Why film

[craigmagee]

It would be interesting to find out the youngest person here who willingly goes for film and large format. I'm 52.

Well I'm 30, but think I can still count as old school!!

I got into photography at the age of 15 so had a good few years of shooting film (35mm) before I ventured into using DSLR's.
Earlier this year I finally made the move back to shooting film, something I'd wanted to do for about 2 years..

For me its hard to explain, though I think most of the others have summed it up pretty well, but film just has a certain look that digital doesn't have.
LF adds to that look.

While digital captures the bulk of my commercial work, I'm trying to use film on any jobs I feasibly can. My LF camera is going to come out more for the interior/architectural work. I've found that film makes life easier in a way when dealing with the artificial light sources, especially new coloured LED ones. Were I'll get weird posterization, color clipping and color fringing on the dslr, the film isn't effected at all. As well as finding the 4x5 format just much nicer to frame with

[banana_legs]

Much of my work leans more towards art than capturing an 'accurate' image. I use my DSLR for general photography/ snapshots, and most importantly, as a light meter. For most of the more artistic shots, I use film in either MF, 4x5 or 8x10.

My MF work is usually with my ultra-wide angle pinhole cameras, or when the film-plane is curved. MF is a good compromise for pinhole as the exposure times are still reasonable (e.g. shooting at f/128) and the images do not lose too much fine detail to diffraction. Using pinholes with the 8x10 usually means extreme exposure times, but the detail capture is good. The small digital sensors give pinhole images that are a bit too soft for me. When someone makes a curved digital sensor, I may consider moving away from film for the anamorphic cameras.

I shoot stereo images onto 4x5 as I have found when the brain is re-combining the image back to 3D, resolution counts. The 4x5 double frames are easy to contact print and provide the ideal frame size for stereo viewing. With digital, I would need to make a camera with two independent sensors as I would like them to be separated by about 60mm. I have used a single digital camera, moved between frames, and two digital cameras slaved, but I prefer the 4x5 stereo camera as it is far easier to handle and captures 3D motion blur correctly (which the single camera technique does not).

I cannot remember ever shooting (single image) LF where the lens was not either shifted, tilted/swung or all movements used. I often shoot with a large aperture to get a narrow depth of field that I adjust to run through the key elements of the image. I do shoot 6x9cm film in view cameras but even with a loupe, I find it tricky to get the focus where I want it. I have experimented with building a 35mm view camera but the movements had to be way too precise for my clumsy thumbs.

I use B&W mainly, and also often paper negatives rather than film; it is cheap, fine enough for my artistic work and my scanner does a good job with it. For higher quality work, I find the resolution of LF film and better tonal control the reason not to use digital.

As for the quality of current digital MF systems, I have no idea but expect them to be very good, even if the sensor is small. I cannot not afford a commercial LF camera so built my own and do not spend anywhere near as much on film and processing as digital MF costs. I did however save up for a DSLR.

Best regards,

Evan

PS. I am 39.

[Charlie jay]

It would be interesting to find out the youngest person here who willingly goes for film and large format. I'm 52.

Well I'm 30, but think I can still count as old school!!

I'm 20 and i only shoot large format film! Sometimes the odd roll of 35mm when i get my hands on a Nikon fm3a or similar and sometimes medium format when i can use a Pentax 67 or a Mamiya 7...

I'm at university in Plymouth and we have access to loads of decent film scanners and large format printers. I have mainly been using the colour darkroom over the past year and there is something about taking your time and printing your images in the dark that, personally, beats sitting in front of a computer with RGB channels in front of your eyes for hours on end!

As for pure digital photography, i don't know what it is but film has a quality that i feel will (hopefully) never be overtaken. There is something about the colours or the tones or.. something. It's just a lot nicer. Also, of course, there is the major point that you will always have something solid to hold with film. Something to treasure that's not 'blahblahblah.jpg' or whatever. The nature of looking at a negative on a lightbox is just unbeatable.

I feel there isn't much competition. It's all about what type of work you do, they both have massive advantages but i personally, much prefer film (as probably the rest of you do considering this is a large format forum!)

Charlie

[timparkin]

Just a question for colour LFers. Assuming you have a neg/pos that is OK, what do you do with it? Straight darkroom prints? Scanned and printed? I know a lot of folks scan their own - ever have problems with a scanned/screen/print image that would never have happened with a darkroom print, or is it all working well, offering more and never a look back.

Hi Richard,

From the start of my large format work, I really wanted to get some darkroom prints but having seen a few in comparison to high end drum scanned lightjet prints, I think I'll be sticking to a hybrid workflow. Unless you go to a very high quality darkroom lab, scanned results will generally get superior results (for colour positive film anyway).

I'm using negative film more and more and hope to send a print off to be processed by a top lab just to 'benchmark' my own personal process.

As part of my 'getting the best hybrid workflow' I bought a Howtek drum scanner and even though I knew it would be good, I hadn't realised quite how good. I'm basically getting every single bit of the image that I can see on a bright lightbox with a 10x loupe and with very good colour fidelity (hoping to move this to fantastic colour fidelity when I get a Hutch target to profile with - currently my deep shadows are showing a very slight colour shift, a supposed weakness in the IT8 target system).

I'm sending a few prints off to Digital Lab so I can see the final results of my drum scanned originals, I'll post info when I get them back.

Tim

p.s. I do have an inkjet printer and whilst it produces very good results, they don't have that visceral punch that a good fujiflex lightjet print does. The reason I started down this large format journey was seeing a lightjet print of David Ward's in the Hebrides in 2008!

[joolsb]

I do have an inkjet printer and whilst it produces very good results, they don't have that visceral punch that a good fujiflex lightjet print does.

Agreed. And a well-printed Cibachrome beats both. But for truly astonishing colour, dye-transfer beats them all. It's sad that it's more-or-less a dead process, though.

(I took advantage of one of The Online Photographer's occasional print offers and got a couple of Ctein's dye-transfer prints for a relative pittance. They are amazing.)

[dennis]

I've just read through the posts & there are some excellent reasons given for using film, especially LF film. But surely the best reason is the fact that film gives a physical incarnation of the image whereas the digital image is just that, an ephemeral image which may, or may not, be available in years to come dependent upon the direction of digital image storage & reproduction? As someone else mentioned they have negs of 50 years old still capable of being printed - as do I, progressing from Kodak box to Zeiss Ikonta, Leica, Rolleiflex, Hasselblad, Mamiya Universal, to Toyo 45, & yes, a compact digital won, not bought! The Leica, bought in the 70s as a bargain, is my only serious excursion into 35 mm apart from brief experience with Pentax & Exacta. All that said I am impressed by the, presumably digital, images seen these days in newspapers, esp the sports shots.

[Joanna Carter]

As much as I prefer scanning and printing (I don't have the room or the desire to wet print), I find the prospect of having to maintain backups of original digital files, every five years (in case the CD/DVD fails) to be a lot less desirable than simply ensuring that a film original is kept in good condition, once, for the next 100+ years.

I recently suffered a RAID array controller failure, which scrambled the file tables on both, mirrored, hard disks. Yes, I was able to retrieve most of my images but many of my digitally taken images are lost for good. As for the film images, yes, I will have to rescan and work on some of them but, at least, I have the original sheet of film in the same condition as it was when I took the picture.

[scovell001]

Wow, what to be said that hasn't been said already.

I think the reason we all shoot film, is the reason we're on this forum.

We, are the last of the people who KNOW above all of the marketing hype/technological breakthroughs, that film provides an image with such fidelity (certainly for landscape photography) that it is currently without equal. Digital imaging now provides a very compelling alternative, but isn't without some form of compromise.

The ability to only stop down to around f11 before diffraction sets in is a problem, and will probably never be resolved due the physical properties of glass. Trying to compose on a ground glass screen the size of 645 (in the case of an Alpa or Linhof Techno) is another.

In late 2007 Hasselblad lent me a H3D-39, and very recently Colin Prior sent me down a raw file made with the Mamiya/Phase One P65. I wasn't overly impressed back then and wasn't impressed this time around either.

Tim Parkin mentions in his post here about a drum scanner, hutch target & lightjet/fujiflex material. This is the exact same thing I've been doing for the last 3 years, and is about as high in terms of reproduction as is currently available.

Looking ahead, the cost of producing images with film is going to continue to rise as less and less people use it. We'll all ultimately be faced with a choice, continue with high fidelity but high cost, or make the move to a full digital imaging workflow. I think ultimately our own images/photographic abilities or our partners seeing how much we spend will make us decide.

For me, film (certainly Fuji Velvia) will remain at the heart of my landscape workflow for now, but I continue to look more deeply into digital solutions.

What I have learn't (especially over the last few months) is that with digital, the lens, is much more important than the sensor. It seems to effect the entire look of how the image is reproduced, that can't be processed out with things like white balance. As an example, Sigma, Canon & Nikon DSLR lenses have additional contrast, and additional warmth/more red that people seem to prefer these days. You process the image in Lightroom etc. and the additional contrast/colour boost these programs imbue on the digital file push this into the realms of make believe (green grass being a particularly interesting example) whilst at the same time the lenses make the image appear somehow flat.

Leica lenses, Zeiss SLR optics, and some of the old Minolta AF SLR lenses (70-210 beercan) have a way of rendering images in a kind of low contrast, but somehow extraordinarily sharp, 3-dimensional way offering an extremely filmic look. However, there's then a compromise to make in terms of depth of field (f-stop) and resolution.

It certainly is a conundrum! And all the time the people selling the kit, are NOT the people taking the images we'll always be faced with the same diminishing quality/emperors new shoes scenario.

Here's hoping.

Best to you all


Ian

[richard littlewood]

For one thing, I'm glad colour film users maintain their film is tops, even though it only seems that way if it's digitised then printed. I can see that gives great tweakability of an image, something maybe a little complex to achieve in a darkroom unless your printing skills are great, or you have pots of cash to get some top printer to make it (do they still exist?)

I think for black and white things are a bit different. There's all the alternative processing types that mostly start with film, and I have to say there is still a great range of films and paper, and I find the combination of those two still pretty hard to beat in terms of images that dont need massive amounts of delicate tweaking to make them work. At the moment that's most of my stuff, but it's remarkable how a straight from the fix print can be altered and tweaked with various chemicals to make a definate one off. It does though, seem terribly old fashioned compared to digital printing, and because of that I dont see the budding photographers taking to it. I'd like to be proved wrong there!

Keep them coming.
Richard

[AbsolutelyN]

I think Richard's hits on a key point about prints in that you really can create something truly unique and one off. That's something that attracts me to large format in general - you end up with a unique and physical image where shutter speeds, apertures and so many other variables are never exact.

With a traditional print there will be variants in a print run - a series of 10 hand prints will all be unique (assuming a certain amount of dodging/burning) whereas the light jets will (I assume) be identical. There is value in that uniqueness just as there is value in the artist signing a print. It's an area I'm getting more and more interested in exploring.

As it happens I acquired my late grandfathers (very old) enlarger today and I'd be really interested in making some contact sheets from some of my 5x4 or 10x8 negatives. I'm very familiar with b/w printing but have never done colour printing. Does anyone have any recommended starting points (such as books or websites) for printing from c41 colour print film?

Oh, and on age, 32. Tristan

[DaveTheWalker]

It would be interesting to find out the youngest person here who willingly goes for film and large format. I'm 52.

I've just turned 30 and bought myself a LF camera to use. I have my own little darkroom under the stairs, and currently predominantly use 120 roll film in a Mamiya RB67, and a Zeiss Ikonta 524/16 folder (when the RB's just too heavy!). I also use 35mm in my Canon F-1N.... I had a digital Canon 350D before all of these, but I upgraded to film once I realised the benefits ;o)

Dave