The Sequel to the First Roll in the Yashica Electro 35 GSN [Fujicolor Industrial 100]

Images shot on Fujicolor Industrial 100 in Yashica Electro 35 GSN

I try to mix things up with the film photo essays I write on here. Some, like this one from Yangshuo, are travelogues. Others, like this one about shooting in low light, are more about the film and the process of making the photographs.

Others still, like this one about the first roll I ever shot in the Yashica Electro 35 GSN I bought a couple of years ago, are more about me and my own progress with film photography. And this one you’re reading now is the sequel to that.

Revisiting films I’ve already shot isn’t something I’ve done too often as there are so many out there I want to try, but a second roll of Industrial 100 was necessary for the sake of this blog. Read on to find out why and of course to see the results this great little film gave me.

Measuring your progress with your photography

A very well-known photography quote by the very well-known photography Henri Cartier-Bresson says that “your first 10,000 photographs are your worst”.

I suppose it’s a bit like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, in that it’s a completely arbitrary yet easy to remember number that is really just saying you have to practice and repeat a lot before you get good at something.

While it’s hard to accurately and objectively measure how your photography is progressing, especially with things like recency bias and effort justification clouding your view, it is something worth thinking about from time to time if getting better is something you want to do.

Of course that progress isn’t going to be linear or absolute, though. It’s not like every photograph you took starting out was like a D before you improved so everything was a C, and then later everything you shot was a B.

When I look back at my older stuff, I tend to see a lot of photographs from when I was starting out that I now think are pretty bad.

I also think that a lot of what I did for the #leesixtyfive project a couple of years ago is better than a lot of what I’ve shot since, which is something I have a couple of explanations for.

First is that I was shooting a lot more to get the 365 photographs done in the year. It’s like practising anything almost every day. You’ll be better at it during that time than you will be when you drop off and do it less.

The second reason is that I was shooting on digital and so was doing the shoot lots of frames of the same scene and only keep the best one thing, which obviously leads to better set at the end than film when I only usually give each scene one shot.

Comparing the first roll in the Yashica Electro to this sequel

Of course, whether my photography is progressing and how this recent stuff compares with my previous is only my opinion, as I’m the only person looking and thinking about it.

Another opinion I have though is that the results from this second roll of Industrial 100 I shot in the Yashica Electro are a better overall set than those I got from the first.

That could be down to being more comfortable with the camera as much as anything else, but I still think it’s a fair enough way of checking progress over a given time span. Same film, same camera, same place, same genre, and an acceptance of those cognitive biases from earlier.

A couple of the images here – the rollercoaster one above and the red ribbons one below – are very near (yet not as good) re-creations of some of those from the aforementioned #leesixtyfive project.

While that’s a sign I was running out of inspiration and ideas in Shanghai, it could also suggest that I did get more confident and proficient with the Yashica Electro if I managed to almost replicate with it a couple of photographs that needed multiple digital shots to achieve before.

The real reason I had to shoot this roll of film

Although shooting this roll of Industrial 100 meant I could use the results to write this sequel to the first one, that wasn’t the reason I did it. It was something to do with this blog, though.

You may or may not be aware that I review all the films I shoot and post them in this section. If you take a look, you’ll probably notice a theme has developed in all their featured images.

The problem was I only started holding the roll and the box like that for the fourth one I wrote – the Agfa Vista Plus 200 review. Every subsequent review had that shot taken for it too, but not the three before it.

So that’s why I had to buy another roll of Industrial 100. And Rollei Retro 400S and Kodak ColorPlus too. Because having some film reviews with featured images that didn’t match the theme I’d developed was something I needed to fix.

I’m sure nobody else would have noticed this, or even cared if they had. But I cared, so I had to get it done. And as always, whatever the reason for buying and shooting a roll of film was, I’m glad I did.

Because we now have a bunch of photographs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise if I hadn’t and that is only ever a good thing.

A word on shooting some Industrial 100 while you can

Fujifilm are many things to many people, but what they are for the purpose of this section of this post is a real world example of the saying all good things come to an end. Which is just a roundabout way of pointing out again their continuing tendency to discontinue some of their film stocks.

At the time of writing, Industrial 100 is still clinging on. But for how long, nobody really knows. The fact that the ISO 400 version bit the dust is not a good sign, though.

That’s why I would encourage you to grab some of this ISO 100 sibling and shoot it while you can. And not just because it might not be around for much longer, but because it’s a pretty good film too.

As I talked about in my review, it’s pretty well-known for its saturated reds, but that’s not all it brings. You can judge for yourself from the images on here, but I personally like the whole colour rendition and the contrast it gives when the light is right.

You can also expect low grain with it being an ISO 100 film. Overall, if the light is good enough for you to shoot a film with such a low ISO, I recommend you try some of this one if you haven’t already.

And just in case you missed it before, with Fujifilm’s track record, while you still can.

Wrapping up this sequel roll of Industrial 100

As explained earlier, I only really bought this roll of film to take a picture of the box and cartridge to use on the review. Then shooting with it yet another bunch of Shanghai street shots means I wasn’t completely sure what to write about on this post.

Because of that, I just hope you’ve taken something from the various topics that got touched on.

Perhaps you can think about how your photography has improved over time and what you can do – aside from just looking at your whole body of work – to really measure that?

Maybe you got a little insight into what goes on behind the scenes here. Especially if you don’t have a blog yourself.

I always get those images of the box and cartridge for the film reviews once I’ve finished the roll. This is usually as soon as I’ve finished so I’m doing it at the same place I shot at least some of the film.

That gives some consistency in the photograph of the film and the photographs from the film too, which is something else I guess nobody else ever notices but is important to me.

Finally, I hope you got some inspiration to shoot some Fujicolor Industrial 100 yourself too if you’re yet to do so.

You can read the review I’ve mentioned a few times already for more information, or you can go straight on over and see how much it’s going for on eBay or from Analogue Wonderland.  🙂

And if you have already shot some or do get around to it, you can let us all know how it went in the comments below or possibly also by giving me a shout on Twitter.

If you found that post useful, why not take a look at these others to stay inspired or learn more about some other films I’ve shot and reviewed:

1. My comprehensive review of this Industrial 100 film
2. Shooting this film in a cheap point ‘n’ shoot
3. Shooting another great Fujicolor film in China

And if you think others will enjoy this post on shooting another roll of Industrial 100 in the streets of Shanghai too, help them find it by sharing or pinning.  😀