Kodak Is Hiring Film Technicians: ‘We Cannot Keep Up with Demand’
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But exactly this sort of internet ‘wisdom’ was putting me off trying film around 15 years ago, and yet these days I see more people carrying film cameras than dedicated DSLRs.
If you’re shooting color-reversal film - say, something like Portra from Kodak, then believe me, digital cannot match that exposure curve, and the beauty of those colors.
I shoot about half digital - half film these days, because of the cost. But it’s the film images that are truly special.
Scanning in RGB 16 bit definitely helps with color banding. However, it's kinda like having access to a video camera that records in 16K, but you're only going to be able to view it on a 4K display. What's really interesting is if you use an old film recorder like a Lasergraphics LFR M3 (something in the $25,000 range in 1998) and don't mind dropping to a max resolution of 8K and 12 bits per channel, you can somewhat preserve that RGB16 image back to film.
Like yeah, this was professional level equipment in the tens of thousands of dollars in the late 90's, but some of the consumer technologies still haven't caught up. It speaks volumes to how limited the human eye is and how much technology surpassed it a long time ago.
Yeah, I can't do astrophotography very well, but my shots on film are a lot more considered.
After a while you can pre-guess the exposure settings for a particular shot before even looking through the viewfinder, but point the camera a few degrees to the side and you have to reset your exposure for the new lighting.
It's frustrating for the first few years and initially you'll miss many shots but when you nail The Shot you feel that you really 'own' it because everything leading to it was your decision.
Eventually it becomes second-nature and you'll be spinning the settings dials without conscious effort.
I took a shot of a vibrant orange car and imported it into Lightroom. The "embedded preview" looked way better than the Lightroom rendering. Even after half an hour of fiddling, I couldn't get the orange of the car to have both the saturation, the saturation dynamic range, and the metallic "3D look" that the Fuji preview had. And this is disregarding the balance of the rest of the scene (which also looked better on the Fuji). I ended up giving up and using Lightroom's Fuji color mode.
To be clear, we've only reached the point of parity in photography and film in the last few years and only then with expensive, state of the art equipment. It's not yet possible to achieve the dynamic range of good analog with today's mobile phones or mid-range DSLRs. Just for starters you need to capture more than 14 stops of dynamic range which is still only found at the extreme high-end of digital. Even when you've digitally sampled the photons with sufficient fidelity, it requires quite a bit of skill to process it appropriately.
Also, honestly, even with my fancy mirrorless camera, I usually shoot in program or aperture priority mode, depending on how much control I want over the image.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/274846-USA/Kodak_1884...
I’m always skeptical of any story about film really coming back, because it’s just so pricey. And notably this repackaged press release doesn’t quote any actual numbers. But, well, maybe I’m wrong, someone opened a new film development boutique in town, maybe film will hold on just enough to be viable.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/05/20/with-bellows-film-la...
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/585497-USA/Kodak_6031...
Ektar is a more realistic product that the film nerd would be shooting, the processing is less arduous, and much cheaper than processing slide film.
Processing is cheaper for C-41 vs E-6 as well, it'll cost you between 10 and 20 dollars for develop and scan.
I prefer film because I learned how to be a photographer on it, and it looks just how I want it to look out of the box. Beyond that, certain kinds of photography, like long exposure just look better on film.
EDIT: Now that I've read up on Greig Fraser's reasoning, it makes a lot more sense for Dune! https://ymcinema.com/2021/12/03/dune-was-shot-on-alexa-lf-tr...
Yes. They did that because they didn't have digital equipment suitable for cameras and projectors. This is much crazier.
I used to be a huge film photographer as well, back to high school days in the darkroom and getting my hands smelly and watching images appear in developer bath. I too have nostalgia. I was entertained by the online meme/question where someone asked "what is the 'red room' in Stranger Things?", ah these youngsters nowadays.
But objectively, digital sensors can have their color profiles / output remapped to most film "looks", even adding grain, and of course you're not spending $ on film with every shot and waiting days to get the film back. Aside from if you need the medium/large format resolution, (and the nostalgia / anticipation / excitement of the image) there is no objectively better thing about film, is there?
I really get puzzled by people on r/analogcommunity sharing their "finds" of old expired film and wanting to go out and shoot on it. Boggles the mind. You take images hopefully to keep, and wanting to do that with unknown film to save $5 and see what comes out, is... exciting?
(I'm sure this is a religious-level debate, I'm not imagining that this will be resolved here, but at least some enjoyment in discussing it.)
Given what I can get a used, very high quality 35mm camera body and lenses for... that's an awful lot of film and development cost before you start coming out ahead there.
As far as the people shooting expired film? that can have a neat unique look all of its own, that said, most old color film if you over expose it (treat an ISO 100 as an ISO 50) you'll get decent results.
But yes, modern technology is just too damn convenient — I say, having just finished listening to an album on a streaming service, despite having a vinyl copy of it less than a metre away from where I sit, and two working turntables less than a metre away from where I sit.
They do it because it's a challenging and fun hobby.
A pixel accumulates light until hard cutoff point where it doesn’t hold information anymore. Thus probably the most important advice for someone coming from film to digital is that, as a rule, you want to underexpose since blowing out highlights is ruinous (and as a result of underexposition you’ll have to pull up the darks which leads to increased noise).
In contrast, the way grains of negative film are activated by light and result in gradual highlight rolloff makes it possible to make delicate high key shots and generally makes film safer for candid life snaps even if you misjudge exposure.
(Another aspect is that you get a look over which you have no control. It’s as much of a drawback as it is a benefit: you focus on the subject and the scene more than on how you want to make it look in post. Some use expired film for a more unique look.)
Artistically, I understand and highly appreciate the value of making creative choices to utilize historical or nostalgic treatments such as analog sounding hiss or vinyl tracking in audio. In video, I enjoy seeing a director use a "fat" composite video look consistent with 1970s analog recording on a 2-inch Ampex VTR. Yet, having actually started out using that type of equipment as our only way to create, it was a tremendous limitation that reduced our capabilities and the creative choices that were even possible. Spending long hours producing top-notch audio in professional 24-track analog studio only to bring it home on consumer cassette tape was demoralizing. I remember sadly telling my family "This is sounds so much more amazing in the studio off the master tape. I wish you could hear what we made." And I wished I could hear what I made in my car or anywhere other than work.
Photography and videography have followed a similar progression and it's just strange. Today, I capture my photos with a 50 megapixel digital camera with 14 stops of dynamic range and a full lossless workflow (no lossy compression). I capture my audio at 24-bit 96 khz to have plenty of creative headroom in post. Sure, I sometimes creatively choose to use a 1960s lens on that camera or a lovely old studio mic on the front end of my audio workflow because I want that look or sound. But it's a choice I make on a creative spectrum that's 1,000x wider than being stuck with analog generational artifacts being literally "the best" we could manage.
Digital photography has done wonders for the average person by way of the smartphone. However, I would argue that except in very few instances, it hasn't necessarily made professional photography better (in terms of the final photo). By the way, I'm not saying that it hasn't brought some improvements to the process (it certainly has). There has been some phenomenal photographs produced before digital ever hit the scene. It has made it perhaps easier for the professional in that they can take more photographs in a specific span of time or have more dials to tune the style, but those things don't make the photographs automatically better.
A counter argument to this is that the limitations forced better artistship. For instance before music recording studies had autotune and easy overdub or cut-and-paste, musicians had to be able to play things correctly for the whole song.
I'm in my mid 30's, and have been into photography since my early teens, but photography was digital from the start for me. I've sold and exhibited my work, but it's a hobby, never my job.
In the last few years, I picked up a pure manual medium format rangefinder and a slide projector. 90+% of what I've shot on film is slides, and I generally don't make a high quality scan of them.
For going out where I know what I want, and go out to shoot something purely focussed on quality and flexibility of the work, I shoot digital. I'll shoot a few hundred photos in a day, and then procrastinate about choosing selections and going through and editing them. For technically complex photography (I shoot both Underwater and Infrared) being able to evaluate results immediately and tweak lets me get results I would be unable to on film.
But I enjoy taking out my film camera when I'm going out casually. The medium format rangefinder workflow makes me think through the photo more. Being limited to 8 shots per roll forces me to be intentional and selective about what I'm shooting. Not having immediate feedback takes away the pressure to check out and iterate on the work, so I can enjoy the time and what I'm doing other than photography, and be more in the moment. The fixed "artifact" of the film makes it feel done in a way digital doesn't - I can't alter a slide beyond basic cropping.
I don't shoot film for colour profile, or even resolution - I shoot it for how it productively artistically constraints me.
Yeah, part of the fun of shooting with film really is not knowing what you caught until later. Expired film can increase the odds that something comes out wrong, but personally I only use it for toy camera photography where the worse something comes out the better it sometimes is and I expect a lot of what I shot won't be worth keeping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6VFy1Mx_g
I'll mention 2 specific points that I don't think are mentioned in the video: (1) I'm sick and tired of all the digital tracking, (2) I don't have to have ANY batteries of any kind to take pictures with my old Nikon F2 35mm camera. Before anyone makes the claim about it needing batteries for the light meter to work -- I don't need a light meter to take good photos.
Really I wouldn't bother (but when done properly it did turn out some pretty decent B&W prints.
I've had similar experiences albeit only two instances where 'good' film was developed by commercial operators who put the films through the wrong processes. With much Photoshopping I actually got usable photos but they certainly weren't pretty.
That's different to experimenting. Years ago I worked for a television station that had a huge Eastmancolor processing lab attracted (we processed millions of feet of movie stock per month). Running various 'non-standard' test strips though the baths proved very interesting. We produced many strange effects (it was an excellent way of getting to understand how color emulsions work).
Incidentally I still shoot film myself occasionally, Ilford B&W on an old Praktica w/ Zeiss lens. It's slow, painful, I screw up 1/4 of the shots and occasionally destroy a whole roll while developing it. But it's fun. When it's no longer fun, out comes the Z50...
I prefer the crutch of 12 bit RAW and Lightroom which usually gets me out of the same sticky situation :)
Quite the opposite. Reversal ("slide", "chrome") films like Kodachrome are more forgiving of underexposure, while negative films are more forgiving of overexposure.
Back in the heyday of chromes, it was common to slightly underexpose them to get more color saturation.
Wait: how could you possibly do a double-blind test? They'd surely notice the difference between a slide projector and a computer monitor. A digital scan of a Kodachrome slide is not the same as a Kodachrome slide projected with a good projector. The dynamic range from a projector is far greater than any standard monitor is capable of.
The digital projectors used in theatres are getting pretty close. A standard desktop monitor? No way.
*There are a few other methods, such as prisms and stacked sensors, but in practice, Bayer/similar filters give better performance and that's what commercial cameras use.
I guess people would probably say similar things about shooting on film though :)
https://leho.blastpuppy.com/~aloha/photos/
I can do what I do on digital, but not as well.
I think for many people the question is not whether you could recreate the look with a digital camera. Instead you already get the look you chose by selecting your film baked into the image without having to do any post-processing.
I don't think it's purely digital, there's a lot of disgust with what we've done with consumer electronics as well (turning them into surveillance devices to collect behavioral surplus and then turn around and market to us), and a reaction to about 15 years of ever-increasing "Everything on your black mirror!" pushes from every corner of the modern world. Of course, every one of those apps is hoovering up absolutely as much data as it possibly can in the process.
To more and more people who were adults before this transition happened, there's a growing sense sense (certainly in my circles) of "Nah, the old ways were better." It is no business of anyone what I care to listen to in the evening. And with a record, tape, or CD (assuming no SmartTV spying on room audio), that's true. Streaming, hah. It's all being analyzed and prodded.
One can get into the usual pissing matches about records vs CDs vs streaming vs lossless streaming vs... whatever else is out there, but they rather miss the point as far as I'm concerned. The experience of listening to a record, with the processes involved, and typically sitting down to listen to it specifically vs just having it on as background music, is different. It's a very different way to experience music from the never-ending algorithmic playlists, though those are interesting for discovering new groups. You also don't (usually...) have the "analysis paralysis" problem of infinite options.
And we see this with the ever-increasing record (LP) sales. Vinyl now outsells CDs [0]. You can argue about why it shouldn't be, but clearly "the market has spoken," and vinyl is cool again. It doesn't seem to be a flash in the pan either, as the count has been going up since about 2012 every year, by large jumps.
Again, argue how you will about audio quality, but "curling up with a vinyl album in the evening in a kerosene lantern lit room" is a very, very different experience than listening to the same album on some streaming service on a modern digital platform.
I view the return to film as something similar - it encourages a very different way of engaging with photography. Shots aren't "free," which means you have different constraints, and history shows that a lot of art happens when given constraints.
I've also been seeing (and experimenting with...) a rejection of "all the LED lights" - especially in the evenings. The human body is independently sensitive to blues in light from how we perceive color, so one can have a fairly warm color temperature but still have a lot of blue in the spectrum, and we know that blue messes with human sleep. So there's at least a few people I know (myself included) messing with going back to incandescent light sources in the evening once the sun goes down. Lanterns, incandescent bulbs on dimmers, etc. The goal is to see how much a hard removal of "blue" before bed changes, and... I notice a difference. If I've been away from screens, with just incandescent sources, for a few hours before bed? I seem to sleep better and wake up better rested. I'm far from the only person to notice this, and I intend to continue the experiment through the winter.
But at this point, betting on the analog seems a good option. Digital, especially the consumer electronics side, has been weighed by many and found wanting.
[o]: https://vacationvinyl.com/how-many-vinyl-records-are-sold-ea...
Processing the film may be comparatively easy but deep down color emulsions are a true wonder of chemical engineering. Not only do chemists have to be familiar with color theory but also they have to find stable color coupling dyes that bond with the silver halides (a difficult task with many compromises) as well as work through a reversal process and still remain stable not to mentioned the fact that this has to be compatible with the separate process of 'doping' emulsions to both increase and balance the speeds of the layers (each of which is different). Optimizing each of these competing demands is almost a complete branch of chemical engineering itself. If that's not enough, couple it all with the the need to stop color cross-coupling between layers (which is akin to cross-modulation in signal processing and muddies colors and which cannot be removed by simple color balancing)—and the incorporation of stabilizers whilst simultaneously keeping the silver halide crystals very small throughout the process (to reduce grain)—and also the incorporation of chemicals to prevent and mold etc.
Even then that's not the end of the story. It's a great shame that most photographers haven a clue what a gem of technology that's in their possession when clasping a roll of 36 exposure color film.
Now don't think that that the chemical technology of color film is now obsolete as it isn't. Even if color films were now a complete dead end each of its chemical processes live on in other areas of chemistry.