Lomography XPro film

It was a fantastic little day wandering around the Grandview Lodge resort area, walking along the many paths through the trees and by the lake. There were company sponsored activities (such as board game tournaments) and many people to talk to. John and I took a few hours out of the day to walk around the lake by ourselves, and recharge mentally. I was still photographing with the Nikon FG-20 and the Ilford HP5+ film. I’m still not thrilled with how grainy the film ended up being, and how some of the photos turned out. After I finished up with that roll, I loaded up a roll of Lomography XPro. I have learned that this is really color slide film, but packaged so that it looks like it could be developed as c41 film. What this does is distort the colors. This is actually a pretty common practice, but many film processing places won’t cross process film for various reasons. So it ends up usually not being the cheapest experiment. My local lab where I take my color film doesn’t usually cross process film, but because I hadn’t tried this film before, and because the woman that works there likes me, she developed it as c41 anyway. I must say, I really don’t like the way the colors come out with this film. I have had other slide film cross processed before, and have gotten pretty cool results, but not this time. I have not yet tried all of the Lomography films yet, but I have tried a few. Sadly, I think this film will be added to the ‘not trying again’ list.

Through this 365 project, I have been taking photos of everything with my cell phone as well as my film camera. I’m doing this for many reasons.

1. Because I am often developing and scanning the film multiple days after taking the photo, it can sometimes get a little tricky to remember when I took each photo. Having a digital record of this helps.

2. I can record the photos in my ‘Day One’ journal app, document the camera settings, and then have a record of what the weather was like where I was taking the photo.

3. The cell phone photo gives me the geolocation data of where I was photographing that day, and I am a bit obsessed with location data right now.

That said, I won’t always do this with my posts, but this time I am posting many of my cell phone photographs as well as the film photos. The cell phone photos come after all of the film photos. Honestly, I like them much better. I know this could be fodder for all of the many arguments over cell phone photography, film vs. digital and all that. But I am really quite tired of all of those arguments. I am experimenting with so many different types of film over the course of this project, many I have not tried before, and many that are quite expired already. I am not going to like every type of film I try, but this project will help me figure out what types of film I love. The fact that I ended up with two rolls of film I didn’t really like on this trip is just unfortunate, but not the end of the world. I’m not giving up using that little Nikon camera, even though I do whine about scanning 35mm film! So here you go, many photos, in many film types and formats.