Adventures in sweet photography

What do you do when you’ve got yourself a large format camera? Why, take some pictures of sweets of course! I ended up taking three versions, trying to get the exposure right. I’m using Instax film which becomes much less sensitive when the light levels go down low.

These should serve as useful references if I take more pictures at the same light level. Essentially it looks like the film needs an extra four stops worth of light at this exposure. The top frame was taken using settings suggested by the light meter, then I opened up two stops for each of the successive ones.

I’m very impressed with the level of detail you can get from the film though. I got out my magnifying glass and I could read all the tiny printing on the wrappers.

Proper photographers talk about “reciprocity failure” which is when the film becomes significantly less sensitive at low light levels. This might be something along those lines.