I was going to call this shot "Double Edged Sword" because really, that's what it represents to me. Let me explain. This is from a roll of film I shot ten days ago on a bright sunny day in London. The old film camera I was using has a meter in it which seems to be accurate judging by the other shots I got with it that day. However here I had stepped into a significantly darker area under a bridge and silly me, I didn't re-meter to expose for the reduced light. The result: a very dark underexposed picture full of shadows, in fact nothing like what the actual scene looked like.
But of course we always talk about happy accidents and this was definitely one of those moments for me when I saw the scan. So I like the reduced colour palette and the brownish tinge to the shot (which is exactly what came out of the camera by the way) and the silhouette of the young lady walking, and the red strip light, all good. So why "double edged sword" you might ask. Well, the severely underexposed shadow areas were so completely full of grain and artefacts as to render the shot almost unusable. So I ended up with an image that due to my own mistake came out looking great but also, because of that same mistake, was virtually unusable. I couldn't rescue it in Photoshop but as a last resort I took it into Nik 6 Dfine which is a specialised noise reduction app that I admit I very seldom use. But somehow, and I have no idea how, somehow it worked a bit of magic and smoothed out those really bad areas. It's still not great but at least I feel like it's now good enough to post.
35mm film photography
Yashica FX-3 SLR
Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 lens
Kodak 800 color film (from a disposable camera)
Loading contexts...
