The biggest problem with shooting in our house is that it's so dark. Even in the daylight it has very little light inside, plus we had to wait until after dark anyway so that E was asleep. I do have a couple really big fluorescent stand lights with umbrellas, but even those weren't quite enough to make shooting with ISO 50 film on the 35mm camera easy. This was my first time shooting with film this slow, but I really wanted to see how fine the grain was. Even if the grain is really nice, given that I think you can only shoot on this in broad daylight (Sunny 16) or in a professional studio with a million watts of light, I think I may stick faster film in the future. The Holga had 400 speed film in it, so we'll see how that turned out.
I must confess that I did "cheat" a bit, essentially testing out a lot of shots with the D80, setting it to B&W mode so I could see how the shot turned out with a given setting. I think this came in handy since it has spot metering, while my FG only does center-weighted. I'm still not very confident in my manual shooting ability, so this was helpful. Besides, even the pros use a light meter - mine just happened to be another camera.
I processed the roll of 35mm film tonight and it's drying as I type this. I upped to development time by about 10% to try and get a little more contrast, since some of the digital shots weren't as contrasty SOOC as I would like. Hopefully I will get them all scanned in tomorrow and post them up. I'm curious to see if people can tell the difference between the film B&W and the digital B&W. I'll wait to post the pictures together to test everyone.
If anyone has any good tips for working with slow film, or getting an 18 month old to cooporate so I can do some photos of E and W together, I'd love to hear them.
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