Digital straight talk, and action

Sure, there’s nothing like doing C-prints in the darkroom, but we need to adapt to the times. I think a lot of the digital haters out there simply don’t know enough about color or the behavior of film to create digital images that work the way they want. Before I did photography in college, I was in studio art classes, and in painting we focused a lot on the color of light. Shadows can be warm or cold depending on the light source. Film is like that too—shadows can be cyan or blue or red, for example, depending on the light source, the subject, and the type of film. Quite simply, one has to understand the color of light in order to get the right results from digital. I don’t want to turn my blog into a Photoshop manual, but I will probably still give some hints about RAW conversions soon. It’s no fun to go to a photographer’s website and see flat, oversaturated photographs that just scream out DIGITAL. The results shouldn’t be overshadowed by the means.

- Elizabeth Weinberg, interviewed at Too Much Chocolate

Intense

Full respect to Dave from Photoworks, who writes on the Photoworks blog:

So I got this big deal event coming up. We’re having a baby, and among other things, one of my jobs is to capture the moment of truth. My wife says, “don’t blow it dude, bring the digital camera.” How boring, I mean how many times will be in a labor and delivery room again? I’m thinking this is a chance for some black and white documentary style action. So I’ll be packing my bessa rangefinder, my lomo smena, and maybe a holga. Some neopan 1600, portra 800, and a some expired slide film to cross process. I’m sure the midwife will appreciate my attempt to be artsy while my wife is screaming her lungs out pushing out the baby. Not sure what to say to everyone who wants a photo sent right away. Maybe that’s what camera phones are for. So we’re 2 days past due date and the bags are packed, the laundry is done, and the cameras are loaded.

Photoworks is my local lab in SF. They have a good Flickr group and will be putting on a one-night exhibition of group member photos in September. (There will be wine.)

As a side note, I love Neopan 1600; it's very friendly to toy cameras with flashes. (*COUGHCOUGH*GOLDENHALF) I shot a few rolls of Delta 3200 but I'm not going to make the switch. If anyone knows of a better high-speed black and white film, please speak up!

Three personal anecdotes regarding the state of film today

#1

I walked into a pharmacy in New York City and saw a bunch of Kodak disposable cameras. An aside: in Japan, you can buy disposable cameras pre-loaded with 1600 speed film—how brilliant. So here's the message on the display case:

JUST IN CASE

• you forget your digital camera
• your memory card is full
• you don't want to risk your camera

Never miss a shot

Kodak Single Use Cameras

Pros and cons here, folks. Yes, it's sad that someone in Kodak's marketing department thought (realized?) that a way to sell film would be to target the market of "people who forgot their digital camera." But I'm glad to see that they recognize the value of never missing a shot, which is what I currently use to underpin my argument for toy cameras.

#2

I walked into a photo store in Long Island, foolishly hoping to get a roll of 120 format film developed. It turns out that the woman doesn't even process 35mm film anymore! She said it wasn't worth the cost of ordering chemicals and keeping them fresh to only develop a roll here and there.

#3

I recently went to Camera Heaven, a photo store in SF's Tenderloin. (If you don't know what that is you can check out this dude's Holga snaps of the loin or TL as we call it. I'm conflicted about his stuff in general but there's no question it works as documentary.) After looking on ebay for a Gossen Luna Pro SBC light meter and getting impatient, I called up the guy there up to see if he happened to have one lying around... which he did.

So I went down to pick it up, and as we were talking I asked him how business for film stuff was. He said it was great, and even laughed a little as he told me that some of his friends in the photo store business had switched over to digital a couple of years ago, only to find now that film was coming back strong. He repairs cameras for other stores, and apparently he gets more film cameras in now than digital ones. "Hey, I've been here for five years," he said. If he can afford to laugh, maybe there's some hope. Not that digital's "bad," of course...

Involuntary

The B blog is a regular source of clear thinking about shooting film. Here he's talking about a recent trip:

My only problem is that I didn't bring along enough film. The last few days I was forced into an uncomfortably deliberate style which felt very unnatural. It's impossible for me to take good photos when I have to stop and consider whether the exposure will be "worth it". Such conditions almost guarantee that no photo will be. I suppose I could get around this by shooting digital but then the opposite effect sets in. When there is no need at all to consider whether an exposure will be "worth it", that also guarantees that none will be. The middle ground seems to be in between: use film freely but expensively.

I am just starting to adopt this approach. Worry less about whether it's a "great" picture and just shoot. Is that the same as saying "don't think"? I don't think so. At the end of the day, you sit down with what you've shot and only focus on the stuff that came out well. Don't think while shooting, but think while editing. Piece together what you (weren't) thinking.

I'm visiting Chicago this weekend, with plenty of film.

Reader mail 3: "no such thing as no post"

The subtitle of this post comes from a message I once read in the forum of a Flickr group called something like "NO POST PROCESSING!" Someone started a thread saying: "when i take photos on my camera i'm shooting in RAW. is it ok if i change the temperature and stuff before i post to this group?" There was some back and forth, and a few people approached the question philosophically, but my favorite answer was this quieter one: "no such thing as no post :)"

"great contrast! lol"

On to the mail, which was in response to this recent analog vs digital post:

I tend to belong to the "pro-digital" camp but my main argument on the matter is that if any of these big film or vinyl people existed today, they would totally avail themselves of modern technology. You don't think a Man Ray or a Bresson would be using Photoshop? Anyways, I have definitely thought about the subject a lot and that's not to say that I don't understand the value of analog photography or music or whatever. But it drives me crazy when people cling to some idealized past.

To make it clear, I don't hate technology, and I definitely don't think that the existence of the Adobe program Photoshop heralds the death of "photography." Speaking as someone who claims to love film, I currently scan all my negatives myself so that I can edit them on the computer. That's not very romantic! I don't develop my own film either, which probably makes me a bad person in some militant photo-camps I don't even know.

"d00d, want a link to this kewl torrent site?"

I'm terrible at using Photoshop, but I recognize how useful it is to everything that I'm doing right now. I agree that there's no need to idealize the past. It's not like people were actually helped by their technical limitations, they just found creative ways to work with what they had. A hundred years from today, photographers will no doubt wonder how we, the godforsaken people of 2008, ever produced anything worth looking at using such a primitive tool as Photoshop. (But they will only think to say this while looking at our images!)

To answer the good question posed here, I am sure that Man Ray wouldn't be so foolish as to ignore Photoshop. He'd probably use it well, too, because I think Man Ray was on point. That's just a guess, though. Hey, everyone knows that Star Wars Episode 4 was so great because George Lucas' shoestring budget made him work hard for his visual effects. Everyone also knows that Star Wars Episode 1 was so wretched because it was a just plain terrible idea, which happened to have millions of dollars' worth of technology thrown at it. This does not mean that lots of technology makes for bad results, or that "bad" technology makes for good ones. Better ideas make for better results, so in terms of photography, the bottom line should always be the image. The way that it's produced should be secondary.

By the way, the only meaning of my Star Wars example is that George Lucas is a hack.

Analog vs. digital, part two of ∞

It's worth reminding ourselves that post-processing is not limited to digital. Using different solutions, develop times, contrast filters, papers etc in the darkroom are all just ways to influence the final print. The quality of the difference (however slight) between what the viewer sees and "what was really there" might be what makes a photograph "great," rather than just "interesting."

Analog/Digital skies

Two good images, one shot with film, the other with digital. It should be pretty obvious which one is which.

twoblackeyes

Jeremy Joslin

What's valuable about a distortion? Why would anyone ever want to produce an 'imperfect' image? In the world of music, this conversation plays itself out between vinyl purists and, well, everyone else. I can't really get behind vinyl myself. My dad, a one-time audiophile, dismisses the argument that vinyl produces a 'warm sound' by saying that you could just invent a digital processor that would add in the necessary distortions to make the sound 'warm.' This was always pretty convincing to me.

I've heard this same argument applied to shooting film: "why wouldn't you just create that effect in Photoshop?" I'm not convinced by this argument, for a simple reason: I'd rather spend my time taking pictures than sitting in front of my screen.