Shooting Autumn with Expired Fuji Astia 100
My favourite shot on the roll, I feel this captures the chaos of a woodland without falling apart as a composition. 1s 50mm F8.0 with polariser.
Sunshine, warmth and long days. Summer sounds great to the average person, but to a landscape photographer it’s hell on earth. Harsh white light, sweltering days carrying bags of camera gear, unsociable hours for sunrise and sunset, and that’s before you even get into the endless greenery. Landscapes devoid of exciting colours and atmosphere. But that all changes with autumn as the night’s draw in, the sun sits lower in the sky and the leaves turn shades of yellow, orange and red to give real colour and contrast.
These small bracket fungi cling to a fallen stick amongst the leaf litter. 1/8s 110mm F8.0 with Rotolight Neos 2.
This is by far the most exciting time of year for me to get my cameras out, helped further as this is the season with the largest number of fungi, which always makes for great photographic subjects. Exploring an area local to me that I am reasonably familiar with, I took out my trusty Bronica SQ-A with another of my expired rolls of Fuji Astia 100. Slide film has much more vibrant colours and contrast and I really wanted to use that to its full potential during autumn.
This expired roll of film showed colour shifts towards magenta. 2s 150mm 6.7 with polariser.
Larch trees are great in autumn as they are the only group of evergreen trees that change colour and shed their needles after summer ends. 1/8s 150mm F8.0 with polariser.
As I have written about previously, shooting expired slide film is often a real roll of the dice. You can never be sure what to expect until it comes back from the developers and the results can vary wildly. I had previously shot a roll at the local funfair with limited colour shifts, but there was no guarantee that every roll would behave the same way. Low and behold there were bigger colour shifts than before, with everything shifted towards magenta. Though this did make the greens that Fuji was famous for in its film pop even more.
The Fuji greens popped even more with the magenta colour shifts. 2s 80mm F4.0 with polariser.
The green borders perfectly highlighted the path winding through the trees on a misty morning. 2s 80mm F8.0 with polariser.
A little bit of mist helped me to create a bit more atmosphere on one of the quiet mornings I was out with my camera, and I can only re-iterate once again how indispensable a circular polarising filter is for this type of photography. It really helps to recover colour and contrast when dealing with wet subjects, and this time of year is almost always damp. It is a pity I never had a chance to shoot a vibrant sunset or sunrise on this roll of film, but you can’t control the weather and you simply having to make do with what nature provides. Even if it is a cluster of mushrooms growing out of horse dung. Whoever said photography was glamorous?
Horse dung made for a great growing medium for these fresh fungi. The dynamic range was a bit too much for the latitude of slide film, hence why the tips of the mushrooms are blown out. 1/15s 110mm F5.6 with Rotolight Neo 2.
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