An Hour at the MIA — Jacob Lakatua

We had exactly one hour at the Minneapolis Institute of Art — my brother’s flight was later that afternoon and there was a dinner reservation waiting on the other end of it — so this was a roll shot at a walking pace, no time to linger or second-guess anything. I loaded Kentmere 200 specifically because it was the fastest film in my bag and I knew I’d be indoors under museum lighting. Then I proceeded to shoot the entire roll with the meter still set to 100, which meant I was handing every frame an extra stop of exposure and dragging the shutter down to 1/15 and even 1/8 of a second to get it. Handheld. In a museum. I walked out fairly certain I had just burned a roll on a lesson about checking your dial before the first frame.

Back home I souped it in Xtol 1:1 and shaved a minute off my usual time to pull it back a stop — seven minutes instead of eight — and the roll turned out to be full of gems. Frames shot handheld at 1/15 and 1/8 came back sharp, no trace of the shake I was bracing for when I saw those speeds on the meter — the M7’s shutter is steadier than my nerves gave it credit for. Overexposure that gentle is forgiving; the shadows in the Tibetan shrine room and the sculpture court hold detail I had no right to expect, and out in the daylight — the museum’s columns and stone lion, the mill stack, the small-town blocks of New Prague with its post office and its twin-towered church — the same extra stop just reads as clean whites and heavy, decisive blacks. There’s a quality to the contrast on this roll I keep coming back to, soft in the low end and firm at the top, and I don’t think I could have arrived at it on purpose. It’s been a while since I’ve put up a post, and it’s a little funny that the one that pulled me back was the roll I’d already written off.

36 photographs · Leica M7 · Kentmere 200 @ EI 100 · Xtol 1:1, 7:00 @ 20°C · August 23, 2026