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This is my first time ever shooting with film so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Many of the photos in the roll are super crisp and clear but some have this kind of foggy haze, especially all the landscape photos I took. I attached a couple beach photos taken on the same overcast day probably 15 mins apart, also a picture of the beach on a clear very sunny day and they were all foggy. This an example of the foggy photo The sea lions came out pretty clearenter image description hereenter image description here

The negatives of the photos are below.

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Some other examples are these two photos of flowers I tried to take.

The "foggy" flower picture

The flower pic negs

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  • This was taken on a canon ae1 program. Brand new film- Fujifilm Superia 400.
    – SJ.
    May 31, 2019 at 0:15
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    What lens? Did you use a hood? Who developed the negatives? Who scanned them? (You or lab?) How is the density of the negatives?
    – xiota
    May 31, 2019 at 0:47
  • As @xiota mentions - please take a picture of the negs. With film photography, your best bet to learn about a problem starts with looking at the negs.
    – OnBreak.
    May 31, 2019 at 2:37
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    Did you use a UV filter on the examples? There actually are legitimate reasons for putting UV filters in front of a lens when shooting color film with long vistas, especially under overcast skies.
    – Michael C
    May 31, 2019 at 13:35
  • @xiota I used the standard Canon FD 50mm f/1.8 lens with no hood. I took them to a local film shop to get them developed
    – SJ.
    May 31, 2019 at 15:59

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Most of the frames you show look underexposed. But there are some that look like they might be okay. Can you explain in detail how you arrived at the camera settings you used? A properly functioning AE-1 on full auto shouldn't produce such underexposed negatives. Were you using Aperture priority with F22? Did you have it in manual mode and ignore the meter? Is the meter working? Was the film expired? Or stored poorly (in a hot car)? Etc.

You should still be able to get better scans. The lab may refuse to rescan because they're underexposed. When scanning yourself, you'll need to adjust the white/black points or brightness/contrast in the scanner software to maximize the amount of image data that's captured and saved. You can also try averaging multiple scans of the same frame.

The histogram is overly compressed:

levels dialog

After basic levels adjustment:

adjusted levels

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  • Agreed. The vertical lines on the first image look like some sort of digital artifacts, not something analog.
    – Phil Anderson
    May 31, 2019 at 1:31
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    I’m in agreement with you but think underexposure may also be at play here. Would love to see the negs to confirm either way.
    – OnBreak.
    May 31, 2019 at 2:36
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    The image is underexposed and has then been brightened and contrast added. That will highlight any issues with the scanner itself such as these lines.
    – David Gibson
    May 31, 2019 at 14:36
  • Thank you all for the help! I will post a picture of the negatives later today when I get them. I'm a complete amateur with film so I'm still learning how to expose a picture properly, so highly possible I underexposed the images.
    – SJ.
    May 31, 2019 at 16:09
  • I added the pictures of the negatives @Hueco
    – SJ.
    Jun 1, 2019 at 1:26

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