Some frames from a 36 exposure roll of Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow.
Bhavna and I were on a weekend trip up to Oberlin, Ohio, to take Kiran back for her last semester at Oberlin College. It was a long weekend, and Bhavna and I decided to visit the lakeshore town of Sandusky.
After reading Jim Grey’s first impressions of the Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow ISO 400 135 films, I decided to try it myself. I was a backer of the Kickstarter Project, but I had not yet exposed any of the four cartridges of Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow. I loaded one of the 36 exposure cartridges into my Minolta X-700, a camera I rarely use as I tend to favour my XF-11. I shot the entire roll at box speed. The roll was developed at Black Lab Imaging in Flemington, New Jersey and scanned at home on my Epson Perfection V600 using VueScan 9.
Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow is a 400-ISO panchromatic black-and-white film which the creator describes like this:
The film is an existing emulsion made by a company with more than a century’s experience in making film.
While the film is rated at ISO 400, the film can be push processed four stops up to ISO 6400 with appropriate development. Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow is perfect for shooting at box speed in bright or overcast light, but can also be used in much lower light conditions if needed.
The film is fine-grained at box speed but shows more atmospheric grain when push processed, along with more dramatic contrast.
In September, I exposed a roll of Agent Shadow at box speed while walking around the streets of Sandusky with Bhavna. The grain is noticeable, but the photographs have a fascinating vintage look. I can’t wait to try the three remaining rolls.
Name
Kosmo Foto Agent Shadow 400
Type
Panchromatic Black and White (negative)
Native ISO
400
Format
35mm
Process
C-41
Features
Kodak T-GRAIN emulsions, Fine Grain, High Sharpness & Edge Detail
It takes only a split second to ruin a partially complete roll of 35mm film. Lessons learned from using a Harman Reusable Camera with Kentmere Pan 400
The Harman Reusable Camera and Kentmere Pan 400 combination is a reusable plastic 35mm film camera with a built-in flash. The Kentmere and Ilford photography brands are owned by Harman Technology Ltd, a UK-based manufacturer of photographic materials. This introductory photography kit is sold with two Kentmere Pan 400 film cartridges, a battery, and a strap. The Kentmere Pan 400 is a budget B&W film similar to Ilford’s HP5 that has a reputation for delivering excellent results.
The plastic camera had a very flimsy feeling to it, so fragile that the camera comes with a warning that you can easily break it if you force rewind your film. I did not doubt that if I did, it would wreck the camera. This item is not returnable. There is a switch on the front to enable the built-in flash, a switch to open the film door, a push-button film release on the bottom, the film advance, and the shutter release. There are no other controls on the camera.
The lens is 31mm with a fixed aperture of f/10. The camera has a fixed shutter speed of 1⁄120 sec at ISO 200 or ISO 400. The camera’s viewfinder has a field of view of 70%. This means that what you see inside the viewfinder will be about 30% less than what the camera captures, which is quite different. You can see my fingers in some frames.
I dropped the roll into the camera, exposed a few frames, then put the camera down and forgot about it. When I rediscovered the camera a few months later, I could not remember if I had loaded the roll or not. I hesitated by eventually opened the film door.
It takes only a split second to ruin a partially complete roll of 35mm film. I snapped the film door as quickly as possible, but the damage was already done. I completed exposing the remaining frames, but I knew that I had already ruined it. The scans that follow are what I was able to recover.
I won’t use this camera again. This was a lesson in sticking to tools that give me the information I need to succeed in film photography. If you are a photography student looking to dip the "toe" into film photography, I recommend buying an inexpensive used camera and lens kit on eBay. Since it has a fixed aperture and shutter speed, YOU WILL NOT learn the basics of photography from using this camera.
A few weeks ago, on a late Sunday afternoon in late April, Bhavna and I took a long walk on the Asbury Park boardwalk. I learned that day that Bhavna had only visited Asbury Park once before, and that visit was with Shaan and me. Let me put that into perspective. I am two years older than Bhavna. We’re both immigrants. Since she was six years old, she has lived in New Jersey. Her family emigrated from Gujarat, India. I have lived in various states, including New York, Georgia, and Michigan, since I emigrated from the West Indies in 1986. I moved from Michigan to New Jersey in 1994. In that short time, I have visited more places in New Jersey than Bhavna has since she started living here. It seems her family was not the adventurous type.
We arrived at the Asbury Park Convention Hall around 2 PM. I noted that the sun was on the western side of the boardwalk. I took a lot of photographs that afternoon, photographing whatever appealed to my eye. Later, while looking at the pictures on the Mac Studio, a pattern emerged; people sitting, people walking dogs and bicycles.
Dog ownership must be a thing in Asbury Park. I don’t know why. We saw little dogs and big dogs. Short hair dogs and shaggy-haired dogs. Dogs! One of the local bars, the Wonder Bar, has a yappy hour. The outdoor space was packed with dogs and their owners when we walked by.
The following Saturday, I returned to Asbury Park with a group of photographers. We were students of photographer Freddy Clark for the "Down the Shore" in Asbury Park workshop by Princeton Photo Workshop. We explored subjects on the boardwalk but also around downtown Asbury Park. During the workshop, Freddy provided some history of Asbury Park. I had no specific plan for what I would photograph, but I tried to avoid benches, dogs and bicycles. I failed.
This week’s Lens-Artist Photo Challenge brings up the topic of light and shadow. I scrolled through some of the photographs from the two Asbury Park trips, looking for examples that worked for this challenge. These images were processed in Adobe Lightroom from the original RAF image. The default (standard) mode on the Fuji X-T3 is PROVIA film simulation, but I prefer CLASSIC CHROME for street photography. I originally intended to post-process these are colour images, but the topic of light and shadow pushed my mind toward choosing to edit in black and white. I switched to the ACROS+G profile in Adobe Lightroom and used that as a base for all the images.
In this image, I was hoping to photograph this restaurant with two people chatting on the bench for scale and to add a bit of story. The lines and shapes and the shadows had caught my eye. However, as I composed my photograph, a third person sat down. I increased the exposure and shadow sliders in Adobe Lightroom to reduce the shadows around the people. I then used an inverted subject mask to adjust the exposure and shadows to my liking. I then cropped out a distracting trash can on the right and reduced some of the sky's dead space.
I like how the shadow on the boardwalk leads the eye toward the back of the image. I like the contrast between the bright clothing of the children playing and the darker clothing of the two people walking toward the camera. This was processed similarly to the one above. I cropped in from the right. This one does not follow the rule of thirds.
I love the look of joy on her face. She’s looking down, almost as though she is chasing her shadow.
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