Shooting Autumn with Expired Fuji Astia 100
Sunshine, warmth and long days. Summer sounds great to the average person, but to a landscape photographer it’s hell on earth. Harsh white light, sweltering days carrying bags of camera gear, unsociable hours for sunrise and sunset, and that’s before you even get into the endless greenery. Landscapes devoid of exciting colours and atmosphere. But that all changes with autumn as the night’s draw in, the sun sits lower in the sky and the leaves turn shades of yellow, orange and red to give real colour and contrast.
This is by far the most exciting time of year for me to get my cameras out, helped further as this is the season with the largest number of fungi, which always makes for great photographic subjects. Exploring an area local to me that I am reasonably familiar with, I took out my trusty Bronica SQ-A with another of my expired rolls of Fuji Astia 100. Slide film has much more vibrant colours and contrast and I really wanted to use that to its full potential during autumn.
As I have written about previously, shooting expired slide film is often a real roll of the dice. You can never be sure what to expect until it comes back from the developers and the results can vary wildly. I had previously shot a roll at the local funfair with limited colour shifts, but there was no guarantee that every roll would behave the same way. Low and behold there were bigger colour shifts than before, with everything shifted towards magenta. Though this did make the greens that Fuji was famous for in its film pop even more.
A little bit of mist helped me to create a bit more atmosphere on one of the quiet mornings I was out with my camera, and I can only re-iterate once again how indispensable a circular polarising filter is for this type of photography. It really helps to recover colour and contrast when dealing with wet subjects, and this time of year is almost always damp. It is a pity I never had a chance to shoot a vibrant sunset or sunrise on this roll of film, but you can’t control the weather and you simply having to make do with what nature provides. Even if it is a cluster of mushrooms growing out of horse dung. Whoever said photography was glamorous?
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