Tips for shooting lasers on film?

Blarg King · Nov 8, 2016

Hello! I reccently bought myself a film SLR camera, and I wanted to try out some laser photography using film instead of digital.

I don't know if anyone here has tried doing laser photos with film, but if anyone has and has some helpful pointers that would be great.

I'll give a rundown of what I'm using.

Camera body: Yashica FX-3 Super 35mm
Lens: Yashica 35-70 mm lens, has 3.5, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, and 22 apertures
Film: Fujifilm X-Tra color negative, 400 ISO
Shutter speeds: 1/2000, 1/1000, 1/500/ 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, and bulb.

It has a light meter, but its an old analog type so I'm not sure how well it will work with laser light.

Thanks!

diachi · Nov 8, 2016

Blarg King said:
Hello! I reccently bought myself a film SLR camera, and I wanted to try out some laser photography using film instead of digital.

I don't know if anyone here has tried doing laser photos with film, but if anyone has and has some helpful pointers that would be great.

I'll give a rundown of what I'm using.

Camera body: Yashica FX-3 Super 35mm
Lens: Yashica 35-70 mm lens, has 3.5, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, and 22 apertures
Film: Fujifilm X-Tra color negative, 400 ISO
Shutter speeds: 1/2000, 1/1000, 1/500/ 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, and bulb.

It has a light meter, but its an old analog type so I'm not sure how well it will work with laser light.

Thanks!

I seem to recall Trencheel303 having posted some laser pictures that he captured on film, they turned out great too. There's something about film that digital can't quite reproduce... Maybe he'll chime in with some tips.

I know there's a bunch of folk here into photography, so I'm sure you'll get a few replies. Seems film is making a comeback, at least for hobby photographers.

Blarg King · Nov 8, 2016

diachi said:
I seem to recall Trencheel303 having posted some laser pictures that he captured on film, they turned out great too. There's something about film that digital can't quite reproduce... Maybe he'll chime in with some tips.

I know there's a bunch of folk here into photography, so I'm sure you'll get a few replies. Seems film is making a comeback, at least for hobby photographers.

Yeah. I think part of the comeback is you can get an excellent pro quality SLR for less than 40$ if you shop around. Its a cheap way to get pro level results, as long as you're willing to give up some of the niceties that digital has given us.

I know for me, the hardest part is remembering that I have a fixed number of shots, and that messing up a shot costs me money. I have to know what I want, and take my time getting it.

brucemir · Nov 8, 2016

Hey Blarg
You should contact Trencheel. He posted 35mm pics of lasers a year or two ago. If I was going to photograph lasers with my 35mm I would use the first roll just to experiment with exposures for reference and not even worry about great shots, just finding a good starting point for exposure times for future shots. The same pic/set up with various settings for each frequency. And since it is film no metadata so I would write down the shutter / fstop settings to match up the photos when you get them back and figure out your best exposures to start with the next time. I know how many adjustments I make constantly doing what I do digitally. It would be "poke and hope" doing what I do using film. That situation will never arise for me now with the quality of digital cameras. Also when you get your film developed you should also have them give you a cd/DVD with the digital images so you can do what you have to do to correct them using whatever software you use. Good luck and post some pics when you can.

Trevor · Nov 8, 2016

Do yourself a favor and Google "reciprocity failure," then get used to dealing with that when shooting in the kind of light you generally photograph lasers in.

When doing long exposures on film, I dial in exposure on a digital body then account for reciprocity failure and set my film exposure. Usually works pretty well.

Trevor

Blarg King · Nov 11, 2016

Alrighty, just took some laser photos using film. I used an entire 24 shot roll

Should be 10-ish unique shots. I did each shot with both a 5 second and 10 second exposure :thinking: Hopefully at least some of them turn out. Its tricky because film is a chemical process so it reacts differently to different wavelengths. Could be tricky with some of the multi-beam shots I did, but because film is chemical its also harder to completely blow shots out so I feel pretty good.

At worst some of the shots will be underexposed, but I can potentially fix that when I scan in the negatives to Photoshop.

Anyways, not entirely sure when the photos will be up as I've got another roll of film left and I'm going to get them all developed at once, and I have to mail the rolls away for development since nobody does it locally.

I'm also learning that film is a fairly expensive hobby. 25$ for 3 rolls of 24 shot film plus 11$ a roll for development. Might be able to get some film for half that price in the future though. And still cheaper than the film for those Fujifilm Instanx cameras.

Edit: In case anyone was wondering, I did shots with my Blord 445, my LaserBTB 520, my Skylasers 532, and my DIY 638. I'm really excited to see how film renders all the different colors.

trencheel303 · Nov 24, 2016

Trevor said:
Do yourself a favor and Google "reciprocity failure," then get used to dealing with that when shooting in the kind of light you generally photograph lasers in.

When doing long exposures on film, I dial in exposure on a digital body then account for reciprocity failure and set my film exposure. Usually works pretty well.

Trevor

Ahh! Reciprocity failure. I couldn't remember the term and that's had me tongue tied for a while.

Blarg did indeed contact me as suggested in this thread and I sent him a message. I didn't see this thread until now, so for the information of the forum in general I will reproduce my reply here.

trencheel303 said:
Hi.

It's been a long while, and since I got my prints scanned I have no EXIF data. So I'm more or less guessing and using my judgement. From memory though what I can say is photographing 405 is a nightmare. It comes out more like 473, probably because film hates UV (that's why UV filters were a thing, because photos taken on film on a bright sunny day could be washed out by it). You could try a UV filter but then the 405 might not show at all!

What I can say is you have more headroom on overexposure because of the way film works - unlike digital which is, as the name suggests, "digital" in nature, the way film exposes the longer you have the shutter open is different because you end up with a diminishing return. I can't remember the name of it, but basically if you overexpose film by a whole stop, you tend not to be punished as hard as you would with digital, and with night time exposures you can get away with really screwing up your exposure times because the highlights don't blow as wildly as on digital. It makes film very nice to shoot with on a tripod at night or under low light because your guesswork doesn't even have to be that accurate.

For a failsafe, shoot at ISO 400, F-stop of around 4 or 5, and bracket exposures of 3, 10 and 20 seconds. Make sure the room is dark ,and you have a good beamstop that absorbs most of the splash, as that's what kills the atmosphere in a lot of laser pics I've tried (and failed) to combat splash. For lower powered lasers, a full 30-60 seconds of exposure time will do. Remember the settings, and just re-use their approximates next time - thankfully it doesn't need to be an exact science as it does on digital, because when digital blows highlights, it looks horrible!

The second to last paragraph of me warbling on endlessly is because I knew what reciprocity failure was but couldn't for the life of me remember the name of it.

Blarg King · Nov 25, 2016

My SLR came with a "UV filter" which as far as I can tell is just a piece of glass. I'm guessing its just meant to filter out the non-visible UV spectrum as I shined my 405 through it and it went through no problem.

Anyways, one of the photography instructors at my college offered to let me use their darkroom and to teach me how to develop C-41 film, so I'll be learning that next week. Provided I don't botch the development process then I'll be able to have the photos up by the end of next week. I don't have a negative scanner, but if my college has a darkroom I would imagine they also have a negative film scanner I can use. Fingers crossed they turned out.

I'll probably also post some of the other film photos I took if they turn out. I went through 3 rolls of film over the month.

I've got a roll of B&W film loaded in my camera now. I'm wondering how lasers will look on black and white film. I feel like it will either be cool, or look like shit without color. I'll probably just take a couple shots to try.

trencheel303 · Nov 25, 2016

I can imagine they would all just look like white lines with slightly varying intensity. Not really any other outcome tbh.

Tips for shooting lasers on film?

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