I’d promised myself that I’d shoot more film in 2012, so the first proper opportunity I had was Dinorwic. As described in previous posts, I took along a digital compact, and two film cameras. Not ideal, but at least the X10 is small enough to slip into a waist bag and is out of the way. I hate neckstraps on cameras, so I have wrist straps on my SLR’s which is fine when you’re using one, but when you’ve got two, it become a pain in the arse. Still, you make your bed and you’ve got to sleep in it.

In the two cameras I used two different types of film – Kodak Ektar 100 in the F80 with a 28-105 lens, and Kodak BW400CN in the F100 with a 20mm lens. Ektar I’ve used before on my last visit and was quite pleased with the results, while I’ve been using chromogenic black and white films such as BW400CN, XP2 and the like for years, if nothing else for convenience as they are C41 process.

I’d originally though about using the colour film to bring out the colours in the scenes I shot, but the colour pallete of Dinorwic is so limited, that I wouldn’t have taken many shots if I’d have stuck to that plan. So, I ended up using them both side by side. In retrospect, Ektar was probably too slow a film for the conditions as it’s speed is 100 ISO, and at times I was struggling for light as I was not using a tripod. No such problems with the BW400, especially with the short focal length lens.

Would be nice to have had two F100’s, it’s just a nicer camera to handle than the F80, which arguably is a bit small for me. Not that I’ve got excessively large hands, just that the F100 fits better.

I do like the Colour shots, and was surprised at how well it managed to cope with how well it handled the light, although, colour negative film does have very good dynamic range.

Interestingly, the feedback I’ve had seems to favour the black and white ones.