Sayen House and Garden

I went so many places and took so many pictures in May, I’m still talking about it a month later 🙂

On Memorial Day weekend, I hopped in the car with my cameras and my firstborn kid and drove to Hamilton, NJ to check out Sayen House and Gardens. (Mostly the gardens, since the house wasn’t open. A peek in the window made me think it is only used for events.)

It was a lovely day, perfect for taking pictures of flowers and fountains and little bridges. I took these with my phone:

I took these with my DSLR:

And these were taken with my 35mm on CineStill 400D:

I love the way these photos came out, both digital and film. It might have been worth being the zany lady juggling two cameras and a smartphone on the trail after all, LOL!

I am enjoying, after the fact, comparing the images I get with each type of camera. I think I can use the film photos to improve my digital images. For example, I have always found it challenging to capture the greens of grass and trees correctly with my phone, and to some extent also with my digital SLR. The tones sometimes feel too yellow or too intense, or both, and require some work in Lightroom to bring them into a range I find acceptable. And I don’t always succeed. But the greens in these film photos? They feel realistic and perfect to me. I plan to spend some time studying these images further. I think if I compare the film images I like to the digital images I don’t, I might be able to come up with a Lightroom preset that I can use to fix the grass in my future digital images with just a few clicks 🤔

I have a four day weekend coming up, and the air quality around here is kind of terrible right now, so it might be a good time to sit indoors and play with photo processing!

Anyway, in terms of film, I am really liking the CineStill photos. I think it’s my favorite film stock so far. I may have to buy more just to make sure 😀