https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxUH5bLHX0MAs there's nowhere dedicated to film capture as distinct from wet darkroom work, perhaps, in this instance, this slot will have to serve.
In the video, the two guys appear to blame themselves for the poor results they get using film cameras. Well yes, as the photographers, there's no escaping that, but I'm not sure they quite understand the roots of their problems, which appear to be associated both with focus and "look". For a start, both of them are using rangefinder cameras. That's the most difficult way they could have travelled; they face two problems right out of the gate: focussing is not as easy or as accurate as with an slr, and another problem is that they probably subscribe to the "focus and then reframe" ideology. (My very last employer, back in 1965, had both a Leica M3 and a Nikon F; the Leica was reduced to a single type of job: room sets for BBC TV. Everything else was done on that Nikon, or on 6x6 or 4x5. He had all the lenses he needed - it was usage based on horses for courses, not pocketbook possibilities. The Leica got the rooms because of the 21mm wide-angle lens, which was better than any Nikon competitor.)
This, unfortunately, is
guaranteed to give them poor focus because, as anyone who's thought about it rather than accept it as a given, will understand that from a lens manufacturer's perspective, the flatter the field of focus the better. Hence, lenses are designed to do the opposite than allow the focus/recompose technique. If you try to use that trick, you will always find that your new camera angle will make the bit you wanted sharp inevitably closer to the camera than you wanted it and, thus, less than crisp. The only way for the trick to work is to find a lens not with a flat, but with a circular plane of focus, because as you have actually been describing an arc when you move the camera, terrible lens curvature is the only way to get the target in the right place as well as in focus. Think of it as shooting down the middle of a T-square from the narrow end. When you move that T-square and recompose, the flat field of focus that the cross part at the top of the device represents will no longer be in the same plane as the original subject was.
To add to the problem surrounding focus, lies the minefield of the depth of field concept. The reality, of course, is that there is ever only one, single, plane of best focus, regardless of aperture chosen. Sure, you can disguise a lot by stopping down, but that's all you're doing - faking it.
Exposure. The cameras have built-in meters. Wonderful, but do they understand what those meters are trying to do? They are trying to turn whatever they see into a mid-grey tone. It's up to you to know - or learn - where, in the available range of tones you can get from your film/development choices, you want that chosen tone to lie. You then expose for that.
At any ASA speed other than the manufacturer's recommended one, you are going to have to process for longer or for shorter a time than he recommends. If you push the ASA a great deal higher, and just use normal processing, you'll get very little image on the film; if you lengthen the development, what you get is mainly raised contrast, blocked highlights, and not a lot more for your pains. Extended development cannot create in an image that which has not been captured due to underexposure. As suggested, it can magnify contrast and perhaps give the illusion of a little more detail. It's not surprising then, that when they speak of shooting a 400 ASA film at 1600 ASA they don't get optimal results! Also, you may have set your meter to 1600 ASA, but how are you actually using your meter? It's not impossible that you are actually "overexposing" at that speed by, in fact, measuring a part of the subject that in the case of a true 1600 ASA film you would have been overexposing at that same setting. The resulting reasonable result could be due to user error!
What was that about the first ten thousand hours?
