Results tagged “film” from British Rob's Blog

Late last year my collection of chromes I'd built up since 2002 came over in a container from the UK. I've now made a number of my images made from these transparency films available for sale in my gallery, including the one below (my most viewed flickr image). I have a huge number that I simply never got around to scanning so I will be enlisting the services of a professional scanning service to digitise my best work.

Signed limited edition, museum quality frames are available on all of these images; this one will start as number 2/100. This image taken at the Scarborough end of Old Orchard Beach, Maine on Fuji Astia 100F with a Canon EOS-1N, 135 f2 L lens.

After that big essay I thought I'd treat those of who who prefer images to some film images I had taken between 2003 and 2004. Feast your eyes on these gallieries and if you like any image, add them to a lightbox and email me your request. Once my slides ship I can then arrange for a custom print to be made. Just click on an image below to launch the gallery...


Col du Tourmalet, Hautes-Pyrénées, France.


'Mavericks', Half Moon Bay, California


Mono Lake, Yosemite, California


Route 180 to the Grand Canyon, Arizona


Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Manhattan, New York, NY

While browsing through Flickr the other day, I thought about the word 'slideshow'. There's no doubt that we're fully into the digital age now with photography - just about everyone has a digital camera of one form or another. It struck me that many people who are now advanced amateurs (and I guess even some professionals) these days have never actually seen a slide show and many have never shot a roll of film in an SLR. Are they missing out? Well, the modern digital-only photographer would maintain that digital has given immediacy and quality that they never had before; that's probably quite true... but to a point.

You see, back in the days before digital cameras, many professionals shooting in colour shot with high quality professional grade film with extremely fine grain (so fine you could hardly see it even with a 6x Schneider loupe). The stuff was and still is incredible. My favourites were Fuji Astia, Velvia and Provia, available in speeds of 50, 100 and 400; 36 exposures; $10 for the film; $10 for the processing. Yes, it cost a lot; yes you could only shoot 36 exposures before changing your roll; and yes, you couldn't bump up your 'ISO' to 64000 to get that low light shot without having to reach for a different roll. So in many ways it was quite restrictive. However, in many ways those restrictions actually helped and there was actually one major benefit that I really miss.

You could only shoot a maximum of 36 at once and it cost a lot. Great! Now those of you who go out with their digital bodies and hammer away on their shutters for half a day and come back with say 250 shots (or possibly more!) are thinking that those days must have been really pricey and there's no way that you'd come away with a good shot. Well not really. The bodies contained no imaging sensor, so they were much less expensive. You could pick up a Canon or Nikon top end professional body for the same price as one of today's semi-pro digital bodies. Then, because you could only shoot 36 to a roll and because it cost you money to process you'd just not shoot so much. Where's the benefit in that? Well, having a cost and restriction makes you think more about every shot - every shot can suddenly become important... take more time to compose and focus... wait for that moment.



You couldn't change ISO mid roll - the film was the sensitive component. OK, so now you're thinking there's no way that's useful. Well only from the point of view that if you only ever really trusted and shot with Velvia 50 or Provia 100, then you'd always just reach for the tripod when the shutter speed got so low (or just turn on the image stabilisation for an extra couple of stops of handholdability). That translated to nice sharp images. There's certainly a huge benefit to changing ISO on the fly and as a wedding photographer I can certainly attest to that. But, just from a hobby point of view, this restriction made you carry that tripod more often because you were restricted.



You could never look at the back of the camera to see if you got the shot. Commonly referred to as 'chimping' these days, back in the film days, you put in your film, closed the back, went out shooting and waited until you got your processing done to look at the images. There were two benefits to that: firstly you would never miss a moment because you were looking through your images. The big downside, particularly for professional work was that you just didn't know if you did get a shot; you had to trust that you loaded the film correctly and that your lab would handle it with care.

So what do I really miss about film? With slide film, I'd go shoot, then head to my local professional lab in London late at night, where they'd carefully process it and I could pick it up at 2am. Then I'd stand over the light table and drool over the images. There was a real magic to never seeing your photos on the back of the camera, but instead waiting until you got the call from the lab that they were ready and you'd head over, step up to the counter, smell the wonderful chemical aroma and eagerly anticipate the image-fest that was about to happen, as the technician handed you a transparent sleeve containing your processed transparency film. It was an experience that I really miss. I'd head over to Genie Imaging (by Wandsworth Common train station) with my loupe and take a look on their light tables - there was no way I could wait until I got home! And those images were final. They looked awesome - with ZERO post production to boost contrast and saturation. Most people have probably shot with negative film, where you had to process the film, then have prints made from each frame. You would head to a minilab where they'd process and run a batch of auto 6x4s. The results were ok, but I hated that auto part and that's why I started shooting transparency. You got it right in the camera and the film did the rest - it did an amazing job at providing you with crisp, clear, contrasty, saturated images with a dynamic range that puts many high end backs to shame. But, the tolerance for transparency was low - if you got the exposure out by 1/2 a stop you'd have a job trying to get any image from it. That big problem made you think even more and it taught me a lot about exposure.



Then there was the issue of the 'look' of film. You would use different film stock for different purposes: landscape and nature photographers favoured Velvia 50 for its incredible detail, saturation and that wonderful effect reciprocity failure would have; commercial shooters sometimes plumped for Astia 100F for its wonderful shadow and highlight depth and neutral tones; and sports photographers seemed to go for Provia 100F or 400F for the fine grain, slight saturation and then and then push it for extra speed and contrast. Others favoured shooting Kodak transparancy or negative and there was a whole other world of black and white (Tri-X, Iford). Whatever look you were after, there was a film for you and a favoured way of shooting with it (pushing or pulling) and processing it (in the correct or different chemicals - hence cross processing) to give edgy, fashionable looks. It was a real art, plus you'd get someone else to handle that aspect, while you went out to shoot again. Now that we have digital, many photographers spend forever trying to get those same 'looks' that they had with film. There are many plugins and recipes now available, which personally I think are a little over-done and unoriginal sometimes, which allow the photographer to get some of that back. That's a whole other essay.

My biggest gripe about digital is the post production and work flow. Now I can go out to shoot and have an almost limitless bucket to store my images. I certainly shoot more than I did with film; probably twice as much. But with film, I shot, got someone else to process it and the job was done; there was little or no post production other than re-purposing the image. With digital I always shoot RAW to get the most dynamic range from the image; I think I shot about 200 jpeg images until I realised I was losing a ton of information and quality (JPEG is a compressed, lossy format even with the least compression applied). So now with digital capture and RAW I had great quality - FAR better than that of scanned film, but the work flow was really lacking the speed and charm of film, plus for the first time I had to process the frames MYSELF. With digital, a great image doesn't just come out of the camera, there's some work involved in making it pop. The images from RAW can be likened to negative film - they are the unprocessed images with a ton of information that must be gently massaged to obtain a final image that can then be used for a variety of purposes (print, web etc). Conversely, JPEG images direct from a camera can be likened to a polaroid print. The camera does the processing and what comes out is your finished, compressed article; there's little information that you can work with if you've gone straight to JPEG and that's why I always, always shoot RAW.

The work flow for transparency film for me went something like this: shoot, process, view on light table, select, cut and mount selects (into slides), then view on a slide projector. Then, once I had critically viewed at a large size I'd further reduce the selections to those that I would spend time digitizing (scanning). Now with transparency film you could make an R-type print - with incredible saturation and contrast and I remember a couple of times when I'd stumped up the money to have enlargements made. Those prints were incredible, but very expensive.



Before digital cameras went main-stream we were busy scanning our slides or negatives so that we could re-purpose them for print or web. That was an incredibly time consuming task and once we were done, we spent another age in Photoshop using the clone tool to spot out any dust that had also been scanned. It was a lot of hard work and a science in itself; something that I don't miss at all. One of my biggest problems was getting sharp scan. Since film was physically flexible, when you'd scan you had to focus the scanner and hope that the film was as flat as possible, otherwise that lovely, sharp slide would translate to a rather mushy image. I couldn't really afford the 20,000 pounds for a Flextight scanner (that made your chrome completely flat when scanning) and besides I was eyeing up the 8000 pound Canon 1DS digital body, which gave medium format scan quality in one convenient form.

I purchased a mint Canon 1DS in the spring of 2005 and began the changeover to a full digital work flow. It wasn't an easy start. Back then there was no Lightroom, no Aperture and no Bridge. There was no such thing as a non-destructive work flow and batch processing meant loading your images through Photoshop Camera RAW one-by-one and then exporting as a TIFF. I struggled for a while, revelling in the incredible image quality from the camera, but cursing the horrific work flow. It was a LOT slower. (Interestingly some photographers were still struggling with a work flow like this at the 2008 Olympics, go to about 3/4 of the way through).

Now at this time I was still on the dark side and dealing with Windows, but out of the darkness in early 2005 came a very interesting and free application: RAW Shooter Essentials. It made dealing with a RAW shoot a piece of cake and the quality of conversions along with editing tools blew Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) out of the water. It made work flow much more bearable and for the first time I had a non-destructive work flow. Then Adobe upped the ante and brought out Photoshop CS2, with 'Bridge', which coupled ACR with batch selection and processing. So I switched over to that, but the quality, speed and tools were just lacking. Pixmantec then brought out RAW Shooter Premium with all the tools I could ever need (including image versions for the first time). I bought it and I was a happy camper.

Then on the train in London in the Autumn of 2005 I read about Apple Aperture, a work flow product which promised to be a Photoshop killer (according to the press, not Apple). Wow, for the first time I saw many of the old tools I was used to back in the film days: collections of photos, stacks of images, loupe, light table and even album design - all in one product. The only problem was that I was a Windows user (and patriot) and Macs just seemed so strange. Not long after that Apple announcement Adobe announced that they would be bringing out a competitor to Aperture: Lightroom, which would be for both Mac and PC. Great I thought, maybe Lightroom will give me the tools that I need? At first Lightroom was a beta just for the Mac platform and for a long time I just had to sit back and watch online videos of both products to see which one could be an option, or would my existing product do the trick - it seemed like it was advancing along nicely. Then there was a shock announcement on the Pixmantec forums: Adobe had bought out Pixmantec and was ingesting the people and ideas from the team into their Lightroom product. That hurt. Adobe had put a little sweetener in though; they promised that they would be giving away free copies of Lightroom version 1.0 to all early adopters of RawShooter Premium and there would possibly be a way of translating all of the edits made. But suddenly I was without an immediate upgrade path; Aperture was on the Mac and Lightroom was nowhere in sight for the PC. What was I to do? With a busy summer ahead with shoots and weddings I needed to make a choice.



I switched to Mac in the spring of 2006 and immediately downloaded the beta for Lightroom. It seemed like a good application, but I still didn't like the processed results and the work flow was really clunky to me; I wanted something that would really simplify things and bring me some tools that emulated the tactile nature of editing I was used to. In addition, Adobe was not making any commitments that any of the edits made in the beta would be readable by version 1.0 and that date wasn't even on the horizon. So what was I to do? I spent hours looking at the videos of Aperture, pouring over reviews and trying to see what the end result was like. It seemed to do everything I wanted and gave great RAW conversions. I bought it; V1.0. Wow, what a great application, but boy was it buggy and slow! It crashed regularly and I forget how many times I had to rebuild the library from a 'vault'. Still I persevered and v1.1 fixed many problems, then v1.5 gave a whole lot of extra functionality. I could now process my shoots much faster than before and finally digital (for me) was now a faster edit process than film.



Adobe then released Lightroom and I got my free license, downloaded it and realised I had made a good choice by going with Aperture. I just don't fully agree with Lightroom's locked, modular interface and the organisation just seems much less organic and far more 'file and folder' than Aperture's virtual structure. Lightroom and Adobe are now running against each other neck and neck and each keeps bringing out new and stunning functionality. There's now an opposing community either side that shouts about the various merits of either application in ways similar to Canon vs Nikon and Mac vs PC debates (or wars). Personally I love the fact that we have two great applications; the competition really pushes the boundaries to give us better ways of dealing with those masses of images. I own both and think both are great, but for now I'm sticking with Aperture because it fits my needs well. Furthermore, I've got my collection of scanned slides and negatives in Aperture and can use the fabulous tools available to repurpose them; I get the best of both worlds.



So will I ever again load a roll of Astia into my EOS-1N and go out to shoot? Maybe - for nostalgic reasons. With Aperture, I've now got a manageable work flow and the quality from my Canon bodies is astounding.

Sure, my Canon bodies cost the earth (well maybe the cost of a small car each) and honestly the running cost of film vs digital has to run in film's favour when you factor in the body cost, computer, software and storage. But, for me it just isn't convenient any more to shoot film, particularly when I need digital versions. So from the practicality stand point, film no longer makes sense to me, but if I was just shooting for pleasure and wanted to make some fine prints, film is certainly still a wonderful medium that should be cherished for all of its qualities.

My Leica projector and slide collection are on their way soon from England; I'm looking forward to pulling them out, turning off the lights, firing up that projector and looking at the images on the wall. At the end of all of this film versus digital debate, ultimately both are part of photography and I'm neither a film or digital photographer; I'm a photographer who loves creating images that make people stop, think and smile.