Getting that film 'look'

The only way to get the 'look' of film is to shoot film. Yes I know there are a lot of ways to cheat using digital with plugins such as VSCO, Alien Skin Exposure, Nik Colour Efex and Dxo but really if you want something to look like film, shoot with film.

But its not practical, cheap or easy to shoot with film. That is kind of the point, film looks so much better because it is a process that takes skill to get right. Having a simulation is always just going to be that, a simulation.

Coming from a guitarist background, the same analogies and simulations abound in that world as well. Digital effects, modelling transistor amps computer programs and so on try to make guitarists feel like they're playing some of the most famous amps and stomp-boxes ever to be made. But the thing is they are always just that, simulations, some very accurate apart from the touch sensitivity of a hand wired and lovingly built analogue tube amp set up nice and loud, the pre-amp valves clipping into overdrive and the power-amp valves being driven to saturation with not a transistor or microchip in sight.

Talk to any good guitarist and they'll talk your head off about why valve amps and analogue effects are just better than anything digital to the point that the word digital is vilified as a hateful term. Spat out through clenched teeth.

They're right as well. Hook up a guitar to a great amp with a great speaker cab and push it to saturation and the noises that come out are to put it bluntly 'orgasmic'.


All the best rock songs in the history of rock, the ones that really move your soul were all written and played on analogue equipment.

Staying in the music world, lets take it even further. Ever hear of a Steinway or a Stradavarius? They're famous for a reason. Now ask yourself who in the classical realm would play anything digital?

Real musicians use real tools, handcrafted by physical means using real materials and most importantly blood, sweat and tears. Digital anything is just not the same, it is soulless, no tree was grown or a hundred years exposed to the elements and shaped by the earth for it to then be taken and skillfully worked by a crafts person into an instrument that brings lasting joy and love. Instruments made from wood have their entire history from the creation of the plantation of the seed to the last coat of lacquer.

What in comparison does digital have? A mathematician programmer trying to recreate that life process with a bunch of numbers and code.

It just can't be done.

This is how I feel about film vs. digital. Do I use digital, yes of course. Do I try to emulate what I do on film, no.

Film is a chemical process, it uses physical elements that are a part of nature, a part of life. Craftspeople using silver dug up from mines by people, cattle raised and nurtured for by people. Even though at the end of its process you are presented with a roll of brown or grey flat material that records light and sometime comes in a little plastic or metal canister that doesn't look like much, it is the culmination of thousands of hours of life from the various ingredients to form into that product that creates the magic we call film.

Digital is the result of engineers and mathematicians trying to emulate the above processes. The one and for me most important variable they never accounted for is the life essence, the hours of blood, sweat and tears that go into a physical product make it better.

I could go into numbers and stats and explain that the latest cameras capture far more detail in their RAW files and have far more flexibility in their ISO ranges and can shoot faster, longer, in harder and more difficult conditions than film could ever do. Digital can and is more 'perfect' than film could ever dream to be but it lacks the spark, it lacks the imperfectness of life that film has over digital.

It is in the minutiae of imperfection that digital can not and never will be able to reproduce. Sure it can emulate it but it can never be it.

As with everything now, good enough or near enough is acceptable. A digital emulation is acceptable over the real thing. Because is cheaper, quicker, easier (delete as appropriate).

Going back a moment to the start of this post where I said I do use digital, it would seem that like guitarists and a lot of photographers I know I would villify digital as well. I don't, I love it but and here's the kicker I use it in a way that plays to its strengths. I don't yearn for it to fill my desire to see a filmic look, I use it and play to its strengths, its perfectness, its ability to use crazy ISO's, its ability to shoot in places and ways that film would struggle or find impossible to do.


I guess what I've been trying to say is use the right tool for the right job, you want it to look like film, use film. You want it to be amazing and do things you could never do, use digital.

I'd like to add in another key in the quest for filmic imperfection. Lenses.





Lenses for a truer film look will be in an upcoming post, for now though I'll leave you all with this picture. Is it digital or film?

Update: for an alternate view, check out this post from Chase Jarvis' website for a more in depth review of the various software emulations.

Technicolor CineStyle.

The last post on installing the EOS utility was in main to tell you all about this amazing creative tool the great people at Technicolor have given all us Canon EOS users for free.

Its called the Cinestyle Looks and I heartily recommend downloading it and using it.

When using a DSLR for stills as well as video we use RAW because we want to capture as much information in the shot as we can. If you're not using RAW, why not? So we use RAW to capture as much detail and information at reciprocity for our scene. Sometimes, that isn't enough. Sometimes the shadows are still a little too dark and the highlight blow out where you don't want them to.

About a year ago I bumped into the Technicolor site while I was doing some research on colour grading for digital video. I basically wanted to know the best way to apply a mood to a scene with as little post processing as possible. The cinestlye looks seemed to be a very quick way to add that mood to a shot.

Looking around the site I found that there are profiles you can download to your Canon EOS that allow you to get the most out of these looks. Its called the Cinestyle Profile and is on the right hand side of the page.
It is a free download and as you can see what it does is maximise the level of details in both the shadow and highlight areas.

Now unfortunately this isn't a magic pill that will make your images look stunning but it is another tool to help us creative professionals to make better work.

As it gives us a wide latitude of detail and using RAW it gives us a flat looking image that is ripe for processing to a look or feel of your choice.

Even importing the RAW's with Adobe Bridge or Lightroom, the pictures will look flat and lifeless (especially  so on the camera) but that's good as it allows us the creative freedom to place our black point where we want to have the shadow detail better than with the standard Canon profiles. The same goes for the highlights.

Now as I said its not a magic pill, so don't expect to shortcut your usual metering. Not that you should ever shortcut on metering. Getting your 18% grey in the right place and your white balance set correctly will help when using this tool massively as the wider the range of tones and details, the better the end result will be when you have post processed your image. Whether its a quick tone adjustment in Camera Raw, or a full on 2 hour edit using all the tools at your disposal, having more to work with on the original image will help no end.

Canon EOS Utility software and installing it

If you've ever tried to install the Canon EOS utility software from the web you'll know how much of a pain in the ass it is to get it.

For some retarded reason Canon decided that you can only have the EOS utility if you have the CD. Now this is fine when you first buy your camera but, over time, CD's get lost, broken and sometimes just plain won't read (that happened to me). 

You can waste your time, money and nerves trying to talk to a support drone but the abridged version of what they'll say is "you can buy a new CD from..." Yeah thanks for that Canon. Less than helpful. I already have the licence to use the software so why would I want to waste my time and money on buying a new one?

There are thankfully ways around this. This is all done at your own risk. I have no liability if you fuck things up and kill your PC. I'll be using windows 8 for this guide. There are links to Win 7 how to's and unfortunately if you're on XP, you'll just have to hope one of these two guides help you.

• Download the utility.
• On your PC hover over the magnifying glass on the top right of the screen.
• Click it and type Regedit.
• Once open, click through the warnings and open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• Go to SOFTWARE and open that
• If you are lucky there will be a key called Canon in there. If not, right click on SOFTWARE and choose New > Key.
• Type Canon as the value. This will create what looks like a folder in Regedit.
• Right click on the Canon key you just created and type EOS Utility
• Then scroll down a bit to find a key called WOW6432NODE
• Open this and if there's a key called Canon in there all well, if not create one as you did above by right clicking on WOW6432NODE
• Open the Canon key and right click on this, create a new key called EOS Utility in there.
• Close Regedit.
• Run your downloaded file.

If all has gone well it will install itself onto your system. All that remains for you is to plug in your mini USB into your camera and use the utility.

If you don't like the metro interface, luckily the utility installs a shortcut on the desktop.

I hope that's helpful to all you win 8 users.

Eschewing digital

Readers of this blog will be aware of my love of film, colour c41, E6 transparencies, b&w, the chemical processes of silver halides suspended in the microscopic layers between the base and top layers of what we call film has always fascinated me.

So recently I made the big decision to drop digital imaging altogether. The media yaps on about film being dead but more and more I see photographers turning back to film. Why? Because its 'better', not better in terms of high ISO or cleanness of the files but better because of its responses to our world.
Digital is just that 1's and 0's cold, clinical, exacting. Boring.
Film is made of the earth we live on silver, gelatin, chemicals derived from mother Earth. What better way to capture it?

For the longest time while shooting digital, I'd always have a nagging feeling knowing hours of retouching and photoshop work lay ahead of me. With film I never had that, we did what we did on set to make the picture right and out it came, work in the darkroom resulting in a beautiful print.

So I have sold all my digital camera gear and bought...

A Bronica ETRS with 75mm f2.8 lens.
An extra film back and speedgrip.
The next things on my list to buy are a 150mm and 500mm lens and a 40mm and 60mm lens.
I'm going to incorporate my normal lighting styles with this medium format camera and with the amazing resolution of scanned 6x4.5 film, I am really looking forward to 'going big'.

The real cost of shooting digital vs. film based SLR systems.

This is something I've been wondering about for a while. Time after time on all the blogs I follow, they all crow about film is dying, film is dead, you can't run film anymore, no more film.

To me it just sounds like marketing baloney for the pro digital. So I'm going to run up a price comparison between the two systems.

I'm going to use Nikon as the basis of the comparison, not because I favour them over any other manufacturer but because in 35mm they are the only manufacturer still producing a pro level body in both Digital and Film.


For the purposes of this comparison I shall concentrate on 35mm and take into consideration the minimum of lenses to get the widest range of jobs done. I won't cover specialist equipment in this review, just the items needed to get a typical job done. I will explore the total cost of ownership and cost per shot for both systems.


All prices as of 10/12/2012

Film camera system.

• Nikon F6 body only : £1,499
• Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II: £1,605
• Nikon 24-70mm f2.8G ED AF-S: £1,235
• Nikon 14-24mm f2.8G ED AF-S: £1,305

This gives us a total of £5644

Digital camera system.

• Nikon D4 body only: £4,329
• Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II: £1,605
• Nikon 24-70mm f2.8G ED AF-S: £1,235
• Nikon 14-24mm f2.8G ED AF-S: £1,305

 This gives us a total of £8474

This is all just for the hardware, I've not included any extras like batteries or consumables. As you can see just to get up and running with pro level gear, the film system is already £2,830 cheaper.

But surely those costs will level out when you include film because film is expensive.

Well lets look at the other side of being a pro photographer, the consumables and software.

Film consumables 

• Fuji Provia 100F slide film 10 pack: £88.00 360 shots.
• Fujilab process, mount print and scans per roll: £25.99 for the 10 rolls above £259.90
• Computer with 3tb nas: £2,531.94

Computer system for the film setup is mainly for networking, advertising, showing work to clients and so on.   It has an NAS backup and service contract.

Digital consumables

• 4x XQD memory card 32GB: £720
• 4x Compact flash memory card 32GB: £436
• XQD card reader: £36.24
• CF card reader: £21.49
• Computer: £6,254.95 includes 2 monitors, 32gb ram, 4x3tb drives, backup 3tb drive
• Networked Storage 4x 2tb drives: £1678.80
• Photoshop Lightroom 4: £103.88

Computer system for the digital system includes a fully specced Mac Pro with all the options and service contract. The extra spending on NAS backups is because digital needs extra backups over film as unlike film there is no hardcopy original. Using Lightroom on for the digital system is for all the editing a professional would do without going into the heavy lifting of specialist photomanipulation editing done in programs like Photoshop.

 

So taking those raw numbers and making a 3 year ownership out of them looks a little like this:

Judging each job the photographer takes 360 shots (£347.90) and gets 4 jobs a week (£1,391.60) not including Xmas that is £69,580 on film and processing costs per year. Over the three year ownership that is £208,740.

These numbers are retail costs and I doubt a professional user of film would pay that so as a bulk deal £100,000 isn't too far out of the realm of possibility. Doing self developing will bring the costs down even further but that is a lot more research.

So lets see what the TCO (total cost ownership) is over three years for each system.

Digital: £17,725.36

Film: £108175.94

Each of the systems is rated for 150,000 shots so the CPS of each system comes out to:

Digital: £0.12 per shot.

Film: £0.72 per shot.

None of these figures include breakages or accidents or insurance, these are just the base costs of what it costs to press the shutter.

I have to say I knew the film system would come in as more expensive but as to how much more expensive, it has shocked me.

Looking at the film and developing costs, it would definitely be in your interest to invest in a pro developing machine and source your chemicals and film directly from Fuji and build a dedicated film processing/ printing room in a studio which as a pro photographer you are most likely to have.

Totally off the subject of photography

and onto my other love, food. Well good food anyway. This vegetarian recipe uses the shiitake mushrooms as a meat substitute. Feel free to change them for a meat of your choice.

Here's a recipe of mine you might enjoy.

Spinach and Shiitake Mushroom Curry

Serves 5

1/2lb of Shiitake Mushrooms

500g fresh spinach

1 tin chopped tomatoes or 6 fresh tomatoes finely chopped

200g of tomato concentrate

2 Tablespoons of ghee

1 medium onion

1 leek

1 green pepper

2 cloves of garlic

2tsp turmeric

2tsp black peppercorns

2tsp fennel seeds

2tsp coriander seeds

6 or 7 curry leaves

3tsp cayenne pepper

1tsp sea salt

The first thing to do is to crush the peppercorns in a pestle and mortar. Put them into a bowl.

Then crush the fennel seeds, coriander seeds, turmeric and cayenne pepper. Put all these into the same bowl as the crushed peppercorns. Then cut the curry leave into small pieces and crush them as well.

Do the curry leaves last as they will leave most of their powder in the pestle. Add a couple of teaspoons of water to the powdered curry and pour it into the other ingredients in the bowl. Mix into a paste. Add the chopped tomatoes and concentrate. Mix well and leave to stand.

Prepare the onion by chopping it into cubes (don't cut them too small you want them quite large).

Wash and cut the leek into 1cm chunks.

Crush the garlic and finely chop them.

Chop the green pepper into cubes.

Cut the shiitake mushrooms into chunks.

Put the ghee into a large frying pan and melt, then add the onions, garlic, leek, mushrooms and green pepper.

Cook on a low heat until the leek is caramelised. While that is cooking, chop the spinach up and add it to the other ingredients in the frying pan.

When the spinach has gone soft, add the curry mix to the vegetables and stir in well. Turn the heat down to the minimum and simmer for half an hour stirring occasionally.

Serve on a bed of Basmati rice cooked with lemongrass.

Enjoy.

Why should you hire a professional?

This image, which is going viral speaks about the difference between a camera user and a professional.
Recently picked up by F-stoppers, they decided to deride it and pull apart the very reason the hard working, experienced professional photographers do what they do. Now I understand they did it as a joke but pulling apart a professional for doing their job and pointing out why you should hire someone with experience over someone that'll do the job for cheap or free is not on.

The commenters were even worse. Ragging on the image on the left because they didn't like aspects of it. Critiquing it and deconstructing it. Oh well done, you know the 'rules' of photography. Comments like 'Both images crap lol...' and 'the only thing missing is the correct moment where you can see either the bride or groom's face in the shot' just show what ignorant morons are out there.

Why am I surprised or even care about them? Because for each of the morons that post, the many more lurkers will have doubts put in their minds about whether they really should hire a professional. This is the meat of my issue with F-stoppers on this. It is hard enough as photographers to make a living from photography without people in the industry bitching about others. All professionals should stick together, not in-fight.



I adore, the left image as it represents that fleeting moment between those two people who are so clearly in love. A moment of tenderness, a moment where all the people in the background are so proud and happy for the couple. They don't need to be in focus, their body language says it all. In fact, them being out of focus draws the intimate moment into sharper focus. Its beautiful. The tenderness captured in that fraction of a second will last that couple the rest of their lives.

Its not just a moment's entertainment for the internet trolls to pick apart. That photo now will be looked at and the feelings of their day will flood back to them, the smells, the sounds, will all be recollected in perfect clarity. That moment shared between those two people, forever.

The comparison image above shows perfectly how the experience of the photographer and being able to read a moment before it happens results in a photograph that memories are made of. Not an exercise in technicality. Not a badly lit snapshot.