You probably already know the story: back in 2010, Lomography “bought the last ever Jumbo Roll of original 400 ASA film from some renowned Italian filmmakers” and recently pulled it out of cold storage and turned it into ~2000 rolls of Lomography Color Negative F²/400 that sold out within days.
If you’re in a hurry, here are my first, very brief thoughts on the film itself. Please take them with a grain of salt:
It’s a pleasure to shoot, develop, and scan. It comes out a bit blue, but it’s easy enough to correct. Pictures on this roll look a bit grainy to my eye, but not offensively so. I have an idea that maybe my developer was a bit hot. I’m in the process of shooting a roll at 320, and InshaAllah I’ll be a bit more careful of times and temperatures on the next roll.
I started up a roll on March 14 and took my time with it. I remembered it a bit late to catch my usual light trails out the office window, but did take a few from there anyway.
After that, it languished in the camera for a couple of weeks: I just wasn’t feeling “it.” I’m still not, much. I test drove a couple of trucks and will share some pictures from that at a later date, but otherwise the camera just sat in the backpack, going back and forth to work with me.
At the end of March, I took a week of vacation and drove up to Arkansas to visit Mom. I knew I wasn’t feeling it, and so I only took the FG/50mm E combo, loaded with the F²/400, and the Fuji X70.* I panicked a bit in Fayettville and stopped to pick up some spares, but ended up finishing this roll on my way out of town on the last day.
So this roll is mostly a walk I took through the woods below Mom’s house one afternoon.
I did shoot the acrobatic squirrel. Squirrels are a bit fascinating with their acrobatics, especially when the bird feeder is coated with Squirrel Slip or whatever that greasy goo is that Mom smeared on the feeder one day. (I didn’t capture any of that, but did enjoy watching…)
And I finally stopped on my way out of town to take a picture of one of the groovy older motels in Eureka. I have an idea to shoot them all one day, but I lack the drive and initiative for it. The light was bad on the morning I took this, much worse than other mornings, but other mornings, I was busy hanging out with Mom and/or reading, and didn’t take the time out to go and shoot.
Priorities, right: Family > Photography. Thing is, I’m sure Mom would be down to go photograph some of these motels with me. She’d probably take better photographs of them than I would, and put a couple in the calendar she makes every year. And if she didn’t want to go along, she surely wouldn’t mind me taking off for a few hours: she’d probably appreciate it even.
It’s fear that gets me, really. Why am I afraid of these people? Ittaqullah, James: fear only Allah.
It’s also my advancing age and fitness level. If I was fitter, I might have more confidence. May Allah guide me.
As mentioned above, I have a roll in progress, but will probably wait and shoot another before developing, but I don’t know. The @Neopantastic shoot week is just around the corner, and I’ve really got to make some progress on a couple of other things, so shooting through the rest of the current roll of F²/400 and a whole other roll of whatever could take awhile. Stay tuned: more to come.
