I have taken black and white film to the streets. To me, B&W mirrors reality without filters. With no colors to distract you, B&W shows you the character of a composition, the flaws, the emotions, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes too strong. But the thing is when I use B&W film, it feels I have a responsibility to protect the subjects from its rawness, in other words, I feel this film reveals too much about a person's feelings and emotions.

This time, walking around Santa Ana, its inner streets, discovering new places and new people, I carried my Nikon F100, a roll of Kodak Tri-X and a couple of autofocus lenses, just to make sure I got correct focus of facial features, when shooting at subjects. As usual, people were nice and inviting. I'd shared stories about my family, I heard stories about theirs, and it was all good.

Editing B&W film is also a great experience. It is amazing to me how much of the image you can get out of the shadows, or how much you can change the exposure, one way or the other, and film being organic, you can get resulting images you feel you can touch. Of course, whatever results you get, you cannot fake light. It is a different look shooting outdoors in midday than shooting indoors with cooler light.

I love so many of the resulting photos. I have to say that getting the negatives scanned in US labs gave me hope in shooting film. Now that I received the mail with all the negatives from the pictures I took, I can start to refine my scanning process and see how to improve it to get better looking pictures.