The #FrugalFilmProject, April 2024: Another day at the beach with the 1920s Generic Folding Camera

The #FrugalFilmProject, April 2024: Another day at the beach with the 1920s Generic Folding Camera.

Earlier this month we went to Barra with the 1920s Generic folding camera. There I used my new film holders and made some images at 1/50s with an ND8 filter as I was convinced that the camera was not exposing at the set shutter speed but much slower. Unfortunately, somehow I went the wrong way and the images were still overexposed (though were certainly better and in fact came out a nice pastel tone).

After this disappointment we went to Barra again today. This time I took a slightly different strategy. I made a meter reading at ISO 800 and 1/100s, sometimes with a neutral density filter and sometimes without depending on the conditions, assuming that the camera was exposing at 1/100s. Then I set the aperture on the camera to the metered reading minus 1 stop and made an exposure with this setting — and it worked!

I was thrilled, and you can see from the Instax films that they're all so much better. That said, a couple of the frames were slightly underexposed and were a little dark. In fact, the best exposure was the first frame of the block of flats, where I did not use an ND filter at all. This was my first experiment with this technique, and I'm going to have to go out and try it again, but hopefully I've found the sweet spot with the 1920s Generic folding camera and can experiment with different subjects in the future. 

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