The truth about film & digital

The word 'Digital' appears no less than 8 times on the packaging of my developed film & prints from Truprint. "We make digital easy!", "Thinking of going digital?", "Got a digital camera?", "Free digital prints", "Make your photos digital" etc etc. It's quite a sales pitch. In contrast Peak just send me my pictures. There's no doubt that the market for c41 process & print has all but disappeared over the last few years. They - Truprint - want to make sure that when I 'go digital' they can keep my business. They assume that 'going digital' is a one way street. Once I've experienced the wonders of digital, I'll never go back. And I'm sure for many that's how it works. How many times have I seen very nice 35mm SLRs on ebay, the description explains "I've upgraded to digital so no longer required", the accompanying photo is badly exposed and out of focus. Some upgrade huh?

I 'went digital' in 2002 and shoot more film now than ever. The truth is that most digital upgraders have never seen the quality that even 35mm film can offer. Film, just like digital, can look great if it's done right. But just like digital, film is usually done badly. OK, for a start, most c41 film is better if you give it a bit more exposure - most exposure errors I've seen with print film is due to underexposure. Shoot your iso400 at 250 or your iso200 at 125 and you might get a better success rate. Secondly, the consumer labs rarely get best results in the prints. Those cheap labs won't allow black on the print. Rather than deep velvety shadows, you get mushy grain filled shadows and washed out midtones. So you upgrade to digital and now you have control over how your pictures look.

Far from being a silver bullet, digital buys it's convenient instant feedback at the cost of a whole new set of problems. Exposure with digital is a pig. The most important thing a digital shooter needs to know is how to read a histogram and how to use the camera's + / - compensation. Trouble is, Joe Snapshot doesn't know or care about this. What's worse is that he can't seem to notice when the camera gets it wrong. Grey snow scenes anyone? I see it all the time. Along with blown highlights and weird colours of course. Just a little tiny bit of in camera work, and maybe a bit of levels adjustment in Photoshop / Elements / GIMP and digital can really shine. But no one cares enough to learn this stuff. Just like no one cared enough to send their film to a decent lab.

OK, here's the bottom line. In the days of film cheap consumer labs messed up most peoples photos. Now with digital, we can mess it up all by ourselves. Ain't progress neat?

No more free film

I got the prints back from Truprint. These are the ones I shot with guessed exposures on a roll of Truprint 'free' film. And you know what? They all came out. But the bigger shock is that, along with my prints my loose, un-sleeved negs and my 'upgraded' Kodak film was a note that Truprint are no longer giving away free films:

"IMPORTANT INFORMATION
From 22nd June 2009 TRUPRINT will no longer offer FREE FILM due to increased postage costs and the decline in film use. An alternative will be offered if you use a 'free film' envelope but credit will not be given. EFFECTIVE 2ND JUNE 2009"

I don't really care, I wouldn't choose to use their film, but it does amount to a huge price hike. Dev & print inc free film was £2.79 with the 'introductory' envelope I picked up at a service station. Now it's £2.99 dev & print + £1 postage + £1.99 for a film. That's £5.98 a massive 87% rise! Still much cheaper than Peak Imaging, but if you don't want the prints, there's not much in it. Looking at the prices for a 36 exp film, Peak comes in at £5.51 and Truprint at £4.99.

I have a feeling that Truprint are trying to get out of the film business. I'll go with Peak!

More on the 'guessed exposure' film soon.

Margaret at Nineteen

Margaret at Nineteen
Originally uploaded by mingfoto34

Whilst on the subject of Kodachrome, Dad just posted this wonderful pic of Mum (Margaret) on Flickr that he took around the time they got married in 1958. It was of course, taken on Kodachrome, the original 12 ASA stuff, a few years before Kodak brought out the faster Kodachrome II (25ASA) & Kodachrome X(64ASA). This is the true magic of the film. It still looks fabulous. I can't imagine any other colour film of the day looking this good when it was taken, let alone 51 years on. Kodachrome was the best, and doesn't Mum look great! Thanks for shooting Kodachrome, Dad!

Kodachrome RIP

Now that everyone else is talking about Michael Jackson, I thought I'd say a bit about the passing of Kodachrome. On the 22nd June 2009 Kodak finally announced they were discontinuing the legendary film that nobody was using any more. I had my last go at Kodachrome, shooting 5 rolls in 2007-2008, just for the sake of nostalgia. All over the net you'll read anguished tales of photographers who'll feel lost without it. Is this the beginning of the end for film photography, digital has killed Kodachrome, and that we're losing the unique look. To be honest, I don't know what that unique look is. Natural colours, good skin tones, slightly weak greens? If it was such a great look, why were so few people using it? The reality is that in 2009 Kodachrome is way past its best before date. The iso 64 film you can, if you're quick, still buy today is the same formulation that was launched in 1974. And E6 slide film has come a long way in the 35 years since. The latest E6 films from both Kodak and Fujifilm are simply better. Faster, finer grained, they have better reciprocity characteristics and are easier to process. If I want natural colour balance and great skin tones, I could shoot the almost grainless Fuji Astia 100F or Kodak E100G and have the results back in 3 days instead of 3-8 weeks I experienced with Kodachrome. Astia needs no correction to exposure for exposures of up to 1 minute and only half a stop at 4 minutes. Kodachrome needs corrections as soon as you get down to 1/10 second. Add to this the fact the K14 process is so complicated that that there is one lab in the world that still does it, and you can see that it really is time to call it a day.

Digital didn't kill Kodachrome. I'm sure that the consumer market for slide film reduced dramatically in the late 70's into the 80's when print film and 1 hour labs became the norm. Slide shows were a regular feature of my childhood until, when, 1977? 1978? We'd go to friends and relatives houses to see their holiday snaps on the big screen. Cine too. It was quite an event. Then suddenly it was unfashionable, dull and tedious. Packs of prints would be handed round instead. Slide film was for 'enthusiasts'. The masses preferred prints. When those same masses switched to digital it was the high speed, low end print films and presumably the labs that supported them that took the hit. It was Kodak 'Max Zoom' iso800 print film that was on every supermarket checkout, not Kodachrome.

But what would have happened if Kodak kept up with development? Could we - the enthusiasts, not the masses - be shooting an ultra fine grain Kodachrome 100G and Kodachrome 100 Ultracolour? Would we be sending to a local lab for developing in the new simplified K20 process? Who knows? Effectively Kodachrome got stuck in a time warp in 1974. 16 years before Velvia and 28 years before I bought my first digital. Kodachrome has had its day and while it's sad to see it go, there really are better alternatives. I'll quite happily shoot Astia instead, which, while it's not exactly the same, it does much the same thing, and does it better. If you want a last go for nostalgia's sake, there's still some left. I've watched the Kodachrome stock level at 7DayShop go from 'moderate' to 'low' to 'stock on order' and back to 'plenty' over the last few days. Dwaynes will continue processing it until Dec 2010.

You can see my last go here.

'Guexposing' Cheap Film

A while ago, a relative handed me two 'free' Truprint films that they weren't ever going to use. Truprint is one of those consumer labs that give you a free film each time you send one in. They, the relies, had found some exposed films in a drawer and sent them in for processing and, well, I got the free film. Two rolls. The film is probably Ferrania Solaris 200, which I wouldn't usually use, but hey, it's free, so I might as well give it a go. Roll one went in my Olympus 35RC. The results, processed and scanned by Peak, were, well, dull. Dull, cold colours, not very sharp. Just what I expected really.

Cothele. Olympus 35RC / Truprint 200 film

So, what to do with the second roll? Putting it in the bin seemed a good idea, but not much fun. I wanted a challenge, so the Truprint film went in the Pentax MX and the camera's batteries came out. I'm shooting it meterless, so to speak. I mean, how much of this matrix metering technology do we really need anyway? Doesn't print film have a really wide latitude? Let's see if this sunny 16 rule actually works. So now I've finished the film, but don't really want to pay Peak's prices for something that, lets face it, isn't going to come out to well. I'd picked up a Truprint mail-in envelope from a motorway service station a couple of weeks back and thought that if it's their film, they should be able to get the best from it. Trouble is, if they process it, they'll send me another film... but I ticked the little box to upgrade my film to Kodak. Wooo hooo! Kodak ColorPlus 200 what ever that is. I've never see that anywhere else... I'm eagerly awaiting the prints back from the lab.

35mm SLR camera still works SHOCK!

Funny thing really. I put a roll of Provia through my new (to me) £4.50 EOS 500. I used various lenses ranging from a 17-40mm f4 L through a 24mm f2.8 to a 100mm f2.8 macro. Good lenses, good film, and all the pictures came out just fine. Sharp, well exposed, great colour... Wow. Who'd have thought it? But then why wouldn't it work? Everyone thought these cameras were great in the 90's and they were. They had matrix metering and multiple AF sensors.  Yep, just like a modern DSLR. The only real difference is the capture media. And there's nothing wrong with Fujichrome!

EOS 500: Low Budget EOS

A Canon EOS 1DsMkIII is an expensive beast. So expensive I don't even know or care about the price. But how cheap can you shoot full frame EOS? Well, a 5D mkII is around £2000. A used 1DsMkII about £1000 and even an old 5D or 1Ds will cost £700. So clearly, it has to be a film body. A 1Dn or 3 can be had for £100 if you shop around, and I have a 50E (Elan IIE) which is worth a pittyful £30 and a really nice bit of kit it is too. Thumb and finger wheels, 'Eye Control' focus point selection, blah blah blah. But we can do better than that. How about a 500 (Rebel XS) for £4.50. Yep, under a fiver for a fully functional EOS body in perfect working order. It has it's limitations of course. It only does evaluative metering / auto AF point selection / AI focus, but hey, it does that pretty well. It's also tiny, discreet, lightweight and as quiet as an AF SLR can be. Best of all it's black, unlike the nasty silver painted bodies that came after it... Is it any good? I'll let you know...