After spending quite some time editing pictures the last couple of days I thought it was about time to show you the first Rollei roll from our trip to Argentina. After having almost all my colour correction done by my Pakon scanner for the last few months I have to say that I’m quite glad I only have to put this much effort into these few shots. Difficult enough to do this for 12 shots a roll, so I only do it for 36 shots on special occasions when shooting cine film. When I do colour correction I actually scan the film as raw files and then use ColorPerfect to get close, before using a Color Balance layer to do the fine tuning. I could obviously just use a preset of a scan software for something like Portra, but in my experience the results are much better when doing it this way. Colour correction is tedious and very subjective, because interpreting negative film doesn’t have a reference. It’s much easier to just get a lab to run it through a frontier scanner, but then I don’t like giving my negatives to other people, because they can get lost or get screwed up along the way. And I expect that doing this often enough will hone my skills in this respect too. So far I haven’t shot much Portra 400 yet, so I don’t have a feel for it yet, but since I still have some 13 rolls of this stuff to colour correct it will happen soon enough I expect.

All pictures taken with: Rolleicord V, Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 75mm f/3.5.
Portra 400 developed in Fuji Hunt C41 Kit, Jobo CPE-2.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

I’m not sure she knew what I was doing, but I sure got her attention.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

This nice guy does really lovely pottery with the black clay from his region. We bought a couple of his pieces and he told us all about it. Then we walked around the square again and I finally decided that I would like to take his picture. Difficult, not enough space and I rarely shoot portraits. But then, one has to begin somewhere right? It was actually the first Rollei picture I took in Argentina.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

In the square version the little gnomes weren’t really that visible, so it needed a tighter crop.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

A very photogenic market hall. I should have metered this better, it was quite underexposed, but I quite like the result anyway.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

We went to the city centre and randomly this tango duo was playing. It was the moment when it finally hit me where I was. Emotional moment.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

Kids dancing to the music. It wasn’t exactly tango, but still!

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

Here the audience. Only the woman on the left noticed me. With a TLR one can sometimes get very close.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

I actually hunted for this street corner on Google Maps to find it again. I saw it from the cab and thought it would make a nice picture. Doesn’t quite live up to my expectations and how I remembered the corner, but I do like the stop sign!

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

The sun was going and it was already the end of the golden hour so the light was a little difficult. And so was colour correction. Nevertheless I like this picture a lot. For an instant I considered taking a picture of the musicians too, but then decided against it for some reason. No idea why. Maybe because there was lots of movement to them and the shutter speed was getting too slow for too much movement.

© Lilly Schwartz 2015

Now this one was difficult – rather pasty white children, rather bronzed adults in difficult light. I think the Portra held up quite well considering.