I like black and white. It has been interesting experience this last year-and-half to shoot all those rolls of film only in black and white. That experience, coupled with using mostly a standard 50mm lens (with occasional risky forays in to 35mm focal lengths, as we will see next week!) really does help you to improve your photography. I find that both colour and wide-angle lenses can trick you into thinking you have a good photographs when in fact… you don’t.
But I do now that there are a few occasions where colour might be worth thinking about. Parks and gardens, perhaps. And on my shelf I have two rolls of portra-400 120, which have been sitting there for a year. They were more or less bought by accident, and I decided, in the end, to try them out in the Rollei.
So I went to all the normal places I go to and shot one roll early on Saturday morning (10/9). I had them developed in a minilab near my house, and I scanned them myself. Scanning colour is a nightmare. I understand now why the three labs who have scanned colour rolls from the Leica all gave different results! I ended up scanning all the negatives twice and pushing buttons almost at random on two different software packages until I got something I liked. But I did!
Here they are:
Montsouris, the morning #1
Montsouris #2
And the last one, my favourite, in Luxembourg:
In Luxembourg
That’s it: next week, back to black (and white).
Technical notes: Camera and film: Rollei 2.8C/Portra120-400. Scanned at home.
The first and the last show very much why colour is *the* choice sometimes. Thanks for sharing!
I spent ages with the scanner without actually liking the act of scanning. It’s a fine scanner (10T) and the software is good as well. But it’s too time consuming – but worth it regarding the results. So for 35mm film I order labscans when giving them to the lab to get them processed. It’s a very big lab with a special offer for the costumers who have their films processed there. A film processed with small prints and a CD with JPGs is under 8 Euros altogether.
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Sounds great. Yes, you are right, I tried to consciously find pictures that wouldn’t have been great in black and white… The pro labs in Paris are very good (eg, PCP and Publimod) but are quite expensive. This film was just developed at the corner…
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Well done. I especially like the last shot. For color scanning I have used Silverfast with decent results, choosing usually the matching film stock in the menu, but sometimes a different film stock. I don’t know how to use Silverfast well. When I import into Lightroom there seems to be an added depth imparted to the image from the indicated scan in Silverfast.
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Thanks! I recently switch to vuescan for B&W, but found I had to go back to the bundled scanning software for colour!
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Really grand images there, lovely colours!
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Portra rocks. And all of the different colour schemes I have seen coming out of different labs around town are very nice :-).
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