The Seasonal Shift: How Fall Light Affects Your 35mm Film Camera Results

As summer gives way to fall, the quality of light changes dramatically, affecting how your 35mm film camera captures scenes. With the sun lower in the sky and the daylight hours growing shorter, this seasonal shift offers new opportunities for photographers using camera film. To get the best results with your film camera 35mm, it’s essential to understand how to adjust your settings and choose the right film stocks to handle the subtle variations in fall lighting.

Whether you’re just starting with film or a seasoned veteran, here’s a technical look at how fall light impacts your 35mm film cameras and how to adapt your approach.

1. Lower Sun Angle: Softer Light, Long Shadows

In fall, the sun travels lower across the sky throughout the day, leading to a much softer quality of light than the harsh overhead sun of summer. This results in gentler shadows and less contrast, which can benefit the dynamic range of camera film, especially for landscapes and portraits. The lower angle of the sun also creates longer shadows, adding lots of depth and texture to your images.

Adjusting Your 35mm Film Camera Settings:

• Aperture: For more light intake in softer conditions, open your aperture to f/2.8 or f/4. This helps your 35mm film camera maintain a fast enough shutter speed to avoid blur, especially when shooting handheld in low light situations.

• Shutter Speed: As fall days become shorter and light fades earlier, you’ll need to slow your shutter speed to around 1/60 to 1/125 to keep exposures balanced. Remember, at slower shutter speeds, a tripod or camera support is recommended to avoid unwanted camera shake.

• Metering: Spot metering for the midtones helps maintain the softness in highlights while retaining shadow detail. In high-contrast lighting, especially when shooting fall foliage, this ensures that your camera film captures a well balanced exposure.

2. Warmer Color Temperature: Enhancing Fall Colors

As the sun dips lower in fall, the light becomes warmer due to the angle and increased atmospheric diffusion. This change in light is ideal for capturing the intense reds, oranges, and yellows of fall foliage on 35mm film cameras. Warmer light naturally amplifies these colors, but selecting the right camera film is critical to fully capture the seasonal palette.

Film Stocks for Fall:

• Kodak Ektar 100: This film stock is perfect for fall landscapes, offering high saturation and fine grain. Its ability to render deep reds, vibrant oranges, and rich greens makes it ideal for fall foliage photography. Kodak Ektar’s strong color response means it pairs perfectly with the rich, warm tones of fall light.

• Kodak Portra 400: A versatile choice for both landscapes and portraits, Portra 400 delivers excellent results in the varied light conditions of fall. With its balanced color profile, it handles the warm glow of golden hour while still providing enough dynamic range to capture subtle details in both highlights and shadows.

• Ilford HP5 Plus 400 (Black and White): If you prefer shooting black and white, Ilford HP5 is an excellent choice for fall. Its wide exposure latitude makes it great for handling both the bright highlights and deep shadows of fall scenes, offering a strong contrast while retaining texture and detail in low light.

Adjusting Your 35mm Film Camera Settings:

• ISO/Film Speed: Fall light varies dramatically throughout the day, so ISO 100-400 films are best for daylight shooting. If shooting in lower light, consider pushing film like Kodak Portra 400 to ISO 800 for more flexibility with exposure, allowing you to maintain detail in shadowed areas without losing the warmer highlights that camera film renders so well.

• Exposure: To fully capture the vibrancy of fall, bracket your exposures—shoot at your camera’s metered exposure, then underexpose and overexpose by one stop. This gives you flexibility when working with the wide range of tones fall light can produce, ensuring your film camera 35mm captures both vibrant leaves and deeper shadows accurately.

3. Shorter Days, More Diffused Light

With fall comes shorter daylight hours, and often, more overcast skies. The cloud cover diffuses the light, creating a softer, more even illumination. While this can reduce contrast, it’s ideal for capturing fine details and textures that would be blown out in harsher summer light. Camera film excels in these conditions because it naturally handles highlight retention well.

Adjusting Your 35mm Film Camera Settings:

• Aperture: To capture greater depth of field and sharper details in diffused light, consider stopping down to f/5.6 or f/8. This will keep more of your image in focus while still allowing enough light into the camera.

• Shutter Speed: On overcast days, you’ll likely need slower shutter speeds due to the decreased light. Speeds of 1/60 or slower are common, but be sure to stabilize your 35mm film camera with a tripod if needed.

• ISO/Film Speed: When shooting in lower light, using a film like Kodak Portra 800 or pushing Kodak Portra 400 to ISO 800 can help maintain flexibility in your exposure settings. These films are designed to handle both low light conditions and the soft, diffuse light typically found in fall.

4. Contrast in Fall Landscapes: Managing Exposure with Color and Shadow

Fall landscapes often present a unique challenge: the bright, saturated colors of the trees are often paired with deep, shadowed areas, especially in forests or parks. This means that your film camera 35mm must handle a wide dynamic range, from the bright highlights of sunlit leaves to the darker areas in shade.

Adjusting Your 35mm Film Camera Settings:

• Metering: In high contrast scenes, such as bright trees against a darker sky, use spot-metering to expose for the highlights. This ensures that you maintain detail in the brighter parts of the image without completely losing shadow information.

• Exposure: Bracketing can be useful here. With camera film, it’s always a good idea to shoot multiple exposures, especially when dealing with varying light levels. This technique allows you to merge exposures in post or simply pick the frame with the best balance of exposure.

5. Fall Portraits: Softer Light for Natural Skin Tones

Fall’s softer, warmer light is ideal for portraits. With the sun lower in the sky, the light naturally flatters skin tones and avoids the harsh shadows you might find in summer. For 35mm film cameras, using the right camera film can help highlight these natural tones while keeping the fall environment looking vibrant in the background.

Film Stock Recommendations for Portraits:

• Kodak Portra 400: Known for its natural skin tone reproduction, Portra 400 handles fall’s warm light perfectly, offering a good balance between warm skin tones and the background colors of autumn leaves. Its wide dynamic range also helps with detail retention in both highlights and shadows, ensuring your portrait subjects are well lit without losing the subtlety of the fall background.

• Cinestill 800T: For low light or twilight portraits, Cinestill 800T offers a unique cinematic look. It handles tungsten and mixed lighting conditions well, making it perfect for those early evening fall portraits when the natural light starts to fade.

Adjusting Your 35mm Film Camera Settings:

• Aperture: For portrait work in fall light, shooting wide open (f/2.8 or wider) allows you to create beautiful subject isolation with a shallow depth of field. This keeps your subject in sharp focus while softly blurring the fall background.

• Shutter Speed: Keep your shutter speed at 1/60 or faster to ensure sharpness in handheld portrait work. If necessary, bump up your ISO or push your film stock to accommodate lower light.

Conclusion: Mastering Fall Light with Your 35mm Film Camera

Understanding how fall light changes throughout the day and how it interacts with your 35mm film camera is key to capturing stunning images. From adjusting your aperture and shutter speed to selecting the best camera film for fall’s warm tones, these technical considerations will help you take full advantage of the season’s unique lighting conditions. Whether you’re shooting landscapes, portraits, or street photography, adapting to the subtleties of fall light can transform your photography and make the most of the inherent strengths of film camera 35mm systems. Be sure to make the most of fall and get out there and shoot. When you’re done Nice is here for all of your film development and scanning needs!