Frugal Film Project December 2025 - Hocking Hills
For my last month of the 2025 Frugal Film Project, I brought my trusty Canonet QL19 with me on our annual Winter trip to Hocking Hills in mid-December. We had just missed the large snowfall in the area that occurred the prior weekend, but thankfully there was still some snow on the ground to make it pretty without being too treacherous to hike.
Hocking Hills is almost like a cheat code - there’s beauty almost everywhere you look. To be honest, I was ready for the cheat code as I’ve been on burn-out mode for a while now and just needed something “easy”. 2025 has been a BUSY year for me and there have been days lately when I just haven’t wanted to pick up a camera. This has made the home stretch of the 2025 FFP difficult at best. But it has been a good motivator to make me shoot, even when I don’t want to. For that reason I’m going to do it again for 2026, but definitely NOT with 35mm film. 36 shots on a roll is just too much, most of the time.
Enough of my rambling, here are some images from December’s roll.
What do you think?
For a consumer-grade film, the Fuji 400 has done very well for this challenge. Exposing for scenes that have some snow, but not all snow-covered, can be a challenge but the film seems to have enough latitude to be just fine. Usually with snow I over expose by 2 stops, but in these mixed conditions I was over-exposing by 1 stop at most.
My next blog post will be a wrap-up for the year, and also will be a reveal of what I am using next year for a camera and film.
Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for reading.
Jeremy