Top 5 Reasons Your Film Photos Look Bad or Underwhelming

Does anyone know how Kyle achieved that long stretch of film with a single wide exposure on it?

The developing and scanning + editing make a HUGE difference I've learnt! Like when you showed your editing process for a brief moment, the image went from looking like bleh to wow with just a drag of the knob.

Digital photographers should be made aware of reciprocity failure when using film. Shutter speeds longer than 1 second and shorter than 1/1000th of a second will be underexposed so more exposure will be required.

thank you.

This video is gold! Thank you Kyle.

New film shooters struggling with #1 (exposure) should invest in one or more early digital cameras to practice with. Their limited exposure range will teach how to work with light and speed lights.

How do I transport the film if I am traveling abroad? Help! 🙏🏻

I left film inside a little automatic point and shoot camera in the middle compartment of my car for a whole year and it gets really hot in that specific compartment and when i finally shot and developed it, it was fine lol! and it was also that cheap kentmere stuff as well

For some reason i like those over or under exposed shots. They like if you do faded color edits like you take contrast little bit out and if you go on levels and you rise shadows corner up then blacks looks more like gray or maybe i understand something wrong but i mean same edit as your profile picture like faded style

Such a great video!

great video for beginners, particularly the underexposure tip

This is why I almost ALWAYS overexpose black and white! You can always print through the density.

I am a very experienced photographer, but I enjoyed your video very much. Your advice is very good. I learned a lot from Fred Picker's books and newsletters. He taught me to not get hung up about equipment. Get good equipment but it does not have to be the best. Your creative brain is your best equipment. A lot of photographers love to talk about equipment and won't talk about creativity. Get to know your equipment well enough so you don't need to think about it. You can just get on with being creative. Another very important aspect of photography is light. Not just the quantity of light, but the quality of the light is very important. It took me several years to learn that. The quality of the light needs to fit your subject - the thing being photographed. It's also very important to do film testing as you did in your video to make sure your exposures and film developing work together to get the results that you are happy with. Fred Picker taught his modified Zone System: using a hand-held spot light meter, take a reading of the high value in which you want detail and place it on Zone 8 and let the shadows fall where they may. If your camera has a built-in meter, you can set the film speed to half what it is on the box and usually get good results. Underexposing your your film is a total bummer.

Film photography is expensive enough just in the cost of film these days. Not only does developing and scanning your self cut your costs by 2/3 but it gives you consistency and most important control. No person sitting at a scanner 1000 miles away knows what your vision is better than you. Instead of my 67 shots costing $3.25 per shot, outrageous, it is reduced to $1.15 totally acceptable. 645 even less and 35 mm down to 40 cents a shot. Learning to consistently meter will increase your success rate substantially.

@DeeRosa keeps mentioning you in his videos and I am like "I'm subbed to Kyle too!"

Ofcourse there is a set standard. That is exactly why C41 and E6 were brought into life. So everyone does exactly the same!

When you say overexpose, are you talking about changing the ISO to 200 on a 400 ISO film? Or changing the EV value to +1 or +2?

In a negative way Kyle, in a NEGATIVE way !

💛

I rolled my eyes when I saw the headline and clicked anyway. But this is a really nice, informative video. Thanks for sharing ;)

Because film photography sucks. Its first those who didn’t grow up in the film era and have money to burn.
I shot pro on film back in the day. It makes me cringe thinking about the tedious expense of film.
Hooray for digital. 😅

To me....they don't look good is because our pictures are not printed light through negative onto paper. The scans are crap and the pictures are worse because they are printed digitally... just crap.

I saw a comment on here talking about how color negative films are meant to be edited but I’ve seen photos from the 70’s and 80’s that look good on their own without editing (and never had an orange tint). Were the films used back then different or was it just luck?

Первая причина – это ты,
А вторая – все твои мечты,
Третья – это все твои слова,
Я им не поверил едва
Четвертая причина – это ложь,
Кто прав, кто виноват – не разберешь,
А пятая причина – это боль,
От того, что умерла любовь

Excellent video.

En regardant votre vidéo, je vois que vous faites des essais sur la pellicule et voir l'acceptation de celle-ci, avec le film poussé ou retenu au développement, et voir le contraste en même temps. Avec le révélateur conseillé par la marque en noir et blanc et en couleurs. Je vois aussi la pellicule g o l d 200 et 400 i s o. En partant de ce principe, si votre sujet est terne, vous prenez une pellicule qui donne plus de contraste. Pour la pellicule en noir et blanc, avec -2 normal et plus 2, pour celui qui vous écrit préfère le plus 2.

Too late to the party but thanks for this video Kyle, I was thinking about giving up :(

If my meter says one thing in one spot, but one inch to the left gives me two extra stops... well who am I to argue with good news? Bonus stops, I'm not going to question it.

thank you. i appreciate your help

Shame on you. This is not acceptable. One must be blind to look at film photos nowadays. You want a film look, just apply countless filters to digital processing of RAW data. “ film community” I have not enough words of disapproval for your consumerist hedonistic approach to global resources. You want all this chemical dirt back? What for? For your wasteful pleasure of getting on good frame per film? Which you will the scan any way to treat in your PC? “Film community” you must be out of your minds .

I just realized my local lab uses automatic color correction on their Noritsu and Frontier scanners. No wonder I never seem to have dynamic range or consistent results...

I can’t believe burnham pier just popped up in this video 😃

100% find a lab that is operated by enthusiasts and not employees

on color neg film (you may have mentioned it) a little overexposure can reduce grain and give you richer colors, but dont overdo it.

At least in b+w, I see more overexposed pictures than underexposed

the solution is Olympus OM4 Ti with multi spot exposure

Hi Kyle, thanks for sharing your points into this. I was kind of expecting something different. Since some of us maniacs are developing film at home (B&W) i was expecting kind of advice or tips on that either. Maybe that's an idea for next video? Wish you great light

great video, especially the explanation about scanning and editing print film. I just started shooting film again after a 20 year gap and from what I read online often people don't know how much control the person that develops and scans has over the final image (as much if not more than I do picking and shooting the film) *your magenta cast image brought back memories from the early 2000's when the two remaining labs we had around would really stretch the chemical time out trying to hang on.

I appreciate this video and the reasons film images don't always look as good as you'd hoped. I'm old enough to remember when film was the only option. I started shooting film seriously several years ago and developed and scanned the film myself. I'm still not happy with what I'm producing and came to the conclusion that film obviously isn't for me. I hate to say it, but I've gone back to digital. It just looks so much better, is far easier and editable and is so much less expensive. I'll be honest, pictures off my phone look better than my film images. Maybe I had too high expectations of me shooting film, I don't know. But I decided to call it a day.

Better yet learn to develop and enlarge your own film. IMHO the appeal of film photography is the process. If you are only after the end product or a particular "look" then you are much better off sticking with digital and perfecting your post-processing techniques to achieve your desired end product.