by Dan K
First published by
http://japancamerahunter.com
Introduction
Film photography is
similar in many ways to digital photography and most of your standard digital
photography techniques apply to film too. You just have to understand the
peculiarities of film and its limitations and you’re good to go. That will be
explained in detail in this article, which presumes readers are already
reasonably proficient at digital photography and are embarking upon film
photography for the first time.
I have already covered the
different kinds of film available and the look that they produce in an earlier
article. The main difference between actually using film versus digital cameras
is a matter of getting the exposure right and this will be the primary focus of
this article. I will also briefly talk about developing, printing and scanning.
Film Speed
The sensitivity of a film
is referred to as film speed. A slow film is one that’s less sensitive and a
fast film is one that’s more sensitive.
Film speed is measured in
ASA. Functionally, it’s the same as ISO on a digital camera. You won’t often be
faced with any other measurement of film speed, but the most common alternative
is DIN standard 4512. This is an old system and the only time you’ll have to
use it is if you’re using a very old camera. Often the film box will state the
DIN number alongside the ASA rating. Just in case, here is a handy table:
Essentially, all you need
to remember is 100 ASA (ISO) is 21 DIN and each additional 1° of DIN represents
a third of a stop of exposure sensitivity.
Shooting in Low Light
I will be pilloried for
saying so, but I just don’t recommend shooting in low light with film. There is
film that can be shot at up to 6400 ASA, but I find the grain, contrast and
lack of shadow detail not worth the exercise. The main reason fast lenses were
so popular before digital was due to the relatively slow films available at the
time. As films got faster, wide aperture lenses became less common.
One further complexity is
that at long exposures, film suffers what is called reciprocity failure. That’s
when the film performs at below its rated ASA during long exposures. How much
exposure you’d need to add depends on each film. If you are determined to do
bulb exposures, look up how to calculate it in the film manufacturer’s
specifications.
I don’t enjoy doing long
exposures on film. It’s eminently possible, but it’s much easier to get it
right by trial-and-error using a digital camera. As a general rule, if the
light level, film speed and maximum practical aperture demands a shutter speed
that would result in camera shake or subject motion blur, then I just put the
film camera away and go to digital, or find a way to better light my subject.
The filp-side to film
being slower than digital is you can get really slow film. This makes it
possible to take wide aperture photographs in broad daylight with a hint of
motion blur. By over-exposing, you can get far more than a hint of motion blur.
Do this with a digital camera with a base ISO of 100 to 400 at midday and even
shooting in RAW won’t save you. In fact try it; take a narrow depth of field
shot on medium format with midday shadows and motion blur. That would say
‘film’ in a way that would be extremely difficult to reproduce with digital.
Flash
The traditional solution
to photography in light too low to shoot with a wide aperture alone is to use
flash. Done with skill, this can work out very well. To my eye, on-camera flash
it comes out better than with digital flash photography. I do like the look of
on camera flash and black and white film. Certainly, it comes out better than
an underexposed image.
Artificial Lighting
Film has a fixed white
balance. Most colour film is daylight balanced. Shooting under tungsten or
fluorescent light adds further complexity. Whereas electronic flash has a
colour temperature close enough to daylight, tungsten and fluorescent light are
of a different colour temperature and nature. In the old days, you’d buy
tungsten film, but today the vast majority of film is daylight balanced.
Colour temperature is
traditionally corrected with optical filters. For example an 80A filter will
cool Tungsten light to approximate daylight. This comes at the penalty of two
stops of light cut by the filter. Another more modern approach is to fix it in
digital post processing and you may lose only a little bit depth.
If you are using flash or
strobes with tungsten balanced film, you should employ a CTO (orange) gel over
the light source to bring the colour temperature back to the equivalent of
tungsten, just as you would with a digital camera. In a situation of changing
or tricky cross-lit white balance, I will usually choose monochrome film
instead of colour. It’s a lazy cop-out, but remains sensible advice.
Fluorescent tubes and LEDs
not only have a strange colour temperature, but flicker too. The solution is to
make an exposure of 1/60s or longer to avoid uneven lighting. This fix applies
to digital photography as well. As for the colour temperature, I would simply
guess whether it is closer to daylight or tungsten and use the appropriate
film. If in doubt choose daylight film, because a little amber colour in the
light gives the scene a little warmth and atmosphere.
Setting Film Sensitivity
Older film cameras that
have a meter required you to set the film speed manually through a dial,
whereas most modern film cameras can take care of setting the film speed for
you. Not to be confused with Nikon’s designation for crop-frame sensors, DX is
a system by which electrical contacts in the camera body pick up a reading from
the film canister. The film has a DX pattern on it (not all do) set the camera
film speed to DX. If not, set the film speed manually.
Note that if the canister
does not have DX contacts, most DX cameras default to 100ASA. If your film is
other than 100ASA and lacks a correct DX code, for example, it’s some funky
small production film, or bulk-loaded from a 100 foot roll, first consider
whether this will be a problem with your camera. There are some interesting
work-arounds available for this situation. When I bulk-load film, I often recycle
used 135 film cans with a correct DX code for the film that I intend to load.
Also, some modern
consumer-grade cameras don’t have the facility to override DX. If so, you might
be able to get round this with exposure compensation, if available. Sometimes,
I want to use film rated at 1600 ASA, but the camera’s meter only goes up to a
lower setting.
If all else fails, just
shoot away and treat the film as if it were rated at whatever the camera thinks
it is rated at. This will under- or over-expose the film and tell the lab that
you shot it at 100ASA. I’ll tell you about re-rating film next.
Pushing and Pulling Film
Many people don’t know
that you can adjust the film speed in development. What you do is shoot the
film at up to three stops over (two is better) and clearly label the can. It’s
not common in high-street stores, so it helps to make good eye contact with the
lab-technician and say clearly “Please push two stops” and wait for him to
mumble an acknowledgement and write the instruction on the order slip.
Otherwise he might well forget and then you’ll have to rely on latitude and
that’s usually only good for one stop of under-exposure. BTW, I wouldn’t bother
pushing one stop; it’s usually not necessary.
Pushing is relatively
easy; they just stop the machine and let it develop longer. Pulling is hard to
do in a commercial processing machine, but straightforward to do by hand. Note
that many labs hand-process black and white film, so you may have more luck
asking them to pull it, especially if you go to a good artisan lab. I don’t
normally pull film as print film has great over-exposure latitude.
Note that pushing increases
grain and contrast and loses some shadow detail. Pulling reduces grain and
loses some highlight detail. If I want more grain, I’ll push it. I find it more
effective and reliable than altering the developer chemistry. Cropping also
enlarges grain, but you lose some sharpness and contrast and shadow detail are
not affected.
Latitude
Print film has tremendous
latitude compared to digital sensors. Films vary, but you can shoot most print
films at between +3 and -1 stops of exposure. The precise latitude can be found
on a technical data sheet, or if you know how to do it, you can read it by
looking at the DX code on the can. I will teach you how to do this, because
unlike film speed, latitude is very rarely written on the can. This is a bit
silly, as I can’t recall seeing a camera that could read the second row of
contacts, not even Fujifilm Natura cameras that rely heavily on latitude in
their exposure programs. It’s especially silly, because it is humans metering
by eye that would benefit more from using latitude than automatic cameras would
anyway.
In the picture above, the
two red highlighted contacts reads +1/-1 stops of latitude. The blue
highlighted contacts read +half/-half and the green contacts read +3/-1. You
can confirm this from the table below.
In practice, having lots
of exposure latitude means you don’t need to be spot on with your exposure. As
you over-expose, you will lose highlight detail. Conversely, as you
under-expose, you may start to lose shadow detail. It’s best to get it right,
but when I am working with high-latitude print film in a meterless camera, I
tend to err on the side of over-exposure and give an extra stop of exposure for
good measure. This is Old timers would say “Expose for the shadows”.
In fact, you are supposed
to be using something called “The Zone System” to balance shadows and
highlights. Read up on it if you want to learn more. As a general rule of
thumb, if the scene has a high dynamic range and your key subject is not the
brightest part of the image, then expose to keep shadow detail. Let the
emulsion’s greater over-exposure latitude handle the tricky highlights. This is
the opposite of the way you’d do it with a digital camera, where you might try
to avoid blowing out the highlights. Try it and once you have the hang of it,
it will make a lot of sense.
Latitude relates to the
flexibility of setting the film’s mid-tone exposure. As a side note, dynamic
range describes how many stops of variance the scene can encompass. In this
scene below, I exposed for the shadows and relied on film’s wide dynamic range
to carry the highlight detail. You can still see details on white shirts in the
midday sun.
In the second example
below, I had no time to plan my exposure as I was busy dodging a bicycle
messenger cycling across the road. As a result, I exposed sloppily without
adjusting the centre-weighted meter. The image on the left is as scanned. The
one on the right has been adjusted in Photoshop to bring up the shadows. It
kind of works, but it’s not as natural looking as a proper exposure would have
been.
Slide film, on the other
hand, has great dynamic range, but narrow latitude. It has to be shot at
precisely the correct exposure, to within less than a stop off. I can’t
guesstimate it by eye to my own satisfaction. Most metered cameras can handle
it, but the best are the Nikon matrix-metered SLRs. Where it will bite you in
the behind is when you’re using a camera with a dodgy meter or shutter, or a
camera designed for mercury batteries but used with alkaline batteries of a
different voltage. Unless you can be sure to meter correctly, don’t shoot slide
film. Whenever I see the lomography website, I am astounded at the skill or
good fortune of the photographers that post good images shot with slide film
and cameras with no exposure control at all. It’s not as easy as Lomography
would have you believe.
Using Expired Film
Film is a chemical
process. Chemicals degrade with time. Colours can shift, but the biggest effect
with expired or poorly stored film is it gets slower. Therefore, I sometimes
deliberately over-expose old, expired film. Slide film is very temperamental and
should be stored as cold as possible, slowly brought to ambient temperature,
shot before it expires and developed immediately. Print film is much more
tolerant and 25 ASA to 400 ASA black and white print film is all but
bullet-proof.
Processing film
Most film emulsions with
unusual processing requirements are no more. Kodachrome, for example required a
special process that can no longer be found. Today, most labs offer only three
processes:
C-41 is the colour
negative process
E-6 is the colour slide process
B/W chemicals process
monochrome print film
I prefer to develop colour
film in a lab. It can be done at home but it’s cheaper, easier and required
less kit to get it done commercially, even when pushing. Bear in mind that
slide film and black and white film can cost triple to be done in a lab. Black
and white print film can be developed by anyone that can follow a cookbook and
is cheap to do at home, so I do all mine that way. The other reason to do your
own black and white film is control. Most labs don’t specify which of several
available developers and protocols will be used, or how old the chemicals are.
This can have a significant effect on the grain, tone curve and quality of the
image.
If you’re bored with your
photography, colour negative film can be developed in slide chemicals (E-6) and
colour slide film can be developed in negative chemicals (C-41). The latter is
more common. This messes with the colours to creative effect. You end up with a
colour negative with strong hues. I love it, but it’s not for every roll. Make
sure your lab knows you want to do this not all labs will cross process.
Whatever you do, don’t get a lab to cross process movie stock in a conventional
C-41 or E-6 machine. It will leave a nasty gunk all over the inside of the
machine, on the rollers and on other people’s film.
You can even cross process
colour film in black and white chemicals. You get a thin but contrasty black
and white image with strong grain. This needs to be over-exposed and pushed a
stop or two or you will have no mid tone detail and no shadow detail at all.
Black and white film can’t
be cross processed in C-41. It just comes out blank, and the lab-tech will
laugh at your naivety. Some specialist labs can even reversal process certain
black and white negative films with clear film bases, but if you want black and
white slides, you’re better off with a film designed for it like Scala or
Fomapan R. You can process these as negatives too.
Scanning
Many digital photographers
like to scan, being accustomed to editing and storing images on a computer and
sharing the results on-line. Whole books can be written on this topic and I
will go into greater detail in subsequent article, but for now I will provide a
simple summary.
Some labs will scan on a
drum scanner, especially large format film. I scan mine at home on a flatbed
scanner that is designed for film. Other people I know prefer to photograph
back-lit negatives with a DSLR and a macro lens. There are pros and cons to
each process, but they all get the job done. Just don’t buy one of those little
dedicated film scanners with a camera inside. I have tried several and they all
gave horrible scans and scratched my film.
Enlarging and Printing
The best way to enjoy your
slides is as slides and best way to enjoy your negatives is as prints. When I
print, I like to print big. 35mm film can easily be printed to 12″x18″, but
finer-grained films are best for this unless you want grain to be a big
feature. Note that I said “feature”; it’s not like ugly chroma and luminance
noise. It is a feature; it contributes to the look and feel. It is worth
finding a good lab that does optical enlargement. Digital labs are more common,
but they will just scan at 1200 to 2400 dpi, then re-sample and print on a
digital printer at 300dpi. Optical enlargements get the most out of your film
and look much better. Most digital labs don’t print larger than 12R except by
special order, as this is the biggest they can make from a 3:2 format image on
a standard roll of printer paper. A good print is a sight to behold.
Conclusions
The use of film has pros
and cons over digital. If you understand the differences, you can use it to
best advantage. The important thing is to get out and start shooting. You’ll
learn from your mistakes and take pride in your triumphs.
Further Information
This is the latest
instalment of Dan K’s series of articles on the theme of Film for the Digital
Photographer. If you have not already read his previous articles, I would
encourage you to read them. They cover combining film and digital photography,
film cameras and the various films that are currently available.
I hope you have found
these articles interesting and enlightening. Regardless, please share your
questions and observations. JCH’s readers include some of the most experienced
photographers and we can all learn from each other.
You can follow Dan on his
social networks. He always has something interesting to say about photography
and cameras.
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