The Death of Film

in Film , Saturday, March 10, 2012

The recent announcement of the demise of Kodak Ektachrome E100G - along with all other Kodak slide films - however predictable, came as quite a shock. At the time my stocks of E100G, in my opinion the best slide film ever, were 10 rolls. I’ve just ordered another 50 3 5-packs and whatever loose rolls my supplier can find, and in the meantime I’ve used 5. It will be interesting to see if Fuji are still making my second favourite, Velvia 100F, when I run out of E100G. It was never a very popular type, and that makes it a marginal product line in a very marginal product range. But if not Fuji, who else? Agfa? REALLY? The writing really seems to be on the wall now.

Of course this reopens the age-old Filme Vs Digital arguments. I’ve long had a foot firmly in both camps, and at the same time I’ve been an avid reader of the saner end of the ongoing debate. There are countless very persuasive exponents for and against fim, both making very convincing points. If you remember Paul Whitehouse’s character, Indecisive Dave, from the Fast Show - well, that’s me when it comes to film versus digital.

Apart from the overall arguments about image quality, film brings some practical issues with it. First of all, it needs to be developed. Since I really only work with slide film, then this means lab E6 processing. Long gone are the days of 24 hour turnaround - or even 1 or 2 hours in pro labs. Now it’s a week if you’re lucky. I recently discovered a convenient and remarkably well preserved local photo shop (no, not the abomination from Adobe) that would take charge of my films and could be trusted to ensure that the lab they get sent to follows my instructions and doesn’t cut them up. And sometimes even with 2-3 days turnaround. However, for the last batch of 5 I was charged CHF25 each. That’s basically $25. Each. Plus the initial cost, factoring in delivery, we reach CHF40 per film. That’s untenable, especially as one film had only 4 exposed frames due a mid-roll battery failure on my XPan.

Then there’s scanning. When all is going well, I actually quite enjoy scanning, up to a point. I’ve got a well tuned workflow, and things usually come out as I expect, but one thing I can’t easily fix are dirt and scratches due to careless processing. Processing that cost CHF40, that is. And as I’ve written before, my Minolta MultiScan Pro is showing signs of old age. Dust remains a constant issue, but a good supply of canned air - although good canned air is getting harder to find - and a VisibleDust sensor brush for awkward cases helps considerably.

The impatiently awaited new Plustek Medium Format scanner might be a god-send, at a price. But with no new film to feed into it, it might end up missing the bus.

But really, is it all worth it? Having recently seen what really high-end digital can do, the image quality argument is hard to make. Nevertheless, in my opinion, a correctly exposed piece of Ektachrome, or Fujifilm, has an immediate presence that (my) digital cameras can’t quite match. Of course the density and saturation of film can easily be replicated in digital post processing, but the sharpness of a good slide film is another matter…if, of course, you have a scanner and a scanning technique that can retain this sharpness into a digital file.

Essentially I’m not really fixated of film, but I am very attached to my XPan, and that doesn’t do digital. I’ve been having some thoughts about how to transition to digital panoramic photography - or perhaps transition back - but that’s the subject of another post.

In the meantime, I’m off to round up the last straggling rolls of Kodak Ektachrome E100G.

Goðafoss, Iceland, Feb 2012. A location that has “designed for XPan” written all over it. One day, maybe, I’ll finally get to see it in winter in good weather, having failed at the last 4 attempts. But I guess this is the last time I’ll shoot it on E100G.

Do you fake it ?

in Film , Friday, November 25, 2011

The background current of film pushing against the digital torrent seems to be continuing unabated. An notable new twist is the increasing interest in, or at least marketing push, of film emulation software, of the likes of Alien Skin Exposure or DxO Filmpack. Personally I’m not that interested in faking it - I don’t see much value in disassociating the result from the process, and anyway I’m not that impressed with the results. I can understand the value to illustrators and publishers, in particular for some of the more extreme effects like aged 1962 Agfa consumer prints, but in general if you want it to look like Ektachrome, why not use Ektachrome ? It’s not that hard!

Michael Reichmann recently reviewed DxO Filmpack, and didn’t lose the opportunity to give film a bloody good kicking.

I respect Michael’s experience, although I have some reservations about the direction he’s been heading in since - apparently - money became no object. His photography seems very inconsistent these days, which is a pity. Ten years ago it could be inspirational. Now, despite his protests to the contrary, all he really seems to do is to test cameras, just with a limitless travel budget. Anyway, my point is that there are other photographers who I respect who seem to have a rather different take - from famous ones like Michael Kenna, to emerging stars like Bruce Percy, “alternative” web gurus like Kirk Tuck, Robert Boyer, and seemingly the entire readership of Great British Landscapes.

I could point to Bruce in particular as a clear example that Michael is just plain wrong. Using film - Velvia and Portra I believe - seems to have helped him to develop a very distinctive and personal style. Do his photos suffer from any of film’s perceived weaknesses ? I don’t think so. In fact, when you see so many landscape photographers piling on contrast, blocking out shadows and pushing contrast to (usually, unwittingly) squash down to get that Velva effect, it is a touch ironic. Especially when the same ones spend hours hurling invective at each other in flame wars on who’s (digital) camera has the greatest dynamic range. Then again I don’t much care for Velvia - classic Velvia that is - myself.

Reichmann again “My second impression is to once again confirm how truly poor film based imaging is / was compared to todays’ digital capture. Using a variety of images I went through every available colour transparency and negative emulsion looking for one that appealed to me more than the original processed with my usual workflow. Not a single one even came close.”. Well I beg to differ. Unless pixel peeping comes into, I can easily recall a handful of classic Michael Reichmann film images. I can’t say that so much of his digital work has stick in my memory. Maybe it’s because of the diluting effect of the avalanche of images.

From my own perspective, the image below is one I took a very long time ago, on Kodachrome 64, before I was really into photography. I’ve been trying to recapture that quality of light ever since. The closest I’ve got on digital, I think, is with the Olympus E-1’s Kodak sensor.

But digital seems to be unable to record my impression of subtle gradations such as those in this sky. It has a tendency to turn pinks into yellows or indigos, or just sees blue. Digital doesn’t get it. Probably it has something to do with white balance software. Possibly - probably even - it is representing the “truth”.  I’d never argue that film is better than digital. Then again I’d never argue the opposite. But dismissing out of hand just makes so sense, in the context of anything either than throw-away photography.

HDR with film

in Film , Sunday, September 25, 2011

I took a set of XPan frames of a scene in Iceland back in 2009, with the express purpose of seeing if I could make an HDR composite from them, and get the gritty, high contrast, low saturation “grim up north” look so beloved of brands such as 66 North.

There are 3 exposures, one “normal”, one 1 stop below, one 1 stop above. I decided to try running them through Nik HDR Efex (NHE from now on).  On the first try I fell at the first hurdle. Although NHE has an auto-align feature, it cannot cope with input images with different sizes. Since I had tidied the scans up a bit, they were all slightly different.

The 0EV (middle) exposure

So I rescanned all three using exactly the same size, and tried again. Unfortunately, it is absolutely impossible to get three completely independent scans exactly aligned, so alignment was still required. At least now they were the same size. So, back into NHE. The input processing takes something like 15 minutes or more with these large images, but again the results were hopeless. The alignment was completely off.

So I decided to try pre-aligning with Photoshop’s Auto Align. This worked fine, very well in fact. So having nearly perfectly aligned images, I fed them back into NHE. And 15 minutes later, NHE mangled them way out of alignment. Back to the drawing board. I turned off “alignment” in NHE, and gave it another go. This time it worked, or well enough.  In terms of alignment there are still some artifacts at 100% zoom but for smaller viewing sizes it works.

So then it was off to fiddling with the wide range of settings in NHE, and eventually I got something close to what I wanted.

The HDR look: Somewhere grim in the Westfjords

However, with film as the input, NHE makes grain explode. I had to do a lot of cleaning up, especially in the sky, and the results are most certainly gritty.

It would probably have been a lot easier to do it with digital, but there is a rather unique look coming out of film here, and have got a process that sort of works, I might try refining it.

Old Ways

in Film , Saturday, July 09, 2011

Today was SWISS HARLEY DAYS (well one of them) in downtown Lugano. Yay. I don’t like Harleys, mainly because of the obnoxious and totally unpleasant noise they make. But I had to go downtown anyway - ironically to go the chemist to try to find something to stop me making obnoxious and totally unpleasant noises while I sleep - so I didn’t have much choice but to grin & bear it. And the streets were crawling with Harleys, Harley Guys, Harley Chicks, and people selling pretty much anything with Harley branding.

Great opportunity for street shooting, no ?

Well yeah, but I don’t do street shooting.

So just for a complete change, since I decided to do some street shooting, of Harleys, why not throw in another spanner and dig out my long-retired Canon A1, put a roll of slightly out of date Ektar 100 in it, and bolt my rediscovered 50mm f1.2L on the front ? And so I set off.

Terrible iPhone photo…but rather gorgeous, isn’t it ?

I took me a little while to get into the groove, but I soon got back into it. Frames 14, 15 & 16 have some great shots featuring bits of a bikini-clad biker chick posing for all and sundry on a very impressive Harley. Unlike the slobbering mob focusing on her more obvious attributes, I went for close up, f1.2 gorgeous-detail. Frame 15 features a close up of the tattoo on her ankle against some detailing of the bike’s chrome. Awesome.  Frame 17 is a KILLER. I got a large Harley dude with a patch saying “great legs, what time do they open ?” on his leather jacket, with the patch in the foreground, and her legs, which did indeed match said criteria, in the background, lying on the Harley. WHOA! I’m motoring here.

Well, of course I would have been if the camera had been switched on.

It’s simple, shooting with film, isn’t it ? Just set the aperture, set the speed, focus and click. Bingo. Well yeah. If, that is, you remembered to turn the thing on. Unlike my digital wonderboxes, or indeed my XPan, the A1’s shutter will fire with the camera - and hence the meter - switched off. I’m not sure why. There’s no control over shutter speed, or is there ? Can’t remember.  I’m not sure why I didn’t realise there was no meter display, either. So, after frame 18, I switched it on.

Oh well. Back to the hot chick, who is starting to look a little concerned at this weirdo with the antique camera.  The rest of the roll was sort of ok, but really not as inspired. What the hell, I’ll rewind it and take it the last surviving 1-hour shop.

Oops. Seems I didn’t quite remember how to load a roll of film into an A1.  Oh well. Again.

So I went home and did a bunch of chores, for example lying on the couch thinking about what part of the gardening to do.

And later I went back into town with two more rolls of Ektar, the first properly loaded, camera switched on, Av mode, ready to rock.  The hot girl was looking a bit frazzled by now (it was a hot day) but was still game and so was I, but the bikes and been moved around and the geometry wasn’t there any more. Nevermind, I still took a few shots, and then wandered off to take some details of bikes, and some more street shots, including a nice candid of two pseudo-Angels. At least I hope they were pseudo.

And then I came home. And I decided to write this post. And I took the photo above. And while fooling around with the A1, I noticed that the aperture on the 50mm seemed to be stuck wide open, as it was when I first tried to put it on my E-P2.  Oh well once more. At least a good number of shots were at f1.2, so I guess something will have worked.

But in any case, it was really, really fun using this camera again. I felt, I dunno, somehow sleek and graceful (ha!) compared to all these people lumbering around with huge DSLRs, constantly chimping, photographing from 2 miles across the street with zoom fully extended.

Film is fun. Even when it doesn’t work. Oh, and Harleys are ok, too.

New Medium Format film scanner

in Film , Thursday, June 30, 2011

For those of us still in the Stone Age of film, and slide film at that, there’s a lot to worry about. Dwindling film supplies and variety, processing labs dropping like flies, and especially that day when the film scanner goes bleeeeeep-kerTHUNK. And then it’s Game Over, unless of course you’re willing to sell your soul to Hasselblad for a Flextight. The last (and first, really) wave of affordable, high quality medium format scanners from Nikon, Minolta, Polaroid and Microtek are fast approaching Lights Out. But remarkably, a potential saviour has arisen in the shape of Germany’s Reflecta. Although they’re probably not well known outside of Central Europe, Reflecta is a company with a long history. Typically they’ve made various low to mid-range accessories and devices, including slide projectors (I believe some Leica slide projectors were rebadged Reflectas) and cheap and cheerful 35mm film scanners. However, as the mid to semi-pro market collapsed, Reflecta has been cautiously and quietly edging upwards, acquiring a credibility-enhancing partnership with Silverfast on the way, as well as some encouraging reviews. Although the fact that they have practically no credible competiton must help. And now, well they’ve taken the major step of announcing their first medium format scanner.

And note, unlike any of it’s comparable predecessors it goes up to 6x12. It doesn’t appear to have a dedicated 35mm panoramic holder, but I guess one can be cobbled together.

On paper the specifications look modest. A DMax of 3.6 (I wonder how many people remember what that means) and an optical resolution of 3200dpi. Probably enough, and actually probably closer to the truth than claims of 4800dpi and similar, but not terribly exciting for the marketing men. But then it doesn’t need to be. It has no competition whatsoever, if you discount worn out overpriced eBay fodder.

From pre-release photos it appears to have a mechanism and construction similar to the Microtek / Polaroid 120 scanner, with a moving holder and fixed sensor, which is a pity. Moving sensor systems generally provide a much better platform for multisampling.

It is due to be available in July, but so far no pricing has been announced. I would expect something in the range of €1000, but I suppose it could be higher.

And will it be any good? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. But with the alternative being Nothing, I suppose the bar’s not set too high.