
Another not so good day. It was a Sunday and Kay and I decided to work in the yard most of the day. After mowing I decided to power wash my tractor and mowers. Once that was done, I knew I needed to get at least some type of picture for the day so I quickly set up my tripod and just guessed at the exposure using the “sunny 16” rule. With the sunny 16 rule, I can guess exposure on a sunny day by setting my camera at F16 and setting my shutter equal to my film speed. No need for a light meter, right? Wrong. I set my camera at F16 and 1/60th (close to 1/100th) because I thought I had ISO-100 film loaded. Wrong. I had Ilford HP5 which is rated at ISO-400. So my shutter speed should have been 1/500 rather than 1/60 of a second. Hence, overexposure by about 2 stops. I still got an image but barely. And worse still, I had the same light leaks! Of course I still didn’t know about the light leak problem. Tonight I developed the film from the previous three days and discovered the overexposure problem in the bottom of my images. Even the day 2 image had just a bit of this problem although barely noticeable. Tomorrow I am going to shoot and develop some test films to try and track down the cause of this problem.
I only had time to shoot this one image so this is what we get – an overexposed image with light leaks of some sort in the bottom of the image. Another throw-away. So far, 5 sheets of film, two usable images.
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