My first time shooting film, I bought a couple rolls each of some of the most affordable 35mm film: Fujinon Superia X-tra 400 and Kodak Colorplus 200:
When I went to the Houston Rodeo, I thought it would be fun to shoot the carnival at night, so right as we were leaving the concert at about 9:00 that night, I loaded up the Kodak ColorPlus 200 and wandered through the grounds.
If you don’t know, one of the major things about how this film shoots has to do with that number, 200. That means it has an ISO number of 200 (ISO means “International Organization for Standardization,” which does not matter, but just in case you thought it might be a handy anagram, it is not). The number refers to its light-gathering ability - a very low number would be 100 ISO, which would be for shooting outdoors in bright daylight, a very high ISO would be 6400 ISO, which would be for trying to shoot useful images at night.
Here’s a good example of the visual difference from a useful Photography Life article about the subject.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that this story involves me a) shooting at night and b) using a low-ISO film, and if you’ve collected all of those pieces together you might be thinking “boy, that seems like exactly the wrong sort of film for shooting a carnival at night!” and you would be correct.
It was obvious right away as I started shooting. I didn’t know what the results would look like, but even with the lens all the way open and slowing down my shutter speeds to “you better have a real steady hand there, bud” there levels, my light reader was telling me that I was just barely getting enough light into the image even when I pointed it directly at bright neon lights.
The whole point of this shoot was to learn by failing, so I tried to compensate as best I could. I cranked the shutter speed down and tried to get some blurry-rides-in-motion shots. It did not really work:
Those aren’t disasters (okay, the bumper cars one is), but it’s the wrong lens and the wrong shutter speed and I knew the whole thing was disappointing even as I was shooting it.
I had better results just shooting the fairground in general, especially when I aimed the camera at some brighter sections. But the focus was a hairsbreadth thick.
I mean, it’s fine. I had fun!
But, lesson learned.