After seeing some lovely low-key film shots on a forum I’m a member of, I decided to go ahead and produce one myself. I’ve done low-key before, but mostly digital, and I tend to chicken out from crushing the blacks too much and end up bringing the detail back up. In the shot below, I went all-in, and a large chunk of the image is pure black.
It was an underexposed shot to begin with – the entire roll, despite being shot at box speed on a camera with a correctly working meter, came out thin, and with lots of speckles of dust-like marks. In fact, this is the second roll of Rollei film that I’ve had this issue with (the first being Rollei Retro 400s), although a roll of Superpan 200 in 120 roll format came out just fine). I don’t have any more at present, but think I will shoot it at half-box speed in future.
Anyway, back to the picture. Despite the flecks of white scattered across the image (I cleaned most of them up, honestly!) I think it works quite well.
Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Rollei Superpan 200.
Taken on 8 August 2017.
Steel City Snapper photography 