Is this the best Film Camera, Lens & Film combination for a classic look? Captures with a Nikon FM3A, Zeiss Distagon 2/35 ZF and Kodak Tri-X in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina | Summer 2024
Film, Gear Adrian Scoffham Film, Gear Adrian Scoffham

Is this the best Film Camera, Lens & Film combination for a classic look? Captures with a Nikon FM3A, Zeiss Distagon 2/35 ZF and Kodak Tri-X in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina | Summer 2024

I was itching to hit the streets of a City with a combination I’ve long been wanting to try out. I recently acquired a copy of the beautiful Carl Zeiss Distagon 35mm F2 which I’d previously borrowed from a friend and loved when shooting colour emulsion - I knew this lens packed a 3D pop but I hadn’t yet had the chance to use her with a nice contrasty grainy film like the classic Kodak Tri-X and to crank things up a notch I used a medium yellow filter on the front of the lens, which whilst taking almost a stop of light transmission made the blacks that bit more inky and the contrast and grain a little more accentuated.

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The imperfection of memories
Adrian Scoffham Adrian Scoffham

The imperfection of memories

I often talk about painting with light because in essence that’s what we’re trying to do with our cameras. We have a photosensitive media, be that a CMOS or CCD sensor or a sheet of silver halide emulsion and we use available light to freeze a scene that we compose through a lens - what results is the capture of a memory, we record how we see something - which may reveal something about us and how we felt in the moment that we pressed the shutter, it may also convey some feeling to a viewer of the image at a later date. Photography is by its very nature a nostalgic exercise. The choices we make as to how we post-process images in the case of digital photographers using mirrorless and DSLR cameras say as much about the feeling we wish to convey as the choices of a film photographer selecting a film stock or deliberately choosing to use a grainy and out of date black and white film stock.

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