So finally after weeks of waiting I received back my first roll of black and white film from the lab. It felt like I was a kid opening a present on Christmas morning and is still one of my favorite aspects of film photography. I’ve really only been shooting on celluloid for about a year now, but during that time I have exclusively shot on C-41 color film. So I was incredibly interested in the differences of how the process would be with black and white. I grabbed a roll of T-max 400 and went out with one of my friends and fellow photographers, Chris Alderfer, to the small Pennsylvania town of Victorian Bellefonte.
Not fully knowing where to go we drove through the town stopping at an auto body shop and eventually heading to the park downtown. We were surprised to see a park full of people listening to polka music performed from a one man band in a gazebo. People were dancing and laughing. It was something out of old America that has long been lost. Naturally we grabbed our cameras and had a great time shooting the scene.
I found myself wishing that I had color film instead of black and white at some instances, but I finished the roll anyways. One thing that I’d heard was that the black and white stocks tend to not have nearly as much dynamic range as color stocks. This made me a little nervous in trying to be more precise in exposing my images. But looking back after the development process I definitely won’t feel as worried about pushing the film a little bit more in the future. Other than the longer amount of time it took the lab to process the film, I was exceptionally happy with the whole process. After the images came back I just added a bit more contrast in Lightroom to give the shadows a bit more richness and I was done. Definitely excited to experiment more with black and white in the future. Who knows maybe I’ll have to investigate more into my own home development?
Anyways let me know your thoughts on a few of these image from my first roll of black and white and thank you for following along!
- Matt Nickolaus