Today frustration hit me when the light was going earlier than I expected. I hardly managed to finish the roll in my Leica, because I’m trying to stick to ISO 400 due to the risk of airport scanners. There is also still one more shot on the roll in my Rollei, so I barely missed my 2 rolls a day goal too. However, I think I can make up for it easily tomorrow, because we are now in a much more central area and it will be a lot harder to keep myself from shooting way more than I should. The area where we are staying, Palermo, has a vibe very similar to Prenzlauer Berg. Very hipster touristy, but it’s way more crowded and central than the neighbourhood before, which means that taking pictures just got a lot easier. Never mind about my frustration though, it all got better when we walked into the next book shop and the first book I picked up was the one that I had been unable to find for weeks!
Today’s roll was the first one I shot with the XA after getting the Leica. It was a bit of a disaster, way overdeveloped and accidentally scanned with digital ICE which meant that I had to export them as raw scans to get anything from them at all. In the end it turned out interesting enough though.
When I’m back home I go through fits and starts of colour, through phases of black and white, test certain things for a while and then try around with others. Occasionally I ruin a roll when I test something new. It’s not always easy to get coherence into all of this, but it is helping me to decide which film to choose for certain projects and how to develop it. Coherence is a difficult one anyway for me. Although I love shooting street, it’s difficult sometimes to find a connecting thread when you shoot in different places on different film stock with different cameras and you’re interested in different things. I don’t mind it though when I’m back home, because I just tend to get bored there with things being always the same. I don’t think I’ll be finishing my experiments anytime soon – I still have T-Max 400, Delta 400, HP5+ and Foma 400 to test after I’m through with my Double-X – and I’ll just go with the flow and try to find out how I like all these different films. I’m definitely not shooting any XP2 again soon though. It’s not the right film for street, because it just has too little latitude and it’s too smooth. It looks brilliant for landscapes and portraits though with much more character than XP2! At the moment I rarely shoot anything other than street though.
All pictures taken with: Olympus XA, F.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8.
XP2 stand-developed in Rodinal 1:100.
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015