Why film?

Sometimes I get asked why film? Surely digital is much easier, better, faster and although that is true, there is something special about film.

Digital is always consist, and always sharp sometimes to sharp.  Film can give you small inconsistencies and different film manufacturers, give different looks, Ilford Delta 400 is very different to Kodak T-Max 400, Lomography 100 to Portra 160 and this is one reason to shoot film. 

If you shoot 35mm the actual act of taking the image is the same whether digital or film, select your shutter speed and aperture, compose the shot, take the image but with film you have that waiting process to see whether the image is what you were looking for and this is half the fun of film the not knowing until the whole roll is developed.

And talking about developing, this is the part I enjoy the most. Mixing the chemicals, working on the timing for a the developed of a film and the process of turning it into images, I'm still amazed when I open up the tank and see the images for the first time.

Ondu Pinhole, FP4+ Negative 

Ondu Pinhole, FP4+

Another reason for film, is the different choices of not only film but cameras, from homemade pinhole cameras, 35mm, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, 5x4 the list goes on. For most of the year I have been shooting with a Coronet Superflash, which is a pretty basic camera, made c.1955.  It takes 120 roll film, the negatives are 6x9 and only get 8 images from it but the 1/100 shutter speed and 75mm lens still produces great results.

6x9 Coronet Superflash, Foampan 200

Another fun camera is the Lomography Sprocket Rocket this camera shoots 35mm film but gives a negative of 72mm x 33mm, so panoramic but its allows you shot into the sprockets and adds a little twist to the images.  You can allow double expose on the film and have the ability to wind the film backwards and forward to create unusually images. 

Sprocket Rocket 72x33mm Kodak 200

Sprocket Rocket without sprockets, accidental double exposure, Kodak 200

So that's the reason I shoot film.

Colour film

Continuing from the pervious post; B&W and Slide film processing is pretty easy, for B&W its normally just an invert and some minor adjustments to get the image looking good and the same with slide, although no Inverting is needed as its already a positive.

Colour film is whole different ballgame and can be very difficult to get a good colour positive, this is mainly because colour negatives have a orange mask to them, I can't say that I fully understand the reasoning behind it but this article helps to explain some of the reasons, with this is mind colour conversions are tricky.

Although over the last few years, software has been developed to help process good looking developed positive, software like Negative Lab Pro, Grain2Pixel and ColorPerfect, and although they all work well, the biggest problem for me, this they are only plug-ins for the likes of Lightroom or Photoshop, two software program I don't use.

There are some other programs out there, that can help to invert the colour negs like Darktable and RAWTherapee but I never find the workflow with them that intuitive. 

There was an app called FilmLab, for both iOS and Android but I find scanning with a tiny camera phone sensor not to give good results and ditched it.

This meant either scanning colour negs myself, which was a pain, to slow and the colours still didn't always scan correctly or have the film scanned at the lab and then send on to me, this proved to quite expensive especially for hi-res images, so it meant I stuck to B&W as I can develop, process and "scan" them at home and would only shoot the occasional roll of colour.

In the last few months FilmLab has come up with a new program and what is good about this is that; One it works on any desktop computer and two it's a standalone program, meaning I don't need any additionally software to use it.

Orange Mask, Colour Negative, DSLR Scanned

When it was first released it was subscription only, either monthly or yearly and having tried the trial version, I signed up for a year, although now you can pay a one off fee for a lifetime use.

So onto the actual software, the interface is quite basic but this is a good thing as personally I don't want to be changing lots of  slides and fiddling about with different settings.  When you first load the image into the program, it automatically converts to what it think the image should look like, and I have to say that most times its pretty correct and I usually go with that, sometimes it can be a little off and you have to go in and make minor adjustments.

FilmLab desktop

The program can handle colour negatives, B&W and Slide and can save the file as either 8-bit .TIFF, 16-bit .TIFF or a standard .JPG.

After conversion and saving the file, I then take it into PS Elements and do my final adjustments to get the image how I think it should look.

Final adjustments in PS Elements

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the program and love the fact it's a standalone program, the one and only issue I have had with it is, that when the first version was released 2.0.1 and installed it worked fine but a few weeks later, they updated to 2.0.2 and this was suppose to be an automatic update but mine never update, I did reach out to the developers and let they know and was told they would look into it but as yet I've not heard anything back, so this means the at present evertime I was to use the program I have to re-install from 2.0.1.  Now I don't know if this is because of my operating system or not but they have never asked about it or whether the problem is on their side. 

 

Pixl-latr

Back in September 2018; I wrote a post talking about digitising my film and showed the set up I was using.

Two years on things have changed a bit and I thought I would show the set up now.

In that time the Pixl-latr finally arrived in August 2020, and for the last few months this has been the main piece of equipment I have used for holding the negatives flat and being able to scan them with a DSLR.

Pixl-latr. Frame, diffuser and gates

The Pixl-latr consists of a frame, diffuser and a series of gates that fit into the frame to give sizes from 35mm to 5x4 and many sizes in-between.

My set up still consists of a daylight balanced lightbox and a tripod but instead of the film carriers from an Epson scanner the Pixl-latr does the job of holding the film.  The gates are set to which size you are digitising and the film is slid in-between the frame and diffuser, finally a vertical gate is placed in to separate the individual frames.

Pixl-latr with 120 6x9

As far I have used it to digitise 35mm colour and black & white negatives, 120 roll film from 6x6 to 6x9, it really is quick and easy to snap a RAW file of the image and then slid along to the next image, I can easily do a 120 roll in about 3 minutes and a 35mm roll in about 5.

One camera I have been shooting a lot with recently is the Lomography Sprocket Rocket, this camera shoots panoramic images and shoots in and over the sprocket holes on 35mm film, the Pixl-latr works great with this as to allows the sprocket hole to been seen, unlike the film carriers from Espon scanners.

Sprocket Rocket

The Pixl-latr has certainly made the "scanning" of film a lot quicker than waiting for a scanner to scan 6 images at a time.

First Film (well almost)

I wrote this article back in April, during the lockdown, it was for a photography website but it seems as through they didn't decide to use it, so I thought I may as well just it on the blog.

Not all the images are posted here, as there are a few duplicates.

Over the years my negative files have been stored in many different places and in that time I have lost some of the negs. 

The first real camera was the family camera and this was a Zenit-E, which was bought sometimes in the early to mid 70s, although plenty of prints from this era survive, the negatives have long gone.

The first camera I owned outright was the Olympus OM10, which was bought for me as an 18th birthday present, it came with the standard 50mm f1.8 lens. 

This camera went with me everywhere trips to Europe, motorcycle meets, hiking, even on my honeymoon in 1984 but again all negatives from this time have disappeared. 

The first set of negatives I did find date from 1987/88, I can pinpoint these dates quite accurately as the American football match was played in September 1987 and the tour shirt was a Fairport Convention tour in the early part of 1988.

Now here comes the strange things, the images are on Ilford XP1 400, a film stock I never shot before or again, I don't even know why I would have bought this particular film. Back then I was developing my own B&W, so why would I buy a chromogenic film, as my go to B&W back then was HP5 and I didn't shoot it that often, as I did like a lot of people and had my colour films processed at the chemist and this always meant a free roll of colour film back. 

The other funny thing with these negatives is that no prints exist from them, so I'm thinking that this is possibly the first time they have been seen as positive images. 

As for the images 28/36 and just the general stuff I would shoot, holiday snaps, and friends just having fun. 

The OM10 is nowadays seen as a bit of a classic; for me it's always just been MY camera, its shot images from most of my life from late teens to late fifties, weddings, honeymoons, births and it's still my go to camera for capturing life forty years later.