I am not entirely done working with photos from Old Car City, USA. I took multiple cameras with me. However, the film I used was FPP RetroChrome 400, and I just didn’t have enough latitude in the dark forest to make a set of usable images. Well, I did have some usable ones, but it took a lot of effort in post to get them viewable.
The process largely involved some histogram tweaking in Silverfast when scanning, and then some post-processing where I dehazed, dropped the blues a tad, tuned and lowered the blacks and shadows, and bumped the sharpness up to 100. That’s pretty much my workflow when dealing with under-exposed *chrome film.
The issue with transparency/slide film is that it doesn’t have any ability to over/under-expose and retain information. It’s very particular about being properly exposed. This is not how I shoot. I’m used to latitude in my film. Of course, it didn’t help I was using a light meter app that did averaging for phones. In the woods, Sunny 16 is not applicable.
I do love the look of Retrochrome, but at $15 a roll and now discontinued, I need to be more careful. Thankfully, I still have a few rolls to shoot. I’ll be saving those for portraits.
Small baths of light creeping in through the flora is what I liked most about shooting photos here.
Just stacks of doors in the middle of the woods in Georgia.
Isn’t Caravelle a brand of ice cream? š
No derelict car lot is complete without derelict gas pumps.
Biiiiig, blaaaack, Cadillac!
This one took a bit of time to recover properly. It was super-dark. Thanks to Lightroom and Silverfast, I was able to recover the image.
This might be my new favorite photo.
Overall, good trip. I did write up something about my experience with the Leica M240 digital camera, too. Unfortunately, the Leica M4-P that shot the photos above is back at the shop getting repaired (hopefully under warranty) and I will have to resort to using the Kodak Retinette 1A for a while, and that’s OK. It’s truly my favorite film camera. š
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