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| Yodica Films - Atlas |
My latest journey out on the streets was down in Brighton for Brighton Pride and this time I was shooting with film but not any old film stock but one call Yodica.
I first heard of Yodica films on the Sunny 16 podcast and was intrigued by the concept of the film.
Yodica is part of the growing trend in pre-exposed film, this is film that has already been exposed to either a light source or some other way of exposing the film, I have see films with aliens and UFOs or light leaks exposed on to them.
Yodica have 7 different film types out already, all with a range of bright saturated colours, the ones that grabbed my attention were Atlas and Pegasus, both of these have a rainbow effect to them but with Atlas being more random, unfortunately when I went to buy a roll of each both Analogue Wonderland and The Photographers Galley were out of Pegasus so I bought 2 rolls of the Atlas.
The film cannister and plastic cannister are wrap with a representation of how the colours look and is rated at ISO400 but if you peel back the wrap, you can see the original film is Kodak 200.
I'm not an expert on double exposure or film in general but have been told that 400 for the first exposure and 400 for the second will equal 200.
I shot both roll in my Canon eos500n and as the film wasn't DX coded set the camera manually to ISO400.
Brighton Pride was a good day out, with temperatures in the high 20s and very sunny.
I shot a roll and a half of the Atlas, and though and hoped I had some goood images.
I had to wait a week to use up the rest of the second roll and then get them processed, this was a bit of a palava as my new local Snappy Snaps wanted to charge almost £20.
So I ended up waiting another week and getting them processed at Jessops for £11.
Once I got the negs back and looked at them I was surprised how they looked. Scanning them revealed that although the Yodica colours were there and coming through, my images looked muddy and underexposed in a lot of the shots, in fact they looked about 1 stop under. I ended up with a lot of processing in camera RAW to try and get the images half decent.
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| The best result I could achieve from this frame |
The images that I managed to get to look OK, were pretty interesting but some that were shot I just couldn't get anything out of them and a lot seemed very hit and miss.
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| Another one that I struggled with |
I'm reviewing all this about 4 days after doing the scanning and I think I may know what the problem could have been with the images looking so underexposed.
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| Mr Gold |
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| That Vintage Look |
Unlike digital there is no exif data,so this is only a theory, the film is rated iso200 but both the pre-exposed and my shots were shot at iso400 to balance out the double exposure.
Now when I shot on the street, I use aperture mode and normal set between f5.6 to f8 and let the camera go with a shutter speed, as I said it was hot and sunny and I think the maybe the shutter speeds were to high, I remember a couple of times seeing 1/1500 and 1/2000 of a second. It could be that at these high shutter speeds I was underexposing even more and that would explain why some frames look OK and others don't.
Like I said I'm not an expert so this is all conjecture on my part.
So what do I think of this film stock?
Well it is a bit gimmicky and I think some of the purists in analogue photography may look at it as a film for the Instagram generation, but that doesn't bother me I think it's a fun film. If I could nail down the second exposure's better, maybe shutter speeds in the 1/125 to 1/500 would work then I think I would use it more especially for events were the added colour adds to the image. Images like Mr Gold and That vintage look worked really well.
I'm not sure whether Yodica films will get to read this post but if they do and would be interested in sending a couple of rolls to let me test out my theory, that would be much appreciated.
If you fancy trying Yodica films it can be purchased from either Analogue Wonderland or if in London the Photographer's Gallery.
