Portra 400

For the first roll of the year, I’m continuing on with more Portra 400.

This time, I decided to push the roll 1 stop. It doesn’t really look too different though. The grain is definitely a bit rougher than when shooting at 400, but the color seems pretty similar and there don’t seem to be any significant changes to the contrast.

I want to point out the two weird pictures with the white top/bottom. I was struggling with scanning the pictures on this roll and they’re not as clean as I’d like. It was also selecting the frame area really weirdly leading to the white bars. Since those pictures were ones I really didn’t care for, I just left them so I wouldn’t have to rescan them.

Anyways, this roll covered 4 shows during 01/05/23 for Austin Free Week. I started out seeing Strvck and Die Spitz at Stubb’s followed by Vestite and Sin + Seraphim at Elysium.

Overall, I really liked this roll. There were only a few pictures I found outright bad and there were quite a few pictures that I was really excited to see. As I mentioned in the previous posts, I shot this on my dad’s Nikon FM that I just got back from the camera repair shop. As a result, I was able to experiment more with multiple exposures. While I technically can do multiple exposures with my Minoltas, it’s pretty difficult and isn’t specifically a function of them like it is for the Nikon.

I mentioned it in the Die Spitz post, but I’m not sure how much I want to think about color. It doesn’t affect this roll too much, but the auto-coloring of the scanner I’m using isn’t super consistent and it bothers me a little. That said, I’m also not too concerned about color reality because different film will do different things already. If I wanted consistent, reproducible color I’d shoot digital and edit.

I’ll keep this post relatively short but I just want to talk about one extra picture here. It’s the third picture in the top row. This is a pretty weird looking picture. But it’s actually a long exposure of the crowd going wild. You can just barely make out a couple of faces, but other than that it’s just a big jumble. In some ways it almost looking like a flickering fire. I just think it’s kinda cool and wanted to point it out. That’s all for this post. I’m already behind the schedule I wanted to release these on but that’s how it goes.