My first foray into photography

[miliardo]

Hi all,

I grabbed my rangefinder film camera after 20 or so years when I last held it as a young boy It was a gift for me in those days, and of course as a 10 year old I didn't know nothing about shutter speed, ASA/ISO, f stop..

So I bought some cheap film to get my feet wet and shoot it over a course of 6 months...

The film used was Kodak ColorPlus 200 , and the camera Kiev 4 with Jupiter-8M 50mm f/2..

The film was developed and scanned at a local lab..

1) The night traffic 01 - f/8 1/10



2) The night traffic 02 - f/8 20''



3) Sunset - f/16 1/125



4) Branko's Bridge - f/8 1/250



5) Graffiti - f/8 1/125



6) Portrait of a girl 01 - f/2.8 1/1000



7) Portrait of a gril 02 - f/2.8 1/1000



Accidental double exposure as I didn't see that I was at the end of a film so I wound it up again and got this part double exposed...

I don't have any professional light meter so I used either the one on the camera which is selenium match-needle, or an app for Android phones "LightMeter Free"..

Looking forward to your critique and suggestions

 

[Derrel]

Frames 6 and 7 are a classic example of what NOT to do...Your titled frame, portrait of a girl might better be termed "portrait of a brick wall with girl as obstructing element". The wall occupies I would estimate 92% of the frame area, the girl is the other 8 percent of the total image area. In addition to being only 8% of the frame area, she is oddly low within the overall image area...and in frame 6 she is looking straight ahead dead-center in the frame, while in frame 7, you've moved her to the left third of the frame, and have her looking into the larger unoccupied area, which is a good decision: having a person look "into the larger area" is natural, and pleasing, and does not build unneeded, unwanted visual tension.

Overall, you're doing "okay" for not having shot this camera for 20 some-odd years, but the images all lack really striking emphasis, and have a sort of unstudied feel about them, compositionally. Composing with a rangefinder camera is, in my experience, somewhat tricky after a layoff...the finder image is SMALL, and in anything except a high-end rfdr (Leica/Nikon/Canon/Contax/Konica/Voigtlander,etc), composing is basically, looking through a crappy, tiny peep-hole...it's NOT a big, flat LCD screen like on a 120 SLR or even a smart phone, where the image is seen BIG, and clear...you almost need 2 or 3 weeks of use to get into rangefinder composing, IMHO.

Your exposure settings look okay! Not bad! I have one of those phone light meter apps, works great, I used it as my only meter with my Yashica 635 and Speed Graphic last summer! I started out with a viewfinder-type camera for several years...it's not as easy as an SLR or phone with the majority of common cameras...again...the finder image is small and not as easily seen. I would also look for a few "tall" or "portrait orientation" type images of people, if appropriate.

 

[miliardo]

Hey Derrel, thanks for your inputs I'll remember them for future reference. Do you think that cropping those two frames would work to somewhat correct the composure?

Yes the viewfinder is rather small, I try my best with it I've found a few books about photography, will read them later on.

Thanks again