photographer

life . Portrait . street

Madison, WI

Flavia

Fontana Giusti

flavia@grainandblur.com

JULY 22 & 24, 2022 // MADISON

When everything goes wrong in the lab, but it's alright

These are images I made on July 22 on Arista Edu100 with an Olympus OM2 I’m still testing, but then developed with exhausted Df96, so they came out underdeveloped and a few of these images could not be saved. 

The camera also has some quirks, it works wonders when I keep it off, and it works as an aperture priority camera, but it drains the batteries in a very very short time in auto, and it seems to make random shutter speed decisions in full manual mode, like on this roll, I was usually around 1/125th of a second, but the motion blur on some of those suggests the shutter speed was actually much slower. I’m not sure if that’s because the camera corrected incorrect speeds, or if that’s because the shutter is unreliable in manual mode. 

Anyways, despite it’s failings, I like the results it gives me in aperture priority, it’s a wonderful little lens, and the camera is very compact, so I’ll probably keep using it when I don’t want to think too much about my exposures (usually with my kids, or when I try to do candid street photography)…

These were made two days later, I managed to escape the house for a few hours, and I grabbed my Yashica Mat EM loaded with Acros100 (the original stuff, not the newer stock) and headed to my usual spots. It was hot so I made a little detour through the Chazen museum in the beginning, but the light was insufficient and the museum was closing, so I went back to the street. 

I was very happy with my exposures, and I was confident in the images I was making, so I went home and developed right away, while Emilio was still up, living his happy little life around the house. He came into the studio and tried stealing my phone to go youtube somewhere, but I need my phone and youtube is not something I love him doing, so as I stopped him I held the film tank with a single hand, and I dropped it: the film saw the light before it had a chance to get developed. I got so mad at Emilio, I think he’ll stay away from my work space for a while, but the truth is that it wasn’t really his fault, I should have waited, and it hurt. I lost a few frames over this accident – nothing to salvage – and I saved these. I hope you can still see the beauty in them…

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