My most important creative resolution for 2021 was to shoot more slide film in medium format. Once and for all I have decided to teach myself how to meter the light properly. As we know, medium format film slows you down a lot and reverse stocks are not quite forgiving in terms of exposure mistakes. Keeping this in mind, I knew I had to either learn quick or just deal with waisted frames and money.
Bronica SQ-AI recently became my favourite camera, which I use almost exclusively these days. For the film, I decided to go with Kodak Ektachrome (to be honest, I barely have any experience with other E6 stocks). You can read lots of articles, watch plenty of Youtube videos, but you hardly see any improvement in your work unless you go out, measure your scenes, think and do a little bit of bracketing. Need to tell though that the whole “learning” process was more like a pleasant and exciting experience rather than a hard work. To measure the light in the scenes I used either external light meter or a smartphone app with Ansel Adams' Zone System (in some situations I used both).
The more I shot the more confident I felt and it encouraged me to go from the “safe” scenes to the ones with more complicated lighting conditions. Eventually, the greatest reward for my patience were absolutely beautiful tones of my shots (special thanks to Malvarrosa film lab for outstanding dev&scan job). Holding transparent film in your hands is a very special experience itself, and despite there is no practical use for medium format slides, they do look incradible.
In this post I have included random slides shot throughout 2021. Like I mentioned earlier, my camera of choice was Bronica, and only few of these images were taken with Pentax 67.
