I’m a bargain shopper, and when I see film on sale or closeout (which is happening more and more these days) I stock up.

I bought all of Walgreens’ Kodak HD400 film when they closed it out a couple of years ago, and it sat in my freezer ever since. I’ve had a fixation with slower speed film and my LOMO in a quest for the most saturation and finest grain, and so shot 100 speed film in my LOMOs and 400 in my SLRs. 100 speed film is getting harder to find, and I thought I’d try out 400 speed film to see if my bias was unfounded.

One benefit of 400 speed film in a LOMO is the extra two stops of film sensitivity. With the LOMO’s guesstimation zone focusing system, being able to stop the aperture down 2 stops helps widen the depth of field.

I loaded up a roll of HD400 in my LOMO and took it to the Mission Open Studios I blogged about yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised at how short the exposures were inside, even shooting in available light. I took 12 shots and was looking forward to seeing them. This morning, I took out my LOMO and noticed that I’d forgot to move the aperture setting back to A after shooting flash shots. This meant that ALL my shots yesterday were taken at f/16 and 1/60th second. I might be able to pull some detail out of them with photoshop; we’ll see how that turns out when I get the prints back.

The moral of this story is ALWAYS CHECK YOUR SETTINGS BEFORE YOU SHOOT.