Updated 18/12/2008

Kia ora tatou:

A number of you may remember a post where I drew attention to the fact that I had been challenged to pick up my film camera again.

The results were exciting and opened me to old/new possibilities in picture-making. I will restate that: it opened me to revisiting old school technologies and incorporating them into a new way of working. Can I try that again: it offered the opportunity to take old-school technologies and use old methodologies to make…O, forget it.

When I walked away from film some 3 years ago, I never thought I would return, and all that knowledge gathered over a 15-year stretch with fil would become redundant. For  some reason, I held on to my EOS 1vHS. Back then I could have got a reasonable amount for the camera. Today a camera (hardly-used) which cost me $4.5k to buy is worth, at best, $300 to trade. All that time it has sat there, forlorn and forgotten, in my gear safe. In the last few weeks, however, it has had more work than my 1DS Mk III.

And I am loving it (are you reading this, Doc? Stop sniggering).

I got home on Saturday night to be asked, how did the photos come out? Let you know when I get the film back from the lab on Monday. O yes.

Those of us who came through from film remember the anticipation and excitement ( sometimes disappointment) from sending our film off to the lab, the way we jumped back into the car and held the trannies up to the light, so see what had worked  and what had not…. the element of chance in our picture-making.  Then the hours over a lightbox, poring over the images; a time when a 1/3^rd stop was critical, a 1/10 stop nearly impossible to attain. Now we take all that for granted.

So we have three ways of working:

1.       Purely digital

2.       Purely film (shoot film, make prints in a darkroom or an RA-4 processor)

3.       Work hybrid (shoot film, post-produce digitally, output to inkjet or silver halide ( LED, Lambda, etc)

Back in the day, after I discovered I had become allergic to darkroom chemistry, I shot on film and post-produced digitally.

Then I went purely digital. Now I am coming back to film and a hybrid process for some of my work.

Here is why.

If you examine the two, there is a fundamental difference in the way they deal with light. Analogue (film) records light in logarithmic way. That is, the light is recorded in a non-linear way. Shadows take longer to open up than mid-tones. Highlights roll off and kind of fade away. Digital, on the other hand, as a result of the amplifiers and signal processors built into the camera, records all the tones in an equal and even-handed way. Thus a digital image has more open shadows and highlights that block more quickly. Neither is better; just different.

Film has grain. Digital has noise. But each builds differently. A sensor contains x million photosites arranged in a geometric pattern, each the same size as the next. Thus when the image is captured, each photosite (pixel) is the same size as any other one on the sensor. Noise builds as a function of the signal amplification required to produce a result, which is why digital images produce noise in the shadows before it renders in the mid-tones or highlights. Thus the noise is not even in a digital image.

Film, being a chemical medium responds differently. You increase sensitivity (ISO) by making each grain larger. Thus a 100 ISO film has physically smaller grains than one of 800 ISO. The grain size is determined by the ISO of the film. And it builds evenly. The grain is the same in shadows, mid-tones and highlights.

Not only that, it builds in a random way. Film grains are sociable creatures that like to get together for a chat, and they gather in random groupings (a bit like humans, actually). They get together in both loose and dense packs, depending on the light, the exposure, the processing and the way the film was made. It is an analogue response. Thus any result has a degree of unpredictability which can be exciting or irritating, depending on your frame of mind. Note to ISTJ’s : to avoid the latter, stick to digital….

So why shoot film anyway? Do you really want the unpredictability, the element of chance, the uncertainty of result? If the answer is no, then stay away. But if you want something which  is analogue, and which has the opportunity to create  a “look” that sets it apart, which references the roots of photography, then film has much to offer.

I am in love with grain at the moment, and it is entirely important to the road I seem to have wandered down.  I am back looking at my mannequins and, rather than avoiding the grain, I am going for it, In fact it is germane to the narrative I am following and which I hope to exhibit at some time in the near future.

You might ask why I do not use software. I have tried a range of film look plugins and while some of them are very good, it just ain’t the same. Their ability to randomise the noise/grain is artificial, and it looks that way. It is pseudo-analogue, and doesn’t fit the sub-text in this body of work.

What has brought me back is the massive improvement in the quality and range of digital tools available to me, with CS4, and the plugins on tap. Combine analogue input with digital post-production and a whole range of technical options and picture-making possibilities become available.

The image above began out of a happy accident. The film I was using was  Provia 1600(sadly no longer available-I have one roll left), is actually 400 ISO,  which you “push” (overdevelop 2 stops) to get the speed up. I didn’t tell the lab, and they didn’t ask. So it came back 2 stops underdeveloped.

Scanned it gave me rich, heavy, blocked shadows. Somehow that seemed fitting. The mannequins loomed like ghosts from the darkness, a darkness that seemed to wrap and enfold. I began working with multiple files, looking for a narrative between them.

In this one, using 3 separate files, I was able to look back into the darkness, so allow those in the shadows to come forward, to show themselves.

A friend commented today that I was going back to the old school. No, I have discovered that the old chisel I had put to one side is in fact the key to a new, clearer way of expressing what I need to say, of weaving my own kete.

Whano, whano, hara mai te toki

Hau mie, hui e

Tau ki e.

Doc sent me this comment and image. So good, I am going to include it inline.

Thanks Doc.

So about your blog on film-dig, I cant stop thinking about the loss of what I have always called the art god, I’m talking about the beautiful mistake, a professor of art I met in Belgrade said to me once “There are no mistakes in art, the only error is if we don’t understand that the perceived mistake was a road to a new and perhaps undiscovered destination”

Digital photography’s relentless march to perfection where everything is (supposedly) controllable makes the beautiful mistake virtually, if not totally, extinct. When I underexpose a proof sheet in the darkroom I am left with a very light rendition of the thing I had photographed, and as long as I don’t bin it, I have it with me forever. I have printed some works extremely dark or light that I like very much, when I may not have done so, due to what appeared on a (supposedly) bad proof sheet. The digital equivalent is a history layer in PS that is gone forever when the pic is saved. Often when I have been going through proof sheets some time after making them and as my aesthetic had changed I suddenly saw something I hadn’t previously seen! This obviously goes for capture as well, a poorly (again supposedly) exposed negative revisited at a later time with either a different aesthetic or greater skills can offer so much. I think about chimpers looking at the histogram thinking mmm that’s a dodgy one and unthinkingly hitting the trash button, I cant imagine ever standing in my darkroom scissors in hand extracting and binning the bad exposures from a roll of film. Are the gains in speed and perfection with digital photography’s advances worth the losses in the more esoteric? I think not! Art reflects life and life is imperfect!

Doc