Film: The Future?

In the process of tidying recently, I found a roll of expired Fuji Reala 120 film (expired 2005). Reala has been discontinued for a while, so I couldn't help but want to shoot with it. There's a roll of Kodak Portra 160VC in my rarely used Holga, so it was to the Mamiya 645J I went. If you're not familiar with the 645J, it's one of many medium format cameras that use a cartridge for the film loading, rather than a dedicated film back. Of course that means I could never use a digital back with it, but it would take a lot of film and scanning to get to the price of a digital back for me! My 55mm lens is bust-it's stuck at f2.8, so landscapes were out of the question. I opted to use the 80mm lens instead, and shot a model. Alexandra Popovici has been my go to girl over the last few weeks, and she was well up for it. A trip out to Spiddle beach was the order of the day.As the Mamiya has no metering, I brought my Polaris light meter. I know I could cheat and use my digital camera as a meter, but to me this seems to defeat the purpose of shooting film!So I metered, and added a slight bit more to the exposure to open it up a little. This isn't an issue for negative film, and I preferred the leeway, especially as the cloud cover was really variable. We shot the 15 shots that the Mamiya would allow and then I shot more on the digital. Despite having more options with digital, I loved the look of the final film shots more.The shots were processed and scanned by Davitt Photo in Salthill. Due to an issue with the machine (even though it was set to 18Mb scans, it still scanned at 4Mb), they had to rescan the negatives. Not an issue as I'm walking the prom more often these days! Anyhow, I love the final results and will definitely be shooting more film in the future.