Cameras are too complicated

Very nice, but we weren't married on 23rd in the land of the midnight sun..

It's official. Even Ken Rockwell agrees. Pretty much every new camera feature invented since the '80's is unnecessary and make cameras too hard for normal people to understand. Take my mum and her camera. She has a dinky little Nikon point & shoot digital. But every photo she's ever taken has the time and date imprinted on it. Worse, the date and time are wrong. She doesn't know how to turn it off or how to correct the date. The settings are all buried in complicated menus on a screen that's hard to read. So the date imprint stays and the pictures she took at my wedding show the wrong date. If that's not bad enough, all those useless features take too much power and so she's constantly buying new batteries. Rechargeables don't last long enough, and all that battery money could be spent instead on film for an easy to use 35mm Olympus mju or similar. Ah but what about digital's instant results? Oh come on, are we still so excited by that? Hmmppph.

The tale of the three bears

The title is slightly misleading. You see, as I type this, there are three bears, but I'm expecting a fourth in the post any time now. What the hack am I going on about? Well it's more of those teddy bear photograph. I've had the same scan of it printed as a 6x4 by four different photo finishers, just to see how they differ, and which one I like best. Three are beside my MacBook from Truprint, SnapMad and Ilford LabDirect. The forth is on its way from PhotoBox, who I've been using since 2003. As I had to dismantle my darkroom, this is the only way I can get a back & white print now. So which one is best?

First, the photograph. It was taken with a Nikon FE with a AIS 50mm f1.8 on Delta 400 and developed in Aculux 3. It's 'Big Ted' on the sofa, being held tightly by Linda whilst she watched the telly. Nothing amazing, just a picture I like with some nice lighting and tones. It's never been printed optically, so I've only ever had the scan to look at. This was made with my now ancient Acer 2720S dedicated film scanner at 2700dpi and re sized down 1800 x 1200 pixels, to give 6"x4" @ 300ppi.

The first bear to arrive was from Truprint, but that's because I ordered it a week before the others. Initially I was thrilled. The colour was very neutral. It was a little grainy in the darker mid tones, and I put that down to my scanner's love of finding grain in anything over iso 100. But then, the SnapMad and Ilford prints arrived in the same post. The snap mad was slightly darker and a bit warm toned. For some reason I chose not to click the 'make this b&w' button, so I'm sure a neutral toned b&w is possible. But as soon as I saw that it had so much less grain, the Truprint version started to look bad. Really Bad. Both prints were 9p each, and SnapMad has free P&P if you spend over 99p.

Truprint - grainy

99p? Wow, that's really good value and makes the Ilford print very expensive at £1.25 + postage. The difference with Ilford though is that they print the digital file via lasers onto real silver gelatin black & white paper. Not the Fuji Crystal Archive that everyone else seems to use. Now there's nothing wrong with the Fuji paper. For colour, it's fantastic stuff. But as a chromogenic material, the final image is made up of three layers of coloured dye rather than grains of real silver. This is why black & white prints made on colour paper look fundamentally different to prints made on real black & white paper. And explains why you'll sometimes get a colour cast. The result from Ilford is superb. Not only does it look like a real black & white print - after all it is a real black & white print, but the grain is gone. I can't quite understand why, but instead of grain, there are smooth tones from the shadows though the mids into the highlights. The only way to get a better print is to print optically, something that would be expensive to do unless you have your own darkroom. If I wanted to make prints for display, I'd go with Ilford, no question.

So what about the Photobox print? Like Truprint and SnapMad it's on Fuji Crystal Archive, but they're better than either. They match what I see on my screen closer that Snapmad, and haven't got the wierd grain of Truprint. The tone is neutral but of course, not a patch on the Ilford.

Ilford LabDirect. Smoother tones and real B&W paper!

Conclusion. I'll use PhotoBox for day to day stuff, and for colour. For prints that are going an the wall, I'll pay the extra and get the real thing from Ilford.

Got Prints

I like prints. That's why I used to have a darkroom. So, after Truprint bombarded me with offers of free digital prints I decided to give them a go. I uploaded a varied bunch of jpgs, some from EOS digital cameras, some from film scans. A couple of Kodachrome scans, some PanF+ from a point & shoot, some Delta 400 from my Nikon FE, and Neopan 400 and Astia shot in the Rolleicord. The prints were all 6x4 glossies, except the Rollei shots which were square so I ordered 7x5s, hoping to cut them down to 5x5 as Truprint don't offer square prints. So how did it go?

Slowly... I ordered them on a Tuesday, and they arrived here at Agitated HQ on the following Monday. I've posted film to be developed on a Tuesday before now and had the results back by Friday, so not impressed by the speed then. But the prints look pretty good. Colour looks good, pretty close to how they look on my screen and at 9p a print, I'm quite happy. The black & white shots, especially the teddy bear shot above, a scan from Delta 400, are really nice. Fuji Crystal Archive paper is never going to look as nice as real black & white paper, but even so, for the cost, it's as I said, pretty good. These are all shots that have appeared in my pbase galleries, and I think they look considerably better as a 6x4 print than they do as a 600px jpg on the web. But, hey, they should right? And they are way ahead of anything I ever got out of an inkjet. I'm not going to scan and post here, so you'll have to take my word for it. 

Except... well there's always an except. This time there's two. The squre files got cropped to fill. There's no option to 'fill' or 'fit' to the print size, so if you want to trim down to square, enlarge the canvas to the print size in Photosh*p first. Secondly one of the prints has had what looks like some weird local contrast adjustment that wasn't on the file I sent. I'll reserve judgement on that until I've sen the same file printed elsewhere.

So that's small prints from Truprint, not bad, but next stop, SnapMad.com

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.