Downtown Alley on Film

In photography, they say—or at least I do—that timing is everything. That was certainly the case when I was out and about shooting a roll of Ilford FP4 Plus with my Nikon F about this time last month.

As I mentioned in my last post, there’s this narrow alley that I keep my eye on for interesting light. Whenever I walk past it, I’m in the habit of glancing down it to see how the daylight is rendering it.

Out of all the others on that roll most of which were admittedly rather uninspired, this exposure stands out:

I happened upon my favorite alley precisely when a shaft of sunlight was shining directly down the middle of it. As I stood there thinking about what to do with it, I noticed my shadow and decided to make a shadow selfie.

For this shot, my light meter recommended an exposure of 1/60 sec. at f/5.6. I knew the meter was seeing a mostly dark scene with a narrow strip of bright light. I wanted that scene to remain mostly on the dark side with the exposure best balanced for that shaft of light. I ended up bracketing this composition using three different shutter speeds—1/60, 1/125, and 1/250 sec.—all at f/5.6. My gut intuition was right: the fastest exposure time was the right one. It seems all that work I’m doing with learning how to shoot without a light meter is paying off.

What’s more, if I hadn’t been using a completely manual camera, I don’t think I would have put much thought into my exposure settings at that particular moment. I find I am far more mentally engaged when I use a manual film camera. It simply does not give me the option of being lazy like an automated digital camera does.

One thing I love about practicing photography is that it has made me far more attune to my surroundings. I am much more alert to the subtle yet significant transformations in character that those surroundings take on especially as the light changes.