I've been back now for three days since my week-long trip out to the Kootenays in southern British Columbia. I got most of my film developed on Saturday but spent many hours after that examining and scanning film. As I alluded to before, this is not the fun part of shooting film. The fun part, along with the expectation of what you might get when you drop it off for development, is in dealing with the challenges that film throws at you. I am going to write a longer report later but basically I will give you the short version: for me it involves a lot of guesswork. When one of your cameras has a dead meter and the other one is one you barely trust, you are going to be relying a lot on the Sunny-16 rule.*

Sunny-16 rule brush up:

In direct sunlight set your shutter speed to as close to the ISO of your film as possible, then turn your aperture to f/16.

ex. The sun is on your subject, you just loaded Sensia 200. Your shutter speed should be 1/200th. Your aperture is f/16.

All of your exposures then vary around that and that involves the guesswork portion. In shadow? In slight shadow but still in midday? I would open up the aperture to f/8. Sun blazing at your lens? Close up the aperture to f/22.

At least that's what it was in theory. Really, I did a lot of bracketing and even some of those didn't work out.

When I write a followup post with some of my better shots I will relate some of the other challenges.

All these shots I scanned with my Canoscan 8400F and believe me they took a long time. I still have two medium format rolls to go through.

Update1: Sensia 200 shots

I've written a post about my hit and miss shooting with Fujichrome Sensia 200 on this trip.

*I did have a hand-held meter with me but I am still babying it and it's not going on hikes or out kayaking.