it, but then I would have missed out on this great lesson and these interesting images 🙂
Who says photography has to represent reality?
#underexposed #pranburi #samroiyot #velvia50 #mamiya7ii #mediumformat #ishootfilm #filmphotography #slidefilm #thailand
#bluehour #niceview
2 Comments
Permalink
hello, this collection of images is stunning.
looking at these “old” seescapes makes me wonder: did you use ND Grad filter to balance sky and sea exposure?
for me this is the hard part with Mamiya, being a rangefinder, it may ne difficult to place NDGrad.
also, Velvia being a ver slow film, did you shoot handheld for theses seascapes?
regards,
JL
Permalink
Hey Johan,
Thanks for stopping by my website!
I did use a nd grad for these shots, in fact, I use nd grads with the Mamiya most of the time. I dont find it that big of an issue placing grads on the mamiya. I generally shoot velvia in soft light so at the most Im using a 2 stop, and occasionally a 3 stop grad (very rarely though).
If the horizon is in the middle, I just slide the grad down to the middle of the glass on the lens. If there the horizon is on the top 25%, one quarter up and such. If you use the lee filter system, there are some screws on the front of the filter holder that actually mark the top most and bottom most viewable area of the lenses.The ‘gradable’ part of the opening of the lens stops at the screws on the front of the lee filter holder, not the big circular opening. Sure, there are some differences between the 150mm and the 43mm lens area, but not as much as you think.
If im want to be extra sure about the placement, I will just bracket a few shots and move the grad up or down to make sure.
And yes, I used a tripod for those shots, almost always do with the mamiya 🙂