What are the odds that the batteries in two different cameras, batteries installed years apart, would fail at roughly the same time?
I hadn’t shot with the FG since before Ramadan, and maybe a month ago, I went to grab it and noticed that I’d left the advance lever switch thing in the on position. :facepalm: I’d done it before, left it for a few hours or days, but never for 4 or 5 or 6 weeks. I flipped it off and didn’t think too much of it, went shooting a couple of times, and just last Saturday went to finish off the roll at a little park in far west Irving, out near DFW. The shutter sounded a bit clunky, and after shooting a few frames, I noticed that the black match needle wasn’t visible at all.
Hummmm…
I hit the battery test button… nothing. Graaaaghhhh… Think, James, think.
The FE has a mechanical shutter speed of 1/125th. The Kodak Pro Image is 100 speed film. It’s expired, but only by a few years and I shoot it at 100 with no trouble. It was a bright, sunny day, and I was moving between full sun and open shade.
So: f/16 and f/11 or f/8, right?
I got home and developed the roll. Arrrggghhhh!
Frames 0-7 exposed properly, and I suspect that f/5.6 on an overcast day was just about right, maybe 1 stop over. Frames 8-18, though, were completely blank. Frames 20 and 21 overexposed a stop or so. Frames 21-27, completely blank. Frames 28-36, overexposed/underexposed/exposed properly.
So how did I do with Sunny 16? You be the judge.
These first two were shot at about f/5.6 and 1/125th, before I realized that the meter wasn’t functioning…
These two were shot at f/16, following the Sunny 16…
I performed some minimal processing on these: my usual levels adjustment, plus a bit of white balance correction until they looked good. The last pair might be a bit red, but they’re both close to what I saw. In my opinion, though, the Sunny 16 resulted in at least one stop of underexposure, and the 1/125th at f/5.6 is just about right, given the conditions, maybe a 1/2 stop over, but not much.
What I found particularly interesting was how different the white balance ended up. Color Negative film has a fairly wide latitude, but I know that vast over or underexposure leads to changes in color, but I thought it only really occurred in development… Now I know better.
