Ilford Delta 100

Hello Readers,

One of the main reasons why I started this blog is so I write a little bit about my experiments with film photography. I started film photography approximately a year ago, the camera I chose to start with is the Minolta Maxxum 7000, the reason for that is it shares the same A-mount as my digital Sony a77, which means I can use my full frame lenses and not have to buy any new lenses just for film photography use. The other reason is the camera is very easy to use, it is very similar to any modern DSLR in terms of controls, in fact, all modern cameras have something to owe to this camera.

Some people might criticize me for using this camera because it does not give a true film experience, of manually exposing, focusing, advancing a film and rewinding it, because this camera does all that automatically, however, it is still a great tool for the fact that it gives you what we think of now as “full frame” for around 40 dollars for the body and 5 or 10 dollar for a roll of film comparing to at least 1700 dollars for a digital full frame body, meaning you could enjoy great tonality and shallow depth of field for a fraction of the cost.

The last roll of film that I shot was an Ilford Delta 100, it is my first time to shoot a black and white film, previous films that I shot were Kodak ColorPlus and Gold 200, unfortunately I don’t have any decent scans of previous rolls that are worth sharing on internet.

The first picture is a self portrait that I took in Tiffany Falls in Hamilton, I triggered the camera with a cable release, so I was able to go only as far as the length of the cable allows me. The lens used is Sony 28mm f/2.8, which is a lens I don’t like at all when used on my digital camera, but I think it is more than good on a film camera.

 

The 3 photos above are at same location too, the second picture was shot at exposure time of 1 second to express the movement of the water falling, but my favourite is the fourth picture where I tried to capture the different tonality on the leaves from dark to bright when the sun rays were hitting only the top part of the canopy.

Finally this image for cityscape of Toronto, in this picture the film really shines for its exposure latitude and ability to pull great details from the shadows, if this was taken with digital camera you would have just a silhouette of the buildings and need to do a lot of post processing and exposure blending work to get similar result.

 

Hope you enjoyed this blog post, stay tuned for more.