I decided that I wanted to explore the use of 35mm film photography and see how the images would differ from far newer DSLR technology. I had a similar set-up with 3 flashguns all with remote triggers (2 o’clock, 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock, with the subject being at the centre of the clock face). I then got my assistants to throw the hali powder/flour mixture over the subject. Below are my unedited images after they were developed. The first 25 images were captured with the camera set to shutter speed priority and a shutter speed of 1/300. The other images were all captured in auto and as such came out looking fuzzy and without detail.
35mm Colour film
I then took all the images into Lightroom to enhance the colours and I removed anything that I felt diminished the quality of the images
The 10 images I selected to edit in lightroom:
One unintended outcome of these images was the imperfections that occurred when I was handling the film after development. These imperfections give the images another dimension and a tangible feel. In image IMG_0008-1 it makes the powder cloud look like a galaxy, not like a cloud of coloured powder. These accidental imperfections have made me want to physically distress my next photo shoot to see if I can purposely recreate a similar effect.
The 10 images after editing in lightroom:
However, I felt some of the images could use further enhancement so I took a selection of images from Lightroom and further edited them in Photoshop. I created a layer mask on 50% opacity and set a brush to between 15-25% opacity and coloured over the powder to make the colours even more vivid and strong (see figure 2 for comparison). This method of enhancing the colours was effective because it only changed parts of the images that I painted over and so didn’t affect the colours of the whole images, which would have occurred if I further manipulated the colours in Lightroom.
The 5 images after a further edit in Photoshop:
Finals
I chose these as my final images as I felt they best represented my original dust shoot and yet came out completely different due to the fact they were developed onto film. However the colour in these images was not as vivid as the original, so to counteract this I further edited the colours in Photoshop (see above for process). These images had a lot more grain and flecks on the film.
Some of the images have a darker bottom half due to the fact film cameras have rolling shutters that can’t move fully out the image fast enough due to the high shutter speed. However, I like the effect this gives the image.
Time 