A BLAST INTO PHOTOGRAPHY'S PAST

Look what I came across today when clearing out an old drawer! It's an exposed roll of Fujichrome Provia 100 RDP II! I wonder what is on it?

Image © Diane Macdonald. All Rights Reserved.
^{Click on the image to view full screen!}

---

Camera	Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens	EF100mm f/2.8 Macro USM
Exposure	1/125 sec; f/11; ISO 200
Location	Florida, USA
Post-processing	Adobe Photoshop® CC 2017 and Adobe Camera Raw

---

Does anyone still use this exact film? If so, you are shooting with expired film, because Fuji stopped making it around 18 years or so ago! I think it is fun to shoot with expired film, although I have not done it in many years because I no longer have a film SLR. Do you have samples of your work on Steemit? I'd love to see it!

Fujichrome Provia 100 RDP II was a great transparency film for my business of shooting stock images, because it had more saturation than the Fujichrome Provia 100f RDPIII which replaced it, and is still available today. Fujichrome Provia 100 RDP II was not a great film for portraiture, because skin tended to be a bit too warm, but for landscape and studio work it was a great film that could be pushed or pulled in the E6 processing too.

So, what is pushing or pulling a film? It's quite simple really. I often pushed the Provia 100 1 stop, which meant that instead of shooting the film at ISO 100, I would shoot it at 200, while using the settings for 100 ISO. This would give me an extra stop of light, so I could use it to get more depth of field in a landscape shot. Of course, if processed naturally, this would have given me underexposed shots. So this is where the pushing came in. I would tell the lab that I shot the film at 200 ISO instead of at 100 ISO, and they would push the film by leaving it longer in the developer!

Pulling the film, is obviously the opposite of pushing, and would normally be done to correct a mistake of overexposure in the camera. The lab would then process the film for a shorter time.

So, I now have a dilemma! I have no idea what is on that roll of film. Perhaps there is nothing on it, and I just rewound it when I was selling my old film SLR! On the other hand, there may be something on it and I could have shot it at either 100 ISO or 200 ISO. I could ask the lab to do a test strip to see if I need to have them push it, but I would lose the images in that test strip if the film happens to need to be pushed – and the killer shots may be the ones ruined! So, I could then have the rest of the film push processed. On the other hand, I could just go ahead and have the roll processed as normal, taking the chance of underexposing everything!

Slide film is not as forgiving as print film, so when shooting transparencies it was critical to get the exposure right in the camera. This made the transition to digital easy for me, because in the early days of digital it was more critical that exposure was correct.

What are your experiences of shooting film? I'd love to hear about it. Do you still shoot with film? I know that a few of you do! I also used to shoot 4x5 transparencies for commercial shoots. Does anyone still use a 4x5 camera?

Thanks to @juliank for the #macrophotography contest. You can read about the rules here.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! I appreciate it. Please check out my photography-101 account here: https://steemit.com/@photography-101 and Follow if you wish.

#TheAlliance is a community of people from all backgrounds dedicated to producing and supporting work on Steemit. Check us out! You can find us on the Discord Channel.

#Steemusa is a community of people from the United States or those living there dedicated to producing and supporting work on Steemit. You can find us on the Discord Channel.
#TeamCanada is a community of people from Canada or those living there dedicated to producing and supporting work on Steemit. You can find us on the Discord Channel.