The Quiet Picture

I got back my roll of Velvia 100 this week. I was very excited to see that the greens were still as intense as I remembered them, the colours really pop. Unfortunately I was not able to reproduce the pop when I scanned them, but I’ll always have my light table!

The roll goes back to late June, so there are some nice summer memories in it. Like this forget-me-not I found in the forest on Hamrafjället, which I visited on the morning of my trip to Röros. I only took this one picture and I’m well chuffed to see that I nailed the focus – there was some wind so I had to wait for an opportunity to press the shutter. With digital, I’d probably have snapped 5-10 frames under the same circumstances. But it’s nice to see that I have the patience to wait for the right moment!

One thing I was curious about was to see how I can work with the 15mm fisheye on full frame – I can barely work with it on a crop sensor. But I reckon in a way it’s easier because the fisheye effect really comes to life when all 15mm can be used effectively. I like the fisheye illusion how the curved horizon imitates the curvature of the earth. The planet in miniature!

The light was really fleeting, the kind that disappears by the time you’ve picked up the camera from the bag. But in this case I was lucky to get it back for two seconds so I could take the picture.

This is from the same day and same marsh as the previous slide. It had just rained quite heavily but then suddenly the sun burst out. The colours were amazing, the mosses were glowing with reds and yellows and I was all excited about capturing it all. In the picture it seems like there is a lot of blue sky, but there were clouds all around and just seconds after taking this picture the clouds moved in front of the sun we heard the rumble of thunder. It started raining again and I lost the opportunity, but at least I have this frame. The Sigma 15mm fisheye handles flare really well – I haven’t cloned any flare from this picture, but I did straighten the horizon a little bit (the fisheye effect made it curve a little bit because the horizon is not in the middle of the frame).

I have totally failed with reproducing the greens here, but I like the scene; there’s something about dead trees that always draw my eye. It was just a matter of trying to compose to bring some order in the chaos.

The last time I mentioned that I have a slight tendency to under-expose. I think I found the reason for it – it only happens with particular scenes, those with a lot of blue sky or running water. I seem worry about overexposing the sky or the water, so I don’t compensate as much for the shadows as I should. But now that I’m aware of exactly what is throwing me off, I know to watch out for it. Looking at the pictures, I’m not at risk of burning out the sky or the water even if dial in another 2/3 stops. I’ve loaded Velvia 50 in the camera and the plan is to find running water today and blue skies tomorrow…

Last week I finally got my first roll of film back – it wasn’t the developing that took time (in fact, it was a really quick turnaround) but just simply completing the roll in the first place. Spring wasn’t a good time to start… it’s the summer greens and Velvia I dreamed about. Except that now the summer greens are here and I’m just taking flower pictures, so on a monthly basis I’m not always taking one film roll worth of landscape pictures with digital, either. But now I have Velvia in the camera and I dream of green!

The biggest problem I had with the slides was to find the light table. I had packed all my film stuff in a box in the storage room and of course it was furthest back, so I very nearly had to turn the room upside down until I got to it! Having been doing digital such a long time, it was such a pleasure to be looking at new pictures which were complete as they came. I mean, with digital you upload the RAWs to the computer and then have to start adjusting WB and other settings before the picture pops. It kind of dilutes the experience. It’s not that the pictures are worse, but the first impression definitely is. The slide on the light table is the final product – and even when you notice that the exposure or colours aren’t quite what they should be, there’s nothing you can do to it anyway, LOL! What you see is what you get. But of course, the slides can be scanned and the colours can be fixed in the digital file, which is what I had to do with some of these. I used the 40D and macro lens to digitise the slides and I’m actually pretty happy with the result, the film scanner I used to use didn’t give me anything better as I recall. If I need a bigger file size, I can “scan” the slide in two parts and stitch them. But for now, I didn’t feel the need for it so I even included the perforation.

As for the exposures, it seems like I have a slight tendency to underexpose. I think I also had it to some degree back when I was mainly doing film, but it’s probably worse now when I’ve forgotten how film behaves. Need to re-learn the latitude and dial in +1/3 stops, because not one of the slides were overexposed! But having mentioned the latitude, that’s the biggest handicap with slides as I see it. Just trying to find the correct exposure for bright clouds and dark forest is hard enough, take for example the top left slide. I swear the exposure is as close to correct as it gets, the cloud is just on the right side of hot but I still lost the shadows in the trees. There’s no shadow fill or curve adjustment that will get them back! I’m not complaining though, just comparing. Film is fun!

I was only supposed to write three posts about film, but that was before I actually got the camera. It feels like I’m more excited about my 2nd hand film camera than I was with my brand new 40D!  So I picked it up last night and the first impression when I was unpacking it was “wow it’s huge”. When I compared it to the 40D, it’s only marginally bigger but somehow it still seems larger than its dimensions indicate. Weird. The second reaction after unpacking the camera was “wow no display”. Just a tiny window to see the film roll, LOL.

Then after I had attached a lens and turned on the camera and pressed the shutter – oh wow. The Sound. When the 40D came out, a lot of people were complaining about the shutter sound. It was different than on the 20D, yes, but I got over it in about a day. But the EOS 3 is like beautiful music… I need to get it as an MP3. I’m telling ya, you want to take pictures with this camera just so you can hear the shutter!

What the Duck 648

* * *

The lens I mounted on the camera was the Sigma 15mm fish-eye. I’ll add a fourth “wow” here – for the first time, I saw how wide 15mm really is. I could get the whole room in the frame… it’s a brand new photographic experience for me. I think I should try to learn to use wideangles this summer!

Maybe so far I’ve made it sound like going back to film is all good, so I’ll talk about the caveats now. There are some things where digital beats film (and I don’t mean cost and instant feedback etc that I’ve already talked about), and some of these I will miss.

The possibility of changing ISO on the fly is one of the benefits of digital. I will be using Velvia 50 and 100, so whatever I do I have to do it with a slow speed film. I’ll be mostly using the film camera for landscape this summer, so it’s not a critical issue, but should I want to take the occasional macro I’ll run into trouble for sure, because most of my flower work seems to be done in low light. So if I want to do macro with film, I’ll have to find some subjects in brightly lit places. Or shoot petrified flowers.

I was a big fan of Velvia back when. Then around the time I switched to digital, Fuji changed the emulsions and even stopped manufacturing Velvia 50 for a while, but it seems to be back now. The strange thing is that I saw a chart about the grain size and according to Fuji, the ISO 100 emulsions have finer grain than the old 50! I’m gonna have to see it myself, so I will start with a couple of rolls of both.

Another digital benefit I will miss is white balance adjustment. Velvia is daylight balanced so it’ll work fine in sunlight, but when the clouds start coming in, my pictures will get the blues. The solution is obviously to use colour correction filters, but I have to confess that I was never really good with them. I owned an 81B which I never used and now I don’t even have that one. The biggest concession I made to colour correction was to get the Moose polariser which combines an 81A with the pol, so it will work with waterfall photography (which I prefer to do in overcast weather).

With that in mind, I am not completely liberated from post processing when I get the film scans back – one way or another I’ll have to fix the colours because I will not waste any more money on filters.

And the third benefit of digital that I will miss is graduated ND filters. Yes I know there are no grads in digital cameras, but I mean the ease of creating HDRs from multiple exposures. I can do that with film as well, but it quickly becomes a cost issue. Graduated filters is another thing I’ve always overlooked, so there are some type of pictures I never took with film because the latitude wasn’t there. But now I think I will try bracketing in moderation, if the subject is worth it. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll get an ND grad anyway – I could use it as a “slow-down tool” with digital as well.

And then finally – there is the issue of waiting. And waiting. And waiting, for the slides to come back from the lab!

Late winter is probably not an ideal time to get new gear, Velvia is wasted on snow and April in particular has never been a productive month for me. But the camera won’t suffer if it has to sit on my shelf for a few weeks and the Velvia rolls won’t grow old in the freezer. When the greens start sprouting up, I’ll be ready!

Recently I’ve been thinking about digital noise and wondering if it’s time for me to switch to full frame. But every digital camera has noise, the only difference is how the photographer sees it. My noise threshold is low, probably because the digital noise seems too patterned to me. Film grain on the other hand is random. If you claim that you prefer the noise to film grain, then I bet you’ve never seen a Velvia slide up close! Or then you just really like noise (or you’re really young and think that analogue cameras belong to a museum together with vinyl records). I remember when I switched to digital and was looking at the nearly noise-free ISO 100 images, the smoothness blew me away. Now I look at my old slides and see the grain in Velvia 50 and think that it’s beautiful! Grain is the nature of film, it’s part of its charm (your mileage may vary), but noise is just… well, noise.

Just to have an idea of the noise on a full frame camera, I tested a Canon 5D Mark II and to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. I was seeing a lot more noise than I had expected after reading all the positive reviews, so the 25K investment is not justified in any way, even if it looked like the noise was more random (thus more tolerable) than it is on my 40D. When it comes to full frame, I get to play with it on my cheap 2nd hand film camera anyway. Will be nice to see how my lenses perform, the 15mm fish-eye in particular should be interesting.

So with regard to getting back to film photography, there isn’t really any big reason to do it, it’s more of a feeling than a rational move. But here’s one thought: When I switched from film to digital, it quickly improved my photography thanks to the quick feedback. Now that I’ll start using film again, I’m actually half expecting it will make me a better photographer because it will slow me down!

I’m going to do something radical – go back to film!

Ok ok, not really going back but I will get a film camera again. I think I once mentioned half kidding that I want a medium format camera (2nd hand kits come cheap these days), but now I decided to settle with 35mm. The reason it’s happening now is that my 40D has to go to service and although I’ve played with the thought of relying on my G10 during that time, in the end I just couldn’t cope with the idea of living without an SLR. Besides, an analogue SLR is a whole lot more fun than a digital compact!

The running costs of shooting film will be high, because now I have to pay for each exposure. But then again this is a hobby – the most important part is that I enjoy it. The feeling of seeing the new slides on the light table is quite simply unbeatable, I’ve missed it from the very beginning when I switched to digital. You can think of it this way – with film you have to finish the picture before you press the shutter, so you better make sure you got everything right. With digital, you can snap and check the LCD, and try again… and then download the RAWs and start working on them. It kind of dilutes the sense of achievement even if the picture turns out to be great. I’m not very disciplined so if an easy road is offered to me (like checking the histogram instead of double checking exposure beforehand), I’ll take it. Slide film doesn’t offer any such shortcuts.

And let’s face it – digital captures may be cheap, but the digital cameras sure ain’t!

A 5D mkII costs about 25000 SEK and a used 5D (mk I) costs about 10000 SEK. I’m getting an EOS 3, which is roughly the film equivalent of a 5D (mk whatever). Back when it was still sold as new, it cost about 12-13K but I’m now getting it for about 10% of the original price. Before I switched to digital, I had an EOS 5 which was 3′s predecessor. The 5′s can still be found and they would be even cheaper than a 3, but I didn’t want the same camera I once sold myself and the price isn’t an issue in any case, not when people are just trying to get rid of their old kit.

Having said that, my decision has nothing to do with money (other than realising that it isn’t such a big investment at all). It’s just a desire to try something new – or old, as the case may be!