Images shot on Kodak T-Max 400 in the Kodak Snapic A1
This website is not about telling you what to do. With your photography or anything else. But I do occasionally try to motivate people to be productive. So I’ll say this:
When life gives you llimones, I think you could probably at least think about trying to see if you can make some llimonada. If you want to.
I got given a sizeable one when I tried to take a nice little trip to Barcelona. A colossus of a citrus in the Catalan capital.
Awful weather meant a 12-hour delay in arriving on a two-hour flight. 11pm instead of 11am. Diverting via Valencia and the additional four-hour bus ride that meant. It wasn’t fun, and being awake for 30 hours because of it was also not ideal.
But at least I could get a good night’s sleep once I had arrived and wake up fresh for some of that lovely bright weather Barcelona film photography the following day…
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the following day:
Contents
Beginning this bleak day in Barcelona
I had brought some rolls of film with me from home. Got them hand-checked in Luton airport so they didn’t get fried by the new CT scanners there. I thought I’d come prepared.
But the ISO 125 Ilford FP4 and ISO 200 Kodacolor weren’t going to cut it on a day like this.
I could have given up. I never go out shooting when it’s battering down with rain at home. An impromptu pub day was tempting if I’m being honest. But I caught myself. The day was about the lemonade, not the beer.
Not even a compromise of an all-dayer on Damm radler – and that’s not me swearing – would have done.
So I took a wet walk to what looked like the nearest place to my small hotel room that sold film – the Lomography Embassy Barcelona – with the intention of buying some ISO 400 monochrome stock.
Ilford HP5 and Kodak Tri-X were the obvious choices. And when I got there? No dice.
Well, they might have had some of those. I didn’t ask. They didn’t have any HP5 or Tri-X though, I can tell you that.
But after parting with a few more Euros than I would have done if they did, at least I was leaving with something I could shoot. A roll of ISO 400 monochrome film. This roll of Kodak T-Max 400.
Here’s the first shot from it – the first of the roll, you could call it – as well as a few more.
A rainy ramble in the roadworks of La Rambla
The lemonade I was going to attempt to make from this absolute lemon of a day weatherwise was a pretty simple brew – some street shots around Barcelona on a slightly dark and more than damp day.
The camera I’d got with me, the Kodak Snapic A1, whilst being a pretty decent new compact point ‘n’ shoot and one that I do enjoy using, wasn’t really the best tool for this job.
Its aperture and shutter speed are both fixed – the former at f9.5 and the latter at 1/100 of a second.
Even with the ISO 400 film, I wasn’t certain how good the results I’d get would be. Touch and go. Hit and miss. I think I got some hits. But as you’ll see at the end of this post, I got quite a few misses too.
One other slight worry with the Snapic A1 was that it obviously isn’t a waterproof camera, and I wasn’t sure how much of the wet stuff I could expose it to before it might start leaking in.
This meant a few precautionary measures in how I was handling the camera.
When the rain wasn’t too bad, relatively speaking, I could hold the Snapic A1 with the lens faced down and my hand doing what it could to shield the body from the precipitation.
When the rain picked up again, I would have to put the camera into the pocket of my coat. Unfortunately, doing that meant the lens would steam up and I’d have to be sure to wipe it before shooting.
That wasn’t ideal for spontaneous street shots, and with a lot of La Rambla being dug up and repaved, it wasn’t the nicest environment for walking around getting wet either.
But the theme of the day was just doing what I could, so I just did that and no more, and didn’t worry too much about if these images turned out bad.
Seeking shelter in Mercat de la Boqueria
Seasoned Barcelona visitors or even residents might look at this set of images so far and think mate, it’s nice that you shot some film, but did you even leave the hyper-touristic Rambla area?
And to those people I would say mate, again, look at the weather.
It wasn’t the kind of day for getting off the beaten track. It was the kind of day for getting through this roll of film in the Snapic A1 and seeing what kind of images I ended up with.
Camera experimentation, not city exploration.
So when I got halfway down La Rambla and saw the La Boqueria market, I realised I had a double opportunity.
One, to see what this camera can do indoors without using the flash. And two, to get out of the rain for a bit on this bleak day in Barcelona.
There’s a pretty simple rule of thumb with photography that I think has served me well down the years, and it’s something that is essential to remember when shooting in situations like this.
I’ve written about it before on pieces like this one, but the general idea is that you just have to have enough light to achieve the shots you’re going for. You don’t need so much that it’s too much, but you do need enough.
And as said, sometimes that means just enough. If you use it well, that might be less than you think.
If you’re going to shoot at night or indoors and not use the flash, your enough light is going to have to come from another source.
In places like this where they’re illuminating what they’re trying to sell, that’s not too difficult to find.
Some failed shots from this bleak day in Barcelona
Despite making sure I had enough light to leave the indoor market with some good enough shots, I didn’t exactly have a 100% success rate when shooting outside on that day.
Looking now where I went wrong, there’s a general trend of these bad shots being taken on more enclosed streets than those earlier in the blog post that worked.
With the rain – which I’m not sure I’ve mentioned yet, have I mentioned it was raining that day? – being constant and my jeans proving very adept at soaking as much of it in as possible, it really wasn’t the time for getting my phone out, opening the light meter app, and checking the likelihood of each individual shot working.
I simply didn’t care enough to do that. I didn’t care if some shots didn’t come out well. I was more interested in just shooting and seeing which did and which didn’t.
We’ll end this blog post with some of those… that didn’t.
I can see what I was trying to do with these last few below here.
Like in the market where you can use their lights to light up your shot, I was going for the light from the shops to illuminate the people outside of them.
And I failed miserably. Not that I was miserable about it, though. I was actually happy enough that I’d given it a go.
But it was a failure in terms of producing any good photography from the situation, of that there is no doubt.
Thinking about it now, it seems obvious this would happen. In the market, the lights are set up specifically to illuminate the things I was shooting. Of course it would be enough.
In these shops, the lights are set up to illuminate the things in the window, not the people outside.
So while it may look with your own eyes like they’re providing enough light, your film is likely to see it differently.
Indeed, on some of them where the person is standing in front of the window, it’s working even like kind of a miniature version of shooting into the sun, where you’re just going to get silhouettes in front of it.
Wrapping up this day of bad weather in Barcelona
I’ve got one final image to show you before I really do wrap this blog post up.
The last time I was in the city, I found a little art supplies shop that had a pile of Ilford HP5 Plus 400 on the counter. I bought a roll at the time, which I later shot in Paris.
Although having already bought this Kodak T-Max 400 and not needing any, I did nip back to see if they had some this time too. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
But I took the opportunity for a shot on this roll while I was there anyway. The white trousers were good for this image; as was the lit neon sign of the restaurant next door.
This was the first roll of film I shot on this trip to Barcelona, but it wasn’t the last.
And what’s good is that this was the only day of bad weather I had. So the next couple of blog posts are going to feature photographs a bit brighter than the ones on this one.
It’s monochrome again next, as I went with some Ilford FP4 Plus 125 around the beach at Barceloneta.
But you’ll have to wait to see that, as I’ve not finished writing it yet.
I will of course edit this bit and link to it when I have. 🙂
If you liked these images from a bleak day in Barcelona and want more adventures illustrated with film photography, why not have a look at some of these:
And if you think others will find this post worth a read, help them find it by giving it a share 😀
