32 Frames / A Whole Roll of Lomography 800 – #FullRollFriday – By Gavin Bain

I’m a big fan of challenges when it comes to photography. I like imposing limitations on myself to see what I can create under the circumstances. In 2018 I decided to only photograph and share black and white film photographs. In 2019 I carried on with that theme but I introduced a new limitation by only photographing in portrait orientation. In 2020, I decided that I would introduce both digital photography and colour back into my workflow, but I decided to only photograph in landscape orientation for the whole year.

I have been making photographs on film for the last 10 years but really only stuck to the consumer film stocks so I haven’t really used a lot of the colour film available. For example I have only exposed 2 rolls of Portra 400 in my life and 1 roll of Portra 160 – which I suspect has now lost me a lot of readers and followers.

If you have read any of my contributions to this website you might already know this, but if not, where I live in Townsville, Queensland Australia I am part of a group of local film photographers that all meet up for coffee fairly regularly. We have just started to consciously organise photographic outings this year. Recently we headed out at dawn for a shoot down by the water. I saw it as a perfect chance to try a new film stock, so I purchased a roll Lomography 800.

I loaded the film into my trusty Canon Model 7, grabbed my tripod and cable release and headed out in the dark to meet up with the guys. I did however encounter a problem that I don’t usually encounter. For the last two years I have mainly shot black & white film in midday lighting.

My light meter reads both incident light or reflected light, but it doesn’t have a spot meter. So I resolved to take a reading with the incident light, and the reflected light and figure out a nice median of the two.

As you will see, the result of this is that there are some frames that are similar. This is due to the fact that I was testing differing exposure combinations.

My film was processed and scanned by Hillvale Photo in Victoria, Australia and I was very impressed with the results from both my terrible metering attempts, and the films colours.

I was really hoping the last two frames came out exposed as I really liked the bird flying in the second last one, and the last frame the fisherman was casting his rod. But such is film photography.

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