Action Camera Blog

Take a look around and you’ll see that film has started to make quite a comeback. Not just for school classes. A couple of us here at Action Camera have gone back to film specifically for the medium it produces. For landscape and nature photography it produces a different image from digital. Its not better just different. Recently there was a Hope Valley workshop class here at Action Camera and I thought it would be great opportunity to try out some new film mediums I was unfamiliar with.

Ektar was a film I had heard of but never got the chance to shoot with. I got into film as Kodak was going out of business, so I thought i’d never get the chance to shoot with. Fortunately their revival brought the Ektar back with it. I canvased some people on ideas for what they like to shoot with Ektar. I mostly got told that it was more of a portrait film but I had to give it a shot on landscape.

I really enjoy the color from these negatives. I develop my film, and then use an Epson V550 to scan my negatives and digitize them before bringing them into Photoshop or Lightroom. Its an interesting combination of these old medium for taking pictures with the modern medium for editing them.

Film isn’t as easy to work with than digital. Evident in the above photo that has a little strange coloring of the sky. I do still enjoy shooting with film even though it can be very inconsistent. When you shoot with film you do have a massive megapixel advantage though over most digital cameras which allows for some extreme cropping.

I also brought out my medium format camera. A Seagull-4B medium format. Its not the nicest camera for medium format but its fun to shoot. That’s become my favorite reason to shoot film. Its weird and its fun.

For the medium format, I went to shooting Portra 400 just for a change of pace. Strange things happen with film. Its different and weird and I wouldn’t want it any other way.