35mm film street photography

With another trip to Georgia out of the way, I feel absolutely awful. A lack of sleep from the past few days. Immense hay fever that sprung up out of nowhere leading to blocked sinuses and a heavy head. But the tiredness has given me a reason to write something, and I do have some fun images to share from the previous week where on two rainy days I took the Zenit ET out with the Mir 1v 37mm 2.8 and decided to try some street related photography. This is something I haven't done a whole lot of before, especially on film stock.

I tried my hand at range focusing for the first time. Which is where you set a distance with the lens, a predetermined shutter speed and aperture of around F8 which should mean everything up to that distance should maintain a moderate amount of sharpness. This means no on-the-go manual focusing and trying to figure out settings when the moment in front of you might completely go within the next second. For the 37mm lens it was fairly simple, though people tend to stick to a focal length of 28mm for this sort of thing, forcing them to get much closer.

Closeness remains a fear still for me. I see a lot more people with cameras outside lately, but nobody is doing this, and while it helps to see so many others with cameras finally here in Yerevan, I still have that realisation of how easy it can be to end up yet again with an interaction from the police. I tried to look up general photography laws in Armenia and found nothing against street photography, but I doubt even the police here know anything about it themselves, let alone the individuals that may not enjoy being photographed. Though this means I have to be a bit more secretive or selective with who I shoot. Some interactions are fun, some go completely unnoticed.

I was shooting on Kodak Colorplus 200 (or its recent relaunched name that I can't remember) and I can't say I like it that much. It comes out a bit too warm for my liking whereas in the past it felt more versatile in its colours. I also forgot to tick the .tiff format when getting the film developed, and the lab's scans also came out with a bit more warmth to them than I would've liked, so I did what I could to remove some of that without changing the original images too much. Personally, my favourite is the woman holding a plastic bag over her entire head to shield herself from the rain!

This was a stupid amount of fun for me, and it made me really want to get back into film photography. It was also the first time I had used my Mir 1v on the format it's intended for. Where the Sony A6000 is a crop sensor and turns it more into a 50mm which is more tighter. I loved range focusing, I loved hearing the film wind after each shot. I loved the manual approach of having to figure out the light myself based on previous experiences shooting film, given the light metre on the Zenit isn't all that accurate these days. The whole process really motivated me. A shame film costs so much though!