International Film Swap – Guatemala & Canada

I was headed to one of my favourite cities – Antigua, Guatemala – to shoot a wedding and meet up with some dear friends. One such friend is Joseph Nance and he also loves film. We decided we’d try our first attempt at a film swap. We thought Kodak Portra 160 would do the trick for the sunny weather and our theme was “snapshots” – images that reflected each city in some way.

We read it’s best to under expose by at least a stop, which would then give a more box speed exposure when the exposures were combined. However, I kind of got paranoid it would make it too dark… so we split it in the middle and shot at minus one half a stop.

Joseph loaded the image into his camera and used a sharpie to mark a rectangle around where the film met the shutter curtain. When he was done shooting 36 exposures in Antigua, he wound it back up and handed it to me. I asked my photo lab (Prism) to pull the film out so I could then put it into my camera. Then, I put it in my camera (being careful to make sure the rectangle was over my shutter curtain as well), and shot my images in Victoria, B.C.

You can find Joseph on Instagram @josephnancephoto

Here are the results…