Let me paint a picture:
I quickly ran upstairs and fished out a roll of Portra 400 from a box near my desk. I saw it still had the leader sticking out and ran back downstairs to load it up in the Minilux. I was careful and made sure not to waste too much film as I loaded the roll (upside-down, because, Leica) and closed the back. After a few seconds the camera displayed a flashing “0” on the top LCD and my heart immediately dropped. “It’s defective, the seller doesn’t accept returns, so I’m going to have to list it today”. I felt my face getting warm as I started to panic. I opened the back and pulled the film leader out a bit more and closed the back in frustration. The Minilux came to life! The counter on the top LCD read “1” without flashing. I rushed through the process and didn’t realize there was a certain amount of film I had to pull before the camera would catch.
It was RIGHT THERE!
I was blown away when I received the Leica Minilux and I expected the same when I received the first set of scans. BLOWN AWAY, I WAS NOT! When I received the scans, I was really underwhelmed. The scans were decent 37mb files and they had so much detail but I noticed an insane amount of haze in every single photo.
I went out to New York City to try out the camera the very same day I received it. The day was overcast and it had been raining the whole week. So bae and I grabbed our quarantine outfits and headed out the door. I saw a lot of online articles and reviews showing these magically warm Portra shots that took my breath away every time I saw them, kind of like the shot below from my friend @paradoxyc
But, instead, I got this hazy, flat, grainy image with weird ghosting that made me question why I even spent my money. I started realizing there was something off every time I kept looking back at it in disappointment. The ghosted image on the right looked like a photo I took the night I got home from the city and the image on the left looked like a photo I had taken months earlier when the trees had JUST started to lose their leaves. I fucked up and SHOT THE SAME ROLL TWICE!
Everything below this text will just show the scans how I received them from my lab and the second photo will show them color corrected with the preset @paradoxyc helped me create.
I saw it, I hope you saw that haze too! There’s still more work to be done on the color correction on my part, and I’ll make sure I put that work in. Hopefully the next roll doesn’t let me down, I hope I don’t let myself down!