The Woods

Well as promised yesterday I managed to get shot out of the Zenit E, not without drama!!

Shot on HP5 down at Plean Country Park about half four this afternoon. Was shooting merrily when there was a horrible grinding on the film wind on. Reckoned I had a shot so left it at that. Wasn't easy controlling a beast I had last used 25 years ago with one wean in the back carrier and the other going daft in the woods. Jeez you have to start thinking again with this thing.

Got home and rewound, opened up and I hadn't ....Aaaargh disaster!!! Was a proper RTFM error. Shut it up, googled and got the thing rewound. Managed to lock myself in the windowless toilet whilst the kids were going nuts and get the film on the spiral, hoping against hopes that there was still some unaffected frames. It was at this point I notice that I had a 24 in there instead of a 36, hence the grinding, I was lucky I didn't rip it out of the cartridge.

Developed the film in Ilfotec LC29 at 1-9 for 4 minutes instead of the recommended 3.30 as it had a slight yellow tinge to it. Hung up the film in our en-suite shower to dry and then fed and bathed the kids (wife is out of town ...). I had managed to get 19 frames out of the 24 so it wasn't a complete bust. Got them down to bed and then put the negs into the Epson V700 scanner and had my tea. Not overly pleased with the scans, but was using the Epson software instead of Silverlight, which appears not to be working since I had the Mac repaired, looks like I'll be searching for the disk and doing a reinstall, no time tonight.

Uploaded the scans to Aperture, adjusted the black point, sharpness and contrast, exported a jpeg and here we are. It's now 22:35

Happy enough with the shot but it took a lot of experience to try and work out the exposures, though the meter still seems to be on the button, only thing is it sometimes leaves you sitting between two aperture/shutter combinations. I'll doff my chapeaux to those that got great slides out of this, though I'm betting there is a fair amount of bracketing involved.

Would I swap it back for the EOS350D or the GR Digital II? No, but it's got it's place and that is reconnecting you back to the very basics of photography. The one thing that all three cameras require however is "the eye". I'll leave you lot to be the judge of whether I've got that or not.

P.S The Zenit E weighs in at a hefty 880 grams, but damn, that lens is sharp.