35mm film photographs from a Wine Festival

A few weeks back the annual Wine Festival took place in Yerevan, and it was bigger than the previous year, much larger with more stalls, more wine, more food, and generally more chaos. Especially just as the tourist season started to pick up here in Armenia. I didn't really attend it this year, I walked through and shot a few images one evening and almost passed out (literally) due to the heat and getting a bit exhausted. I didn't have my 28mm lens for the Canon at this point so I was range focusing with a 50mm prime lens. Not particularly ideal but I was surprised with the results anyway, especially since these are on 200 ASA film. Kodak Colorplus 200 to be exact.

A 50mm in such an environment is quite tricky, it's a portrait focal length after all, where you're quite limited and with a tighter field of view. And range focusing isn't the easiest thing as well, though it was quite dark in this area and I was having to focus more on the stalls and capturing things that seemed interesting. Shooting mostly from behind the stalls and through materials to see what was going on. This also meant using a bit more of a wider aperture to get more light in, not decreasing the shutter speed too much to capture too much blur in the motion as a result.

I love shooting through spaces though, where it's like you're peering into a window and capturing a snippet of a story from afar. And that's the kind of thing I tried to do here. Also quite inspired by the Asian directors and cinematographers that got me into film photography to begin with. Now I can't wait to see what more I can do now that I do have a wider lens! But these came out fun anyway, even if the subjects aren't all that fascinating. Even so, I'm avoiding that ideology with shooting film, telling myself that the fun of film is letting go and not caring about the price too much. The real love is in taking pictures in general, and not every single one needs to be perfect or high art.

Which brings me to this last one. No idea what this guy's deal was. But I preferred the first image with less context where a man holding a baby is just having a casual conversation with him like he isn't wearing a corkscrew head.