Syncopated Pandemonium

Zion on film

· Aniket

In November, we visited one of my favorite places, Zion National Park in Utah. Utah is my favorite state in the US, largely due to the week I spent roaming the high desert around in 2017. This November I took my film camera with me.

Last year I bought a cheap Contax S2 so I could use my old Contax lenses that I had lying around. Unfortunately, it has only spot metering and with me being lazy to learn how to meter my photos correctly, it turned out disastrous. I just could not get a single photo right. The two roles I put in were both severely underexposed. After watching a recent video from @Badflashes, I realized that there were cheap Canon film cameras out there with the trusty EF mount that had good exposure meters & autofocus. I bought myself the Canon Elan 7 & a few roles of Portra 400 in October.

I used the Canon Elan 7 most of the trip instead of my Fuji. The photos unexpectedly came out great. Here are some of my favorites from the trip. I scanned the negatives at home using my digital camera using a contraption of a tripod, a few levels, Digitaliza+ from Lomography.

The Watchman

The Watchman


The West Temple

The West Temple


River Rock Roasting Company

(They have the best sandwiches & pizza in the Zion area) River Rock


Canyon Coffee

Canyon Coffee


Hotel Hoop

The hotel we stayed at had a random hoop right in the parking lot. Hotel


Pine Creek

Sunlit trees near Pine creek. Hotel

Antelope Canyon

We drove to Page to visit the Lower Antelope Canyon. It was fun to take a few shots in the dark of the canyon. I spent almost a role and thought that the role was wasted because of the absence of light, but I was pleasantly surprised while scanning to find a few good shots. Lower Antelope Canyon Office Antelop Canyon Antelop Canyon Antelop Canyon


“Lady in the Wind” Lady in the Wind


“Everest” Everest Antelop Canyon

The film was processed by TheDarkroomLab down in the LA area. I had also ordered the high resolution scans from them but was not too impressed due to heavy highlight clipping. I also had a role of Ektar 100 which I accidently exposed by opening the back thin while fiddling with the back remove button.

Hoping to share a lot more film on here in the next few months!