Film emulation presets

The fact that there are “film” presets for digital photos proves that all digital cameras are pretty much the same.

How else would you get the ‘same’ output from various inputs?

Why you should not develop color film at home.

Developing B&W film is like making a pasta sauce or salad dressing. Developing color film at home is like cookie cutting. It’s a repetitive and standardized process. 

No doubt, if there’s no lab around, by all means develop your color film at home. Other than that I don’t understand why people do this at home. Developing color film is boring. It’s always the same procedure. If you deviate you get bad results. You can’t try new things like in B&W. You just have to follow the procedure. The process is meant to be done by machines. It’s simply not fun. Even if it works out and trust me, most of the time it won’t.

With color film you cannot easily change contrast for example. I think there’s a way with masks etc but it’s an advanced concept hardly ever used  nowadays. With B&W film you can tweak so many variables by altering the way you process your film. If you deviate with color film you get color shifts. Color shifts are ugly. They are so ugly that it’s almost gag reflex inducing. My advice is: leave color film processing to the labs and enjoy B&W at home. It’s a much more rewarding process. 

Yellow & Orange filters vs pushing B&W film

Yellow, Orange, Red etc. are contrast filters for B&W films. Most modern film is panchromatic, meaning it's pretty much sensitive to all colors we can see with our eyes. This is great, the first black and white films were orthochromatic and didn't see red, which would just show as black no the print (clear on the film). Actually exactly what your black and white paper does.

People call these black and white contrast filters. It is true that they change the contrast of black and white images but not the overall contrast, just selected contrast. Panchromatic film sees all colors more or less at the same brightness, meaning a blue sky and light grey cloud of the same brightness appear almost the same shade of grey. We see color contrast between different colors and on top of that the color yellow will always look brightest to us, blue always darker. Even though the blue sky may have the same brightness as the cloud it will always look darker to us and hence the white cloud stands out. A person against a grey concrete wall is another good example. The grey wall may be the same brightness as the skin of the person, but the skin will always look brighter to the human eye. What you want to do with your b&w film is mimic this. You add a yellow filter for example and all light that hits your film now has to travel through the yellow filter first and will mix to a different color. 

The opposite of yellow is somewhere near blue on the color wheel. So the blue sky will now look very dark on your film. The white cloud is a mixture of all colors so a lot of that light will pass through and it will look very bright. A yellow leaf will almost pass through 100% and hence look white on the film (actually black on the film, white on the print)  Human skin has a lot of yellow and hence will look much brighter when adding a yellow filter. This works for all races by the way. Human skin regardless of tone always follows a mixture of Red>Green>Blue or Cyan<Red<Yellow.

Some people may say that pushing film will give you a similar effect but that's not quite true. Pushing film will increase the overall contrast of the picture. Filters will selectively increase contrast. 

For really interesting results, try pushing Tri-X two stops with a red filter. Have fun!

Why hoarding film doesn't work

Sometime in 2015 when it was announced that Provia 400X was going to be discontinued I made a decision to buy a 5pack every time I go to Bic Camera. At that time I shot a lot of color film and went to Bic Camera to drop off or pick up film for developing quite a bit. I think I ended up with some 30 pro packs (5 rolls). I believe the film was already discontinued outside of Japan. This was really my last chance to buy the stuff and be able to shoot it for the foreseeable future.

The crazy thing is it's 2017 now and I still have over 100 rolls left of it. Most of the stock I have either has expired already or is approaching expiry. It's all been frozen since purchase and will probably be ok to shoot even post expiration date, but for how long? It could take me years to go through all this film.

The really crazy thing is that I already had a 100 rolls of Ektar 100 in my freezer. I bought that because Kodak doubled their prices in Japan sometime in 2015. Ektar used to be the cheapest color pro film they had. I think it was 3500 yen for a five pack. (700 yen per roll) They increased it to 1350 for single rolls. So the five packs and single rolls were on sale side by side for a while. I couldn't resist buying all the Ektar I could afford when I saw them side by side with a 100% price difference.

Now I had over 200 rolls of film in my freezer already and discovered how nice of a film Kodak Gold 200 is. So I went on Yahoo auction and bought a 100 pack of that for dirt cheap. I was already used to buying film in bulk so it didn't even register how crazy of an idea this was. Well, after shooting Ektar and Gold 200 the entire summer of 2015 I really got into B&W because I loved that I can print it at home. I never bought that in bulk because I couldn't find any deals. I just ordered from B&H in batches of 10 - 15 rolls as needed. 

The crazy thing is that now it's 2017 and I still have my freezer full of film. I haven't bought color film in over two years and probably won't have to for the next 3-5 years the way things are going now. The film will probably not deteriorate in quality much over that time since it's frozen. It's just crazy to buy that much film. You just don't know what you're going to be shooting. We can't predict the future, and if I could I would use it for things other than saving some money on film that's going up in price.

Buying and hoarding expired film is even worse. You don't know how the film was stored. Old film will curl a lot more than fresh film. You won't get colors as they were intended. The celluloid base of the film won't last forever either. Color film lasts for about 50 some years I believe until vinegar syndrome sets in and the acetate base will rot away. If you buy film that expired 10 years ago, you are already 10 years into those 50 years, meaning that your photos are only good for another 40 years after developing the film. There are ways to extend the life time of film by storing it in a freezer but who really does that except for Hollywood? I don't know anyone who stores their negatives in a freezer at home.

Maybe you don't care about the negatives because you can hold onto the scans. That's a valid for some people, but why not shoot digitally then and use VSCO to get the film look?

Shoot fresh film. Support the industry and enjoy the film as it was intended to.

What I like about photography and why digital doesn't work for me

I've been trying to figure out why I enjoy photography so much and what it actually means to me. To play basketball it's advantageous to be tall, to skate it's advantageous to be short etc. etc. I can't play basketball or skate in a halfpipe when I'm 60+ years old. In contrast, for photography all I need is a camera. Sure, it takes skill to be really good, but my photos don't have to speak to everyone. As long as they mean something to me that's enough. What I enjoy the most is looking back at photographs I've taken a few years ago. I just love that photographs are a record of light and time. Especially with film or any analog form of producing an image for that matter, I have a physical piece of the past in my hands. I just don't get the same feeling looking at digital images taken a few years back. Every time I open a file, it's being recreated on a computer screen. It's a representation of how that screen and computer interpretthe data, while a piece of slide film or a print (from a negative or digital file) is a presentation of the past. Presentation vs Representation of light and time.

My grandpa used to shoot a lot in his days. I've been trying to get a hold of his photos for the past few years. It isn't easy with my family being spread over four different countries and continents! I know that he shot a lot and I wanna see what he saw then, what interested him and how stuff looked back then through his eyes (or lens). I then suddenly realized that the only way we can ever do that is by not only having a digital catalog of our photography. Unless you print your work or shoot film and have a physical copy of your photos it will die with you.

When I shot digital, I had all my photos in Lightroom on my computer that was obviously password protected. I also had a backups online, and those were obviously protected, too. When our time is up, all this data will stay locked on hard drives or cloud accounts until the dormant accounts finally gets deleted by whatever company you hosted the data with. Unless you know when you're gonna drop, and somehow manage to share your password in time, all your photography will die with you. Imagine if Vivian Maier shot digital. Her work would've never seen the light of day. It's arguable whether she would've liked it or not, but I am trying to point out that it would've been impossible. Her photos would not have been locked up in some storage, they would've been on some hard drive or cloud service. Lost forever.

Make sure you print your work or have some sort of physical copy of it.

The 50mm focal length. Not for me

I somehow prefer focal length below 50mm. I know that sometimes the "bi-pedal" zoom just doesn't work. Some places you just can't get to by walking up. Now, when you're shooting a wedding or need to grab shots of a crime scene what's important is to get the shot. It'll be more about the situation and the record in time than the esthetic of the shot itself. 

I just don't like the compressed look of photos taken with a long lens have. To me even a 35mm lens looks a little bit "zoomed in" but it's still natural.

The sweet spot for me would be somewhere between 28-35mm but in Leica world there's not much. The other issue I have with wider than 28mm is that Leica's frame lines suck for that focal length. You can barley see them. 28mm probably is a better focal length for an SLR. I'd go as far and say that the only really usable focal length on a Leica rangefinder are 35mm and 50mm. Since I don't really dig the 50mm look I am stuck with 35mm on my Leica. Maybe a blessing in disguise, considering the steep prices of Leica lenses.

I get that it's a lot easier to shoot with 50mm lenses. You can isolate your subject and have less distraction in the frame. Easy doesn't equal better. Easy photos also look boring. There's no sense of place or surroundings. If I shoot a cat on a 50mm at f/2 you have no frame of reference. The photo could've been taken 50 years ago and it'd look the same. I'd rather give up on the higher keeper rate and have a natural look to my images. But that's just me. I like to have a sense of time and place to the pictures I take. I like to look at old photos and every time I do I just feel this "wow this is a from that time. This is how things were back then and it's recorded right here." If my photos are all of isolated subjects with blurred out background, I am not getting that. Don't fall into that bokeh trap.

The other great benefit of 50mm lenses is that you have less problems with distortion.  On a 35mm lens you really have to already make sure that you keep the lens parallel to your subject. (Unless you shoot a tilt-shift). What that means is a lot of squatting with your 35mm lens!

So with a fifty you don't have to squat, you can easily isolate your subjects, you get better bokeh your photos look more impressive to other people, you'll get more 'likes' online. 

On a 35mm it's quite different. It's either right or wrong. Once you tilt the plane with a 35mm lens it just looks wrong. You cannot easily isolate subjects. You barely get any bokeh. Your photos have neither the cool wide-angle nor the bokeh compressed looks. In fact 35mm can look quite boring. It really is a lot harder to get keepers on a 35mm I find. But when you do, they are really good! 

So yes, a 50mm is the gift that keeps on giving. You'll have so many keepers and the best thing is they will all look very similar. You don't even have to go places to shoot anymore. Once you bokeh the crap out of your background it doesn't matter where you are. It all looks the same. Blurrrr. 

Anyways, I don't mean to dis 50s, or anybody using 50s. In fact I have good friends shooting 50s and I actually like their photos but whatever makes it work for them, it doesn't do it for me. I am jealous. I want more keepers, too!

I wrote this article in May 2016, and kept in in 'drafts' just in case I change my mind. It's May 2017 now and I still agree with the above. Thought that was worth mentioning.

Messing around with too many film stocks

Why stick to only one film?

In short: To eliminate variables.

It's very tempting to try out new films and see what results you can get with different films and developers. Ferrania for example just announced their first film. An 80 ASA B&W film in 35mm. And Yes! I was tempted at first. I'd love to try it and help them test the film, but I just went through a testing phase for 100 speed films. I shoot 400iso 80% of the time and 3200iso for the remainder. I rarely need a 100 speed film for my type of shooting. Sometimes it does come in handy though. On the beach or on a snowy mountain in full sunshine, I just can't make the 400 speed film work without stacking filters. So I got myself some Fomapan and Silvermax to test and I don't like testing films. It costs money and takes time. I don't feel like going through another test for this new P30 film.

The problem with shooting many different films and processing them in different developers is that your number of variables grows. If something goes wrong or you don't like the results you don't know where to start fixing it. If you only scan your film this makes very little difference, but then you might as well just shoot digital and apply a film filter. I like to be able to print my work. I don't print all of my work, but I like that I have the option to print it and when I do print I noticed that having a good negative makes all the difference. There are many ways to arrive at a good negative and it can be overwhelming.

FilmStock^n + Dev^n + DevDilution^n + Agitation^n + Temp^n + DevTime^n + EI^n + Paper^n + PaperDev^n + etc... = # of ways that you can tweak to get a decent negative.

This is nuts. If you keep changing things  you'll never arrive at consistent results unless it's by luck. Keep as many variables constant as you can. If something does not come out to your liking you can start tweaking one variable and observe if that makes a difference without having to guess. starting by these three makes the most sense to me:

• Shoot 1 film stock
• Use the same Developer
• Keep temperature constant * (more on that below)

* Keep the temperature the SAME! I know people argue that chemical reaction speeds up with increase in temperature and you just adjust the dev time and arrive at the same results. While that is true in general, there is more to it than that. When you change temperature there are a few things to consider. The gelatin of the emulsion absorbs developer at different rates depending on temperature. This is change is most likely not linear with how silver halide reactivity changes. Even worse the developer itself is made up of:

• Developing agent
• Preservative
• Accelerator
• Restrainer
• (buffer)

Unfortunately these components don't change linearly when you increase temperature. To make things easier, just keep everything at 20 degrees until you get constant results that you like. 

In my case I try to stick to Tri-X and Delta 3200 for most situations. The D3200 I only use for indoor low light situations. I find it too flat for anything else. Tri-X, or any other 400 speed film is actually really versatile. I shoot mine at 500iso. Usually I have a yellow filter on the lens which brings it down to an effective speed of 320iso. If I need even slower than that I take out the orange filter which puts it to 125iso. 

f/16 1/125, f/8 1/500, f/5.6 1/1000

I can work with that.

Against the Grain

Fall/Autumn time in Tokyo and leaves are finally starting to change color. People are going crazy about capturing the fall colors. Camera stores are pushing new gear and people love the excuse to buy a new camera. As if a new digital camera could somehow capture the colors any better than a 10 year old D700. 

Meanwhile I am shooting the trees in black and white and on film. I don't need instant gratification and I really like it when I can stick the middle finger up to the fast paced world trying to continuously sell me new gear. 

My film camera has zero shutter lag and focuses every time. Perfectly. It shoots when I want it to shoot, unless I'm out of film...

Anniversary Post

Can't believe it's already been one year since I wrote my first post here. Lot's of things have changed within one year. I have a lot more time to photograph and blog now. I don't know what the next year has in store for me, but I'll probably keep blogging at the same rate, talking to myself... 

Also gave myself a little birthday present. A Fujifilm Instax Mini 90. More instant pictures to come soon. Stay tuned!