The Lost Art of the Negative
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A shelf of digital cameras is not something my eyes would linger upon, any more than a shelf of mason jars. Sure, they can take great pictures. Heck, mobile phones can take great pictures, too. But if someone says "Let me show you a few of the photos I took on vacation", it offers a chance to sit on the couch with someone and share a moment. As for "Let me scroll my phone through the 500 photos I took on vacation" ... not so much.
For context, I've taken quite a few photographs, developing most of them myself. The whole process was intriguing, from choosing a lense and a filter, to framing the photos and choosing exposure settings, to developing the film, to printing a contact sheet, to deciding on the 2 or 3 images on the roll that I wanted to print on paper. The limitations at every stage and the labour involved were part of the appeal. And when, every once in a while, a great photograph came from the experience, it was a little bit of magic.
But, again, I'm old. I guess those in the digital age would list reasons why that is fun and rewarding.
You can and I do run my digital camera within these rails artificially. It's more fun!
(Edit: just checked my mirrorless - it's at 1875 shutter activations and it has been around the world at least once)
Which is to say, whilst those constraints were / are real, they are mostly to do with money, and those who weren't constrained by that got the best results.
But most of the good shots I take are good because I put time into them. Or did a lot of research first. Or went and stood in front of interesting stuff.
I admire your attention to craft and detail, and am glad it gives you so much pleasure. My great-grandfather was a keen amateur photographer, and I've inherited some beautiful photos that he shot (and printed) 100 or more years ago: one's within view of my desk right now. I hope your descendants appreciate the artifacts you create as much as I do his.
To be honest though, trying to squeeze every bit of information out of the optical system is not usually particularly important, and cameras that you can easily hold up to an eye with your hands are usually more convenient than larger cameras. You can get amazing pictures out of any film SLR or any digital SLR from the past 15 years which you can print up to quite large sizes with sufficient resolution. The medium format cameras pictured in the article, or some current state-of-the-art digital camera, will get you slightly better poster size image, but most photographers aren't making fine-art posters.
Twin-lens reflex cameras, view cameras, pinhole cameras, polaroids, etc. can be fun to take pictures with though, just for the novelty. Every type of camera requires its own process and makes pictures with its own point of view. Square negatives take a different approach to framing compared to rectangular ones and a TLR around your neck is located much lower than face height. With a view camera, you always have a tripod and each picture takes a lot of work, but the camera lets you tilt the lens relative to the film plane, which changes the slice of the field of view in focus. Etc.
Modern sensors are indeed challenging the resolution of film, but only because we stopped developing scanning technology as well as chemical film formulations. A 60mp full frame sensor is more or less equivalent to a standard colour 35mm film frame, but all those photos taken on sensors with lower resolution are stuck at 24mp, 20mp, 12mp, 10mp, and less. But even a 60mp sensor can't match the resolution of https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/ so we have a long way to go in the digital realm. The largest digital sensor you can buy or (more realistically) rent is a 150mp from Phase One and that's only 6x4.5cm, the smallest medium format frame. Digital can't currently match anything above 6x4.5 and that's what will keep film going for a while.
Another issue with digital is the lack of latitude. It was pitched against colour positive slide film when film was still popular, because that was the pinnacle of colour reproduction (and still is) but it suffers from the same issues as colour positive film--you really have to nail your exposure. However, when you see a well-lit, sharp, properly developed 8x10 colour slide film, you really don't care for digital the amount of detail beats the crap out of the highest rest sensor. I shoot Fuji GFX100 and while it is an excellent camera, it cannot easily do what I can do with my 4x5 camera in terms of movements unless I buy a Cambo Actus.
I really wish camera manufacturers kept making film cameras, because both technologies, digital and film have their uses and there is no need to abandon one for the other, they can happily exist together. We don't argue that watercolour should be ditched for oils or vice versa, why not keep making both digital and film cameras?
It's somewhat comparable to the markets for slide rules or professional drawing compasses, which have both completely disappeared.
> There is no market for digital sensor simulations
Digital sensors strive to neutrally record as much data as possible about the scene. The creative appearance part is done in software later. You're comparing apples to oranges.
There's also no market because simulating a shitty 1998 digital camera with low resolution and JPEG artifacts is not hard to accomplish using Photoshop if you really want.
That comparison is not fair. Drawing compasses are less complex in terms of mechanical and optical design and manufacturing than film cameras.
> The creative appearance part is done in software later. You're comparing apples to oranges.
You are right, digital is designed to have no opinionated look. It is sterile. And funnily enough most popular LUTs are simulating old film stocks.
> It is sterile.
A good Photoshop operator (or with more time and effort and less capability, a good dye transfer printer with a working darkroom, starting from the most "sterile" negative you can imagine) will blow any film stock you like totally out of the water.
You like having a large company's engineers force their creative preferences about color interpretation onto your art. Other artists prefer to deliberately make those choices for themselves.
Neither workflow is inherently better or worse, but some approaches are better suited to some personalities and artistic goals.
I'd guess(?) that you might be able to do more information reconstruction from analog + lense parameters + film parameters than digital + lense parameters?
Simply by virtue of digital being quantitized at some point.
(But signal processing is far outside my area of expertise, so honestly curious)
Also, some restoration of old black and white films with AI upscaling try to counteract bad early films or films that degraded.
Still, the possibility to extract more information is there, which is a plus for film. With AI, I feel the opposite. I like it that it's fun, but I dislike it that AI creates new information. What's again exciting for me is the possibility of extracting information from a moving picture from movements, and over time. I think these two angles are currently under-utilized, but hold much potential, once we discover more techniques and throw more processing power over the problem.
The same thing is true of "raw" digital files; manipulation by the engineers is involved, even if the photographer does nothing.
Same could be said about a simple smartphone photo, but they hardly hold the same respect.
I personally get the same feeling, but as hard as I try to define where the "honest analog" ends and the "manipulated uninteresting lies" begins, the more blurry it becomes. At the end of the day, there is no honest representation at all, as many people manipulated the analogue photos as well.
Most bird would probably think our pictures are quite unfaithful of what they see, and most bees would argue that the pictures of the flowers we take always clearly lack the UV patterns found on so many flower petals.
So it’s subjective all the way through the stack (Down to the brain’s interpretation of the signals)
I have medium format cameras, a few 35mm, and I take them with me from time to time when on trips for example. There is certainly much more care per shot since I have so few (especially with the medium format that has only 12 shots per roll).
For better or worse, the anticipation, waiting for the film to be processed, is something of course not shared with digital.
And further I linger over the photos more afterward because of how precious they are. And when you capture a "happy accident" — perhaps an interesting, artistic looking light flare in the right place, the film shot becomes even more precious.
Consider this about the original slide: it was physically there with the photographer when the photograph was taken.
It is stained with the chemically-captured energy of the actual light that bounced off the subject, in a form that you can visualise with your naked eye.
If that is not perfect I don’t know what is.
(Yeah, the dynamic range sucks compared to digital. But then some digital cameras suck compared to others)
(I need to build a darkroom so I can print again)
But the thing that really hooked me deep into photography was 6x6 transparencies from a Rolleicord. Velvia, incident light meter, sunny day, job done.
Downvotes on my earlier comment suggest that people haven't had this experience: no matter how great, practical and useful digital is, there is something mesmerising and emotional about a great transparency.
These days I get my visceral buzz from assembling my own simple lenses.
But the same is true for art inks, I imagine.
"Return"? How does this work? You can't make a print without the negative, so why not give them to the customer in the same envelope? Why would the customer need to come back to get the negatives? What am I missing?
... Aaah, that's what I was missing:
> In the digital age, most shops where people get their film developed will scan the negatives into a computer and just email the photographs to their customers.
Ok. So the question that remains is why? Why shoot on film today if you're not interested in keeping the negatives and printing yourself?
Digital photography is incredibly convenient and incredibly powerful; you can simulate any film in post if you shoot raw. It's completely understandable that some people would still prefer to own the whole process and shoot on film, but doing it like this, halfway, and keeping just the scans seems very strange.
It can also be about the process. I know when I shoot film I'm fully conscious that I've got only 36 exposures, I've got a set sensitivity, and my film stock reacts a certain way in certain situations. Limitations can be fun to work with.
All that said, I always take my negatives, but it's understandable why a lot of people don't. I don't think it's a big deal.
And waist-level shooting is very nice. I don’t have a digital camera with an articulating screen that would let me compare experiences, but my TLR is a great way to get different angles and shoot street photography without being as obnoxious about it.
I like 1) the look, 2) the wait ( months of wondering if I'll have any good pictures of my vacation) and mostly 3) the constraint of only being able to take a few pictures. I only have a few pictures so I look at them a lot and I really enjoy each (good) one
/s
My ham radio instructor (VE3XT, RIP) talked about how tube amps for audio were on the upswing at the time (2000s) because of the “warm” sounds. He was an RF transmission engineer, and it was bizarre for him that people were shelling out money for what was just distortion. A lot of aspects of his life’s work was seeking ways of replicating signal distortion-free, and he saw it going out the window.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that every generation will try to connect with a fading medium. This must be human nature. I’ve also realized that my life doesn’t improve when I pass judgement.
I fondly recall the computers and games from then but all of that objectively sucks today
There were tons of stupid things invented in my childhood, but we only kept the „good“ ones around.
Similarly old stuff seems antiquated because we found better new solutions in many cases.
And the majority of new inventions is unnecessary, we'll see in a decade or so which ones are gonna stick
Yes, that's mostly what it is. It's basically how people grow up and react to change. And there are many biases at play, like the recency bias, where the current events seem more impactful than the past events, or the survivorship bias of the old refrigerator of grandma, chugging along all these years, they don't make stuff like this anymore. And the funny thing is that despite bias, there is good information in the experiences as well, because things really do change over time, and certain things really do have certain upsides, which were lost when the thing changed.
I shoot, process, and scan my own film, both color and B&W, and I don’t have any special facilities. Just a sink and a table…
As for environnemental concerns, B&W film is pretty straightforward chemically, and the developer I use is just ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and phenidone. It’s non-toxic. The fixer gets full of silver, but I take that to a lab periodically and they put it through a silver recovery system. I think the environmental impact of the film I shoot is dwarfed by all the other things I do in life (burning fossil fuels, using water in a desert, taking and excreting prescription medicines, etc., etc.)
I doubt most digital camera owners ever shoot enough to get to the point where there’s an environmental net benefit compared with film.
This is one of the reasons why I only shoot with secondhand digital kit now.
ETA to whoever downvoted me: I accept you think I might be talking made-up nonsense! But to get an idea of what I mean, I would urge you to look at why there are so many Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.
It’s just my instinct based on what I know of the processes involved in manufacturing the main bits that are different between even a late era film SLR and a contemporary mirrorless camera —- displays, high density batteries, sensors, additional microcontrollers and usually two powerful CPUs.
The nastiest bit is the sensors, which are very large chips.
But given the sheer amount of electronics in it and what we know of the impacts of toxic waste pollution in Taiwan and other silicon manufacturing centres, and even just CO2 emissions, it seems likely to me that the contents of a digital camera are likely worth hundreds of rolls of film and their prints in terms of pollution impact once you consider all the processes that are involved in controlling that pollution.
The average secondhand consumer digital camera in my experience has shot in the low thousands, where that data is easily found still; it’s getting harder to find shutter activation data and it may not really be a useful guide anymore. But in the DSLR era it was normal to find secondhand kit with use equivalent to 50 to 80 rolls of film at the very most.
This is why secondhand camera companies and hire shops are so important, because they extend the useful life of what is otherwise e-waste. And I think there's a lot of delayed e-waste out there; people who own DSLRs but haven't chucked them because they are occasionally still better than their phones.