A 35mm Safari

May 10, 2015

A 35mm Safari

It's been over a month since I last posted! Sometimes the time just gets away and you gotta wonder where the hell it went!

One of the things that has thwarted my attempts to get out and about lately has been the abysmal weather we have been having. Rain, rain and more rain. Throw in some cyclonic winds that have blown the continent another further 100 metres west and you get the picture! Oh!...... Did I also mention the RAIN???

That's enough of that, I think you may get the picture........

Anyway, as is my habit, I always have a roll of film in one of my cameras. I often go for a photo walk in my lunch break from work and wander around Newcastle CBD getting in some street subjects. It is something I love to do and very rarely will I get an annoyed look from a subject; most people just smile and go about their business.

I was trying out a roll of AGFA Vista Plus 400 (colour film) for the first time. It took me about 2 weeks of safari to use that roll. I also took it to Redhead Beach one afternoon but had no sooner taken one photo then I reached the end of the roll. The only other roll I had in my camera bag was an Ilford FP4 Plus 125 black and white film. So, loaded the Ilford and kept on snapping!

It was a real doggy day at Redhead that afternoon. So many dogs running around playing and glad to be off the leash! Our dog Barney loves to run riot on the beach and then he will run down to the water to cool off!

The colour from the AGFA turned out wonderful; I'm very impressed with that and also with the sharpness of the images. Not too much grain either for an ISO400 film.

Swapping over to the Ilford B&W at Redhead Beach reminded me of something that I had known about but had paid little attention to; DX code. If you look on the side of a 35mm film cassette, you will note a similar pattern to a bar code from a grocery item. This pattern is read by the camera and will automatically set the ISO information in the camera. This was designed especially for point and shoot film cameras that did not come with a manual control option.

After I had loaded the Ilford FP4 Plus 125 and taken about 4 shots with it, I realised that I had not changed the ISO settings from the AGFA 400 film! I went to change the setting and saw that it was already set for ISO100. Here was my dilemma; had the camera used the DX code to set the ISO automatically to 100 default OR had I just shot my experimental AGFA ISO400 film at 100?

I ended up using the whole roll of Ilford at the beach that afternoon. Once I got home I took that film out placed the AGFA back into the camera. The ISO changed to 400! PHEW! I did ask Ilford if the default DX Code for their Ilford FP4 Plus 125 was 100 but they advised that it could be the way my particular camera read the DX code or that I could clean the contacts that read the DX code. Either way, shooting ISO120 at 100 did not make any difference I could see with those first photos.

And here are the results! I have used the Ilford film before and have always been happy with the outcome.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did taking them.

The photos on this post are for sale. Contact me if you are interested!