par avion

A couple photos I probably took either flying to or from LA. I always wondered why I didn't shoot more slides with the Yashica, but then again, I mostly cross-processed them, probably for the worse. I dig the ghostly atmosphere these shots have, though it was mostly by luck than by virtue of skill.

Speaking of which, I got back the slides I shot with the Pen-FT while I was in San Francisco in February, and almost all of them to a one are completely washed out to the point where the transparencies are pretty much totally transparent. I shot a couple test rolls of color negative up in Maine with the FT and found the camera's internal light meter (the whole reason I bought the FT instead of the Pen-F) was pretty close to accurate for being 30 or 40 years old. I know slide film needs to be close to spot on or better, but the degree to which this roll was washed out was something I've never seen before. Kind of a shame because it was basically mine and Susan's whole vacation, including a pretty amazing drive up the 1 to Point Reyes, and none of the photos survived. A big bummer, actually.

I've since been trying to figure out what happened. Below are a couple shots that squeaked by, but are still overexposed. At first I wondered if the airport x-rays had damaged the film or washed it out somehow, but I haven't read anything about this particular damage happening to anyone else. I went out this weekend to test the FT's internal meter versus my handheld Minolta Auto V (which I use for the Hasselblad) and still found the camera's accuracy to be pretty close, sometimes differing by a stop to a half-stop. I don't know if that's enough to give me the results I got. Then I was thinking something ridiculous because I was wearing sunglasses at the time I was shooting maybe I was setting the camera wrong because the scene looked darker with the glasses on? Yeah, it didn't make sense to me a minute later either. Guess I have to keep testing it, or maybe just scrap the idea of using slides with this camera since the meter is pretty accurate and previous rolls of color-negative film came out mostly fine. Also, the photos I took with the Seagull (also using the Minolta meter) came out very nice. Weird.