Having a cupboard full of old cameras and a freezer stocked with a range of old films has its plus points – the sheer number of combinations between camera and film, and the happy accidents that come from a certain camera using a certain film. Every weekend or photographic daytrip can yield a different result.
A few months ago, I spent the day in Paris with some of my workmates, mostly to catch the Pompidou Centre’s retrospective on Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. It’s ridiculous to think that this is the first time I’ve been to Paris since 2003.
Take a camera everywhere, is the sagest piece of photographic advice you’ll ever hear. This day, I took a clunky old favourite that I hadn’t used for at least a year, a Zenit E that I originally bought over a decade ago at a market in Greenwich for the princely sum of £4. The Zenit E’s probably the most-produced SLR in the history of photography, built in the many, many millions in the USSR and spawning a long line of sturdy budget SLRs that lasted until well after the fall of Communism.
An afternoon wandering around Paris after the exhibition gave me enough time to shoot a couple of rolls of film. Overcast lunchtime skies meant black and white; a roll of Fomapan 400 to bring out grit and grain in the grey stone streets, and a roll of Agfa Precisa CT100 for when the sun finally reappeared, cross-processed to give that characteristic retro look.
The Precisa isn’t the Fuji film currently being sold under this old name – it’s the original, the Agfa consumer-grade slide film that created such eye-popping blues and reds and deep blacks when given the cross-processing treatment.
Most of the time, I get these films scanned when they’re developed, at an excellent central london lab called West End Cameras; the mini-lab dev scanners seems to do a much better job bringing out the grain and saturated colours than I can do at home, even with an excellent Nikon Coolscan V scanner and Vuescan software. But this time, the film was expired enough that the lab’s scanner was having a difficult job finding the frames on auto setting, and getting it done manually was going to cost me an extra £10. Playing around a little in Vuescan allowed me to tweak them pretty easily, bringing out grain and crackling colours, all adding to that Parisian café vibe.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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The last picture reminds me of something off of a Steely Dan album….
Ha – thanks very much Jarrod…
Hi Stephen I love the compositions and the cross-processed colour pictures. Keep it up you have an eye for interest street photography. Thanks Andy
Cheers Andy – it’s something I think i need to put a fair few more hours into. But it’s a good challenge.
Lovely pics and a nice review of the camera over on I Still Shoot Film. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks very much, James.
Beautiful photos – love the composition and those colours…!