In Development: Adventures in Film, Volume 19

This roll of film is a bit of a disappointment. I got a few shots from it that I enjoyed, but for the most part the images felt uninspired and kind of…“blah”. I’ve noticed that a lot of my Omaha images turned out this way. It’s a hard place to shoot. There aren’t too many obvious subjects, so I find myself forcing shots at times.

The trouble is that a large part of what makes Omaha special is its subtleties – the things that aren’t obvious photographic subjects. So it’s a very fine line between taking an uninspired photo of nothing and a photo of something that you’d normally think is nothing but on second glance is actually emblematic of the region.

I know I’ve mentioned it a few times before, but one of the things about shooting film that’s been especially helpful to me is the lag between making the image and seeing the result. In a case like this, where there’s such a fine line between an image of nothing and an image of importance, I think that lag is crucial. I find I really need to reflect on these kinds of images from a detached perspective to be able to tell which category the image falls into. With digital shots, that detached reflection needs to be self-imposed. But with film, it happens automatically when scan day comes around. 🙂

All photos were taken with my Leica M3 and Leica 50mm Summicron Rigid on Ilford HP5+ shot at ISO 1600 and pushed two stops in development. They were developed and scanned by Richard Photo Labs, and I added contrast and clarity to most of the images in Lightroom.