The Dail, Dublin City Houses of Parliament, Shot on Film

A while ago I wrote about my last attempt at shooting film when I was away on holiday in Nice. While I got some good shots that time I wan't happy with the quality of the images, mainly because the film turned out to be expired. The last time I had shot some Kodak Portra, but this time I was shooting black and white with Fuji Neopan.

In my previous attempt, I had the film processed and scanned in the US using the popular Richard Photo Lab. This time I decided to try and get it done locally. The results were mixed. While the film has been processed fine, the scans are pretty bad. The negatives were hand processed, but the scans were done on the places Frontier mini lab. The images were scanned in colour, and on top of that seemed to have had both aggressive sharpening and noise reduction applied, resulting in a horrible texture to the images, reminiscent of cheap digital or early cell phone cameras.

I have shot and scanned the same film stock myself before, so I know that the results should be like. Unfortunately, my old but superb film scanner is currently out of action, or I would re-scan them myself. I did manage to effect some repairs to them in Lightroom. By using luminance noise reduction I was able to get rid of a lot of the half sharpened half noise reduced horrible grain structure, and then I used Lightroom's grain tool to match it. The results, while not perfect, is much batter. I also made them true black and white.

I have to say I did enjoy the process of shooting them (now that my camera is working properly again) and I love shooting with my old Yashica FXD. I'd love to try shooting with a proper range finder at some point. If I could get my old film scanner working again, I'd probably shoot a lot more film. was happy with the processing, and it was much cheaper than sending them to the US to be processed and scanned. I just need to find a better way to scan them.

Here's a selection of Images from he shoot. They're mostly street photography shots from around Dublin city. Enjoy.