Images shot on Oriental Seagull 400 in the Lomo LC-A
If you’ve found this post and have decided to read it, you’re probably either into film photography or a fan of Whitby. I can tell you now it’s going to be talking mainly to people who are the former.
You’ve more than likely shot a few rolls yourself in your time. And if you have, you’ll know exactly what I mean when I say this:
Not every shot from your roll is going to be a keeper.
I’m here to tell you not to worry about it though, because it’s the same for everyone. You, me, the well-known people posting to more followers than we’ll ever have on whatever platforms they’re posting on these days. We’re all in the same boat.
I got some stinkers as well as the usual average and actually half-decent ones when I shot this Oriental Seagull 400 around one of the UK’s most picturesque seaside towns, and I thought it might be worthwhile sharing them all as a way of showing you’re not alone in getting at least some crap photographs from your roll.
So here we go. This is the good, the bad and the Whitby.
Contents
Some of the good
In keeping with the order of things in the title, we’ll start with some of what I consider the good shots I got from the Lomo LC-A on this day in Whitby.
They all had to meet a couple of requirements to make the cut to be included in this section.
First was the sharpness and image quality provided by the camera and film.
It’s worth noting here, because I’ll stick up for it whenever I have the chance, that the Lomo LC-A is very capable of producing sharp images. Obviously not as sharp as the prime lenses on your SLR or whatever, but perhaps sharper than you might expect if you’ve never used one.
The second necessity was on me. The simple matter of the composition of the shots.
Keeping in mind this is all a subjective evaluation of my own work and you’re free to disagree with any of it, these are some that I thought had something about them in that regard. The ones I didn’t like so much will come later.
Some of the bad
For some people, first of the roll photographs are just always bad. I can understand that. What’s the point of keeping, or even sharing, an image that has a big old burn down the side of it?
On the other hand, it’s a cool little novelty you can get from certain cameras if you load and shoot them in a way that makes it happen, and some folk even like to try to come up with some deliberate composition with it too.
I’m mostly somewhere in the middle. Film photography isn’t perfect – that’s the whole point of this post – and I think they’re worth showing on here whenever they happen to me.
But I don’t try to use that film burn in any special way. I just take it as it happens.
Regardless, let’s carry on with these bad shots from Whitby, where the next three all failed for the same reason.
It was me. I was the reason.
There aren’t that many settings to adjust on the Lomo LC-A, but there are still enough that I can have one of them set wrong and mess up some exposures.
If you leave the aperture on the LC-A set to Auto, it’ll select an appropriate shutter speed for you. If you manually choose an aperture, it’ll only shoot at 1/60 of a second.
For the next three images here, I’d accidentally done the second of those options. I can’t even remember what aperture it was at. It doesn’t matter. The blur is from trying to shoot too quickly with the slow shutter speed anyway.
We’re not done yet, though. I have two more bad shots from Whitby, and I found another different couple of ways to screw these up.
First was by not getting the focus right. Another setting on the Lomo LC-A lets you zone focus, with the closest distance being 0.8 metres.
I have managed to get some good close-up shots of things with the LC-A before, like the ladder on this post here, but this time, with these padlocks on the fence, I failed miserably.
Finally, the view through that tunnel. I think I just overestimated the film’s dynamic range there – i.e. its ability to render both bright light and dark shadow in the same shot. I’ve done what I can in Lightroom but the general fuzziness is from underexposure, I think.
I’m not blaming the Oriental Seagull film. Like any failed shots I get because of reasons like that, it’s all on me for not properly evaluating the limitations.
The rest of the Whitby
This final batch of photographs probably represents what I, and maybe you, mostly get from a roll of film. The bread and butter. The meat and potatoes. The middling middle.
They’re not bad. But that’s all they are. Just not bad.
Some uninspired composition here, a little too much softness there, and they don’t make the cut for the good photographs section of this post.
I mentioned the Lomo LC-A earlier and how I believe it’s capable of nice, sharp results. I think a bigger issue than the camera on some of these images here was the film.
As I talked about in my review, this Oriental Seagull 400 film might just be rebranded Kentmere Pan 400. If it isn’t, it’s a very close acquaintance of it.
The issue with that is that I wasn’t a huge fan of Kentmere Pan 400 either. I found it to be too flat and fuzzy. I prefer more contrast and sharpness.
If I’d have taken these shots on something cleaner like a Rollei Retro 400S, I’d probably have more of them in that aforementioned good photographs section.
But alas, I had the Seagull 400 that needed shooting, I chose to shoot it on a suboptimal cloudy day, so these are the results I reaped from what I had sowed.
Wrapping up the good, the bad and the Whitby
That’s it. That’s the photographs.
The first thing to say here as we wrap this thing up is how great a place Whitby is.
Go if you’ve never been. Venture out onto the piers. Have a walk around the old streets. Read Dracula. Climb the 199 steps to the ruined abbey. Have a drink while you’re up there.
The second thing is that there were only 23 shots on this post. That’s because I finished the roll later that day once I’d got back to Scarborough. They’re published along with some other thoughts here.
The final thing, of course, is to reiterate what this whole thing was about.
The majority of people are not getting 36 bangers from a 36-exposure roll of film.
Not the big influencers, whoever they are these days, not me with this little website, and not the anonymous people who like to criticise those brave enough to post their work on Reddit or other such places.
We know at this point social media is people showing the highlights of their life, not the reality. And for the vast majority of photographers it’s the same with their work.
That’s fine. It’s up to them and, depending on what they’re trying to achieve with the whole endeavour, is a necessary thing.
I’m not saying you should show anything other than your best work if you don’t want to either. This post is more a reminder to not be disillusioned when you get some bad or just unremarkable shots from your rolls too.
It happens to us all.
What I would suggest is to focus on your good ones, think about how to have more of those and fewer bad next time, load another roll, and go again. 🙂
If you enjoyed those good, bad and average shots from Whitby and want to read some more film photography essays, why not have a look at these:
And if you think others will find this post worth a read, help them find it by giving it a share 😀
