Shooting film

The 1970-1985 era mechanical cameras are supreme works of engineering and design – the absolute peak of their makers’ art. While one can argue that digital cameras are in many ways “better” than those cameras (for some value of “better”), I doubt that the lens from that era will ever be equaled in quality or variety.

Cranky

Speaking of Hayek . . .

Tom @ 3

Some of the classic books, even the dreaded zone system ones are worth a look. I always got a lot out of the Hasselblad Manual by Ernst Wildi and the Ilford Darkroom Handbook.

On general topics:
I used to be a pro photog, moved into other things as the digital revolution really hit. It’s impossible to argue with the economics – you can get a good enough picture for nothing these days. I have lots of old fashioned nostalgia for the slightly better images I took than the essentially costless work of amateurs that is often used now… but that’s just nostalgia. The real quality decline is related to a technology, but not that of digital capture…

In the end, the nail in photography as craft is not so much digital capture as digital output. Fundamentally we’ve entered the age where output is created for the screen and then occasionally printed out… and it shows… when people go to galleries and see collections of old prints they are often blown away… and can’t quite articulate why…

The roots are in the low resolution screens, low dynamic range screens and uneven stepping algorithms in digital printing… I’m too tired for the full rant this evening… and yes, one can imagine a future where digital displays outstrip old-fashioned prints and things get better… but we aren’t there yet.

Note: this is about photography as craft – photography as art has a whole different set of problems… but that’s for another day.

“The world where every amateur with a DSLR can produce images good enough for print and can license them for sale to Getty Images on Flickr is not a world where many people can earn their living from taking pictures. You have to be very special, very well networked or in some real niche market for that.”

And the world in, say 1995 *was* a world in which many more people earned such a living?

Metatone, on the other hand, color printing has improved with digital–it is much easier to correct color and the prints are believed to last longer. HDR display is arriving and synthetic images have become a form in themselves. So the art is changing, but there’s still an art.

“More significant, perhaps, is the way that film trains your head and where the sheer flexibility of digital gets in the way to learning to see things in the right way. If I load a film camera with Velvia, I quickly become aware of vivid colours and blocks of colour. If I’ve got a roll of black and white film, then I quickly become more attuned to line, light and shadow.”

The key here, I believe, is thinking through to the finished work, screen or print, and the discipline to achieve that is harder with inexpensive digital equipment. Learning to do good photographic work, more than ever, is a matter of choosing a simple disciplined way of working with the technology and learning to pay attention to your aesthetic responses–you need to be able to get the equipment out of the way of your eye and hand. The small heavily-automated, irritatingly slow, inexpensive digital camera often gets in the way.

Perhaps there is a teaching method implied here, or a study method. One might start by imposing on oneself a set of different restrictions, one for each week of work. Then one might explore the best, or most interesting, or whatever of these. Hmmm.

Meantime, you’ll get my medium format equipment when you buy me comparable digital equipment. Considering that costs more than most new automobiles, I don’t think I’m giving up film in that format anytime soon.

Oh, Tom–I also like Strobist, http://strobist.blogspot.com/ , for its discussion of lighting design problems in field photography. Caponigro is really good on image processing–he concentrates on Photoshop, but the basic subject is there, even if you use The GIMP. A lot of photography is interacting with subjects and working with lighting, and that hasn’t changed–in these areas, older books do well.

For some reason there’s been a lot of commentary lately on this phenomenon (disruptive innovation and the increasing feasibility of high-quality amateur production cutting into the rents for expertise).

There was a request via an intranet forum at work for an “amateur photographer” to take wedding photos. It was about that long, so I have no further details.

Such honest snobbery is hard to find these days, but I think it is getting in the way of a clear analysis of the situation. The reason pro photographers are having such a hard time lately are two fold. First, it’s a shitty economy so like everyone else they are having a hard time finding a job. Second the advertising based media economy, in which most pro photographers are employed is slowly collapsing. Lower ad revenues means lower salaries for everyone in the business.

I think it is a great time to be taking and consuming photography. I am often shocked at how shoddy the techniques were when looking at 30 year old magazines. I do think that photography might die away as a profession, but that would only because being able to take good pictures would become such a fundamental skill that it would just be assumed that to be educated one would know how to shoot.

True, but that’s no guarantee the market will create lenses equivalent to the ones designed in the 1970s, and as far as I can see those available today aren’t even close.

You have no idea what you are talking about, I suspect that you will try to come back with some old Leica porn, so I will preemptively bring up this.

> You have no idea what you are talking about, I suspect that you will try to
> come back with some old Leica porn, so I will preemptively bring up this.

Ha – just a few weeks ago I was reading a screamingly funny account of how around 1985 Leica was buying Minota lenses, putting their mount and frontpiece on them, and marking the price up from $300 to $1200 (1985 dollars). I recall reading many reviews at the time about how superior the Leica lenses were and thinking to myself, really?

Chris, you say digital photography is easy, but it seems to me that film photography was once (or COULD be) easy as well. With Kodak’s introduction of the Brownie (ca. 1900 as I recall) film photography became very easy; and became easier with the introduction of later technologies designed to allow the amateur to snap photos and send the film off for processing. It is probably safe (??) to say that the overwhelming majority of film product was sold to amateurs who wanted easy and reliable ways to produce photos of family, vacations, etc. That is no different today; rather than comparing today’s amateur photography with yesterday’s serious hobbyist or pro, it might be productive to look at most digital cameras, especially point and shoots, as the equivalent to the Kodak Disc or Instamatic cameras, or to the Polaroids. In other words, your complaint– about missing stages of learning a craft–is not specific to digital. It just comes with the territory. Most camera owners over the last 50 years, certainly, have wanted to miss those stages, have preferred to not worry about ISO, aperture, f-stop, filters, etc. And apart from the idiosyncrasies of specific film stocks, just about problem posed by film photography can be found in digital. With any DSLR, and with some upper-end point and shoots like the Canon G-9 you can set things to manual and play with shutter speed and aperture and depth of field all you want. The main problem, perhaps, is that it is indeed more difficult to learn to see in black and white now, in the sense that one has to willingly train oneself to understand the dynamics of light independent of color. But that can still be done with digital.

The world where every amateur with a DSLR can produce images good enough for print and can license them for sale to Getty Images on Flickr. . .

I do not recognize that description. Images good enough for print, and to sell, still require craft, in the shooting and the processing. Most amateur work I’ve seen, say on Flickr, is pretty much like amateur work I saw in the film days: much of it competent, much of it drek, little of it memorable.

And count me in with Randolph @12 re color printing. I made color prints from film in enlargers in college, and contemporary technology is light years better and easier. No smelly chemicals, no warm water baths that have to be kept at specific temperatures, no multiple exposures trying to get the color balance right. . . The first time I color adjusted an image on the screen and printed it through a professional-quality ink jet printer I felt like I’d entered the promised land! I see no reason to lament to good old days on this one.

Don’t forget, too, that film cameras are not only beautiful and facsinating machines to use but for a few pounds you can get optics that would cost you literally thousands if you were to start in on digital now (I mean this literaklly, £20-£25 will buy you a camera with a superb lens).

A £200 second-hand contax point and shoot film camera will take professional quality images that you would need unaffordable (for most of us amateurs) top-end Nikon glass to achieve in digital.

There seems to be some confusion about lenses. I only know this about Nikon, but if you have one of their pro DSLRs you can use many of their old lenses built in the pre-digital age. Some don’t work because of the mount, some features might be restricted, because the lenses weren’t built with those in mind, but the bottom line is that there is no fundamental difference between those lenses.

And as far as digital technology making things easier – that’s at least not the case in film. Today, almost all films are edited digitally and most films are color corrected digitally as well – that is, while shooting on film as opposed to digital is still the norm (at least for features), editing and color grading is done digitally. Back in the good old days an editor had to learn how to operate a Moviola or a Steenbeck and the people in the lab would sometimes push the film a stop or two at the request of the DoP, but the technology used was quite simple to learn and operate – which was great at least for editors, since they could concentrate on the art of putting a sequence of shots together. Nowadays an editor has learn and keep up to date with all sorts of software and hardware and color correction has become a proper career in its own right. This stuff is hard and a lot of work. Of course, anybody can buy a camcorder and edit on Imovie or something, but that is just the equivalent to Super 8 amateur productions.

Personally I treasure the shot of the about 100 people simultaneously photographing such 60-people scrums.

@Cranky “True, but that’s no guarantee the market will create lenses equivalent to the ones designed in the 1970s, and as far as I can see those available today aren’t even close.”

I am not sure what you mean. Nikon and Canon digital SLRs take the same lenses…. (I don’t know whether the mounts have remained the same since the 70s but definitely they’re the same as the last few generations of film cameras….)

I meant they take the same lenses as non-digital SLRs from the same companies (not, alas, the same with each other)

I think most of the major lens manufacturers would claim their current products are as good or better than anything they made in the past. Improvements in computer-aided optical design, lens coatings, precision manufacturing with finer tolerances, and so on, mean that the very best of what can currently be made in the ‘price-is-no-object’ range is pretty amazing. Canon, Nikon, Leica and Zeiss still make a lot of their old lens designs. If you want to buy a 50mm Sonnar, or a 90mm Summicron, or whatever, you can go out and get one tomorrow. It’s just that those sorts of lenses are very very expensive relative to the polycarbonate-bodied slow-speed super-zooms that most people use.

The high-quality metal-bodied fast prime standard lens that manufacturers used to supply as a loss-leader on SLRs is now a thing of the past, but the modern kit-zoom is a lot better than the kit-zooms of the past.

If you really want to discipline your photography get a hold of a view camera, say a 4×5, and learn to use it.

It’s a completely different experience from shooting with any hand-held camera, film or digital. Not only are focus and exposure manual, but so are the relative orientations of the film, lens, and subject planes. It takes a while to set up a shot, and each one is expensive, so you develop great care in checking framing, focus, depth of field, etc. Spend time looking at the corners of an upside down image, through a loupe, under a cloth, and you will want to make every shot count.

Just use it every so often, and you will find the discipline carries over into the rest of your photography.

When shutterbugs talk about lenses, it sounds just like the Mac v PC crowd which sounds just like the Ford v Chevy crowd.

Absolutist pronouncements are silly. Within the same batch, lenses will vary in quality. Anyway, we remain plagued by sharp pictures of fuzzy concepts, to quote Ansel.

Chris Bertram’s point bears repeating: an artificial limitation is annoying, then instructive, and finally liberating. If you’re up to it. When I take a hike or a light trip, I pack either a 24mm or a 200. I won’t often stop to shoot but when a do, there’s a good reason.

Randolph @12 gets to the real bummer of the digital revolution: chip size. We don’t need denser sensors. We need physically larger sensors. I want to use my Pentax 645 glass again. Because my 645 Takumars are better than any of all of youse guyses lenses, ever.

On the other hand, because “each additional picture is costless” (excepting one’s time) and “you can just shoot away,” it’s possible for the attentive photographer using digital to make adjustments on the go, thanks to the camera’s more or less instantaneous ability to give feedback.

Chris, when you send your film out to be processed, do you have the developed images scanned to a digital format? Whatever one’s preferred tool for initial capture, it seems to me the most useful advancements in recent imaging technology lie in the digital darkroom.

As some of you know already, I’m sure, Jon Elster has written a lot about the creative role of constraints in art and elsewhere, including arbitrary and seemingly perverse constraints such as those CB imposes on himself. See Ulysses Unbound. He goes into the formal structures and conventions in Jazz and blues, the extremes of Oulipo, and more.

I know nothing of photography – thanks for the post and the discussion.

Hmm, then they were 2-dimensional, because I was standing up against the wall… Anyway, what do I know about ‘Art’? I think one of the most interesting things in the Louvre is trying to decipher the 17th-century graffiti scratched into 16th-century statues, how sad is that?

But you were the one who claimed to be taking pictures of people taking pictures of people taking pictures… If only we had a picture of that, eh?

re: 51

If you are lucky, good medium format cameras can be genuinely cheap these days. One UK second-hand retailer occasionally has decent post-war Rolleiflexes for 100 quid or less. Slightly less often, I’ve seen Bronicas and Mamiya RB/RZs for not much more.

50- There’s just no come back to that one. Or, wait! …. Nope, there isn’t. Carry on. For some unfathomable reason you seem to be enjoying yourselves.

Oh dear, that link won’t take you to it. but this one will:
http://www.hackelbury.co.uk/artists/riboud/riboud_pic13.html

JR,

I hate it that the hard earned skill of spooling film in the dark is useless, but I’m glad I don’t have to do it any more.

I’m glad too, especially since I never quite mastered the skill, and had too many rolls emerge from the process with “purple hearts.”

Spooling film onto those reels, in the dark, is for masochists only.

dswift@59: Very good points. What impresses me most about the 645D is the sensor dynamic range of 11.5 stops, which is comparable to print film. Canon doesn’t even publish that spec for the 5D. I’m not sure how much that matters to most photographers, though. I like & work with contrasty scenes, and I’m also starting out as a lighting designer, so being able to record a broad range of contrast is valuable to me, but these are idiosyncratic preferences. It will be interesting to see if this camera finds wide application!

A former teacher, Bruce Jackson says this:

I’m been working with a Leica M9 lately, mostly with a 28mm lens, something my old 35mm. It’s very different than working with my Nikons, with which I mostly use zooms. Going out with the Leica and one lens forces me to think more, to see more. We’re going to Paris for a week in June and I’m torn about which camera to take along–which is to say, which way I’ll look at things. I’m still working on this Buffalo series. As soon as it warms up a bit I hope to find someone who’ll take me out in a boat along Lake Erie and up and down the Buffalo River so I can get some of those structures from the water side.

About these photos:

http://brucejacksonphotography.us/PIB/index.html