Photography is an appealing combination of technology and creativity. As a long-time amateur photographer, there is a great temptation to jump for the latest digitial equipment. The technology has certainly received enough media hype: a new wave of hobby magazines is devoted to digital photography. This short article explains the reasons I remain a "wet" user.
Sometimes it is nice to load up a really fine-grain film and go out on a shoot. The photograph at the head of this article was taken on Fuji Velvia which is renowned for its saturated colours and very, very fine grain structure. Even in the brilliant Scottish summer, it pays with a film that slow to mount the camera on a tripod to get a really firm, crisp image without a hint of camera shake.
Manufactuers of digital camera hardware shout about the number of pixels their camera's image sensor has. In fact, the figure quoted is usually grossly misleading: when a computer user talks about a "pixel", they refer to a dot on the screen ("picture element") which can be illuminated to any colour. When camera manufacturers quote a number of pixels, they are normally referring to the number of image sensors. Image sensors respond to red or blue or green light, so a camera's pixel captures only a third the information that can be displayed by a pixel on a computer monitor.
Under good conditions and with a high quality camera and a good lens, the resolution of this film will be about 30-40 megapixels. My SLR body can be bought for about £160. A £1500 digital SLR body has a resolution of 6 megapixels.
For professional photographers, price is probably not such a consideration. If money really is no object, there is some possibilty of getting hold of higher-resolution digital camera. You can buy a digital back for a medium format camera and get over 20 million pixels resolution; of course you'd do a lot better to put a roll of film in the camera instead.
The above argument ignores the other superior technical attributes of film: for example, its ability to take very long exposures in very low light levels without suffering from more noise in the image, or its capacity to represent a wider range of tone (deeper blacks and brighter whites).
To see what this means, let's take a look at the photo on the
left of a real italian deli, in San Gimignano, Tuscany. Not
a bad shot, might have benefitted from the use of a polariser to
cut down on reflected light from the window. This frame was
taken on colour transparency film, and scanned with a relatively
inexpensive Hewlet Packard slide scanner belonging to a
work colleague.
Even with this relatively inexpensive setup, the image on the right can be extracted. You could amuse yourself by trying to spot the bottle in the main picture! At the time of writing, a 40 megapixel scanner which produces 48-bit colour can be had for about £600 -- less than the price of a medium-range digital compact.
In value-for-money and absolute quality terms, digital loses
out to traditional technology big time. Yet a huge industry has
grown up around digital photography. Why do so many people like
it?
An often-cited benefit of digital cameras is that you get to see the image as soon as it was taken. This is not to be sneezed at but how do you get to see it, exactly? On a grotty little one-inch LCD panel, probably barely visible in direct sunlight outdoors? or maybe a little later, plugged into a domestic television? That'd be about a third of a megapixel with dreadful contrast and even worse colour fidelity.
Assuming that you are unwilling or unable to use your own darkroom facilities, posting off a roll of film to a professional lab, allowing for three days in-lab time, means that a set of high quality prints arrives at your door in just over a week. This can be an inconveneiently long time, but the alternative, having your films developed and printed by a high-street photographic outlet just isn't worth contemplating.
High-street operations rarely develop E6 process films
(colour-reversal film for slides) on site, so you end up having
the film sent away anyway and incurring a similar delay. If you
have been using C41 films (negative films for prints), you can
get them to put it through their processing machines and hand
you a set of prints less than an hour later. You would have to
be mad to entrust these places with your work, though. Let's
have a look at the effors of my local photo shop, just around
the corner from where I work: Photo Factory in Byers Road,
Glasgow.
Fortunately, the negative of the charming French house near
Carcassonne came out of the operation relatively unscathed. The
huge scar across the entire picture on the left is actually a
scanning artefact. Since I'd paid a not-inconsiderable sum to
get the negatives on CD in the first place, I asked them to do
it again, which they did, with identical results. They declined
to refund my money or do it a third time, the implication being
that this was somehow my fault.
Now let's look at a detail from the frame. Out of focus? No: the resolution of the images supplied on "Picture CD" is uselessly small, only good for emailing snapshots to friends or putting pictures up on the web really. This is stated up front when you place the order, but you have to look hard: you could try a little experiment by walking in to a high-street photographers near you and asking them the file format, base resolution and compression ("quality") factor used on their CD service and see how far you get. £600 for a high-quality slide and negative scanner is starting to sound more and more like a bargain.
Having established that this sort of outlet just isn't suitable for the quality-conscious photographer, it would come as a little suprise to say that the prints come out looking as if they've been boiled in caustic: dull, flat, lifeless colours and poorly exposed. Use high-street photo shops at your peril! They are good for the sort of disposable photographs that get taken with disposable cameras.
Even some labs proporting to offer a high quality service come a
cropper when getting the image onto CD. dlab7.com is a lab in
the Channel Islands which claims several awards for slide film
processing and offer "high resolution" scans to CD for an extra
£10 at the time of developing and printing. This "premium
quality" service means you end up with a JPEG files of roughly
2MB per frame on CD, with roughly 6MPixel resolution (hardly the
described "archival quality" I'd've thought). Nevertheless, I
was prepared to pay for clean scans even at this resolution.
Although I have no complaints at all about dlab7's develop and print process, the quality of the scans is dreadful. The picture above is a detail of Kate and is taken close to Loch Doune in Dunfirmlineshire. It is not taken, as the amount of dust and dirt on the transparency makes it appear, anywhere near an open-cast coal mine.
Many of the other frames show signs of bad scanning. There are
blotches, dirt, scratches, and strange herring-bone abberations
which unaccountably run perpendicular to the film. Of course, at
only roughly 6MPixels, the quality of the scans is wretched
compared with that of the transparency. For £10, you can choose
whether or not to live with that, but there is no excuse for
shoddiness like scanning dirty films, and the sort of poor
quality control that lets the CD be shipped afterwards.
We are all, we are told, fighting the War on Terrorism, and my personal contribution to this is to have all of my camera equipment subjected to ionising radiation whenever I want to get on a 'plane.
The sort of scanners used to examine checked baggage work on a similar principle to CAT machines used in hospitals. They probe the baggage with an intense beam of radiation, which is easily sufficient to ruin any undeveloped film inside. We are told that, for films up to ISO400 speed rating, passing camera equipment through the baggage scanner on the way to the departure lounge up to four times won't hurt the film. Personally, I don't believe a word of it, and neither do Kodak: they should know, because as well as making film, they also make airport baggage scanners!
In any case, modern emulsions produce excellent results at speeds much higher than ISO400. Although users of digital cameras probably consider ISO400 to be very fast, the monochrome photo was taken in Newcastle using Ilford HP5 film pushed to ISO800, the only light source being a couple of street lights. The detail shows how, even at ISO800 film 20 years ago, perfectly good results can be had up to roughly A4 size.
Sadly, all but the most expensive digital cameras have trouble operating at more than ISO400, so even carrying digtal rather than conventional equipment is not really a solution. The best way must be to buy film on arrival, and have it developed, if not printed, before return.
Here's a selection of portraits, some monochrome, some colour. There were all taken and printed by me, with the simplest of equipment. The prints were then scanned, so what is presented here is the result of manipulation in the darkroom rather than in the computer.
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You can see that I have a tendency to prefer rather hard contrast prints, which is probably not normal for portraiture, and also to favour a more candid approach rather than spending a long time setting up. This has the advantage that you can grab shots of your subjects without them having time to get upset and bored, but does mean you have to carry your camera around all the time and be prepared to trust its exposure evaluation.
I do like to have control of the print stage. With amateur equipment, I have always found it very difficult to get the colour balance and contrast I would like in the final print, because the temperatures are inevitably all over the place which makes each print come out rather differently. In particular, I have always found it hard to get a feel for colour correction in colour negative papers, of which both the above colour shots are examples. The rightmost image in the selection above was particularly difficult, because it was taken under a mix of fluorescent, tungsten and daylight!
It is in the processing stage that digital technology can be really beneficial. The photo on the left took a whole evening in the darkroom, because it was essentially unprintable as it came off the negative. It is Dog Leap Lane, in Newcastle: a narrow run of steps running down to the docks, illuminated by one sodium streetlamp. Whatever the exposure, the illuminated part of the steps are always suffer almost complete whiteout, whereas the rest of the frame is hardly exposed.
To get a decent print from this negative, the image has to be split into several zones. Each is exposed for different times which equalises the brightness on the paper, and with different colours, which varies the contrast if a "multi-grade" paper is used.
This process, referred to as "burning and dodging", is done by waving pieces of card, or even simply your hands, over the paper as it is being exposed by the enlarger. This process has been considerably simplified by using image manipulation programs such as The Gimp, which make it possible to see the results before the point-of-no-return as the photographic paper is plunged into the developer, and, most happily, to reverse mistakes with an "undo" button.
Digital printing technology is also maturing so that very high quality output is within the reach of the amateur photographer: an A4 seven-ink printer with a resolution of over 2000dpi, which is easily the equal of most photo processing labs, can be had for little more than £200. This really is very good news, bearing in mind the dreadful service we usually receive from most commercial labs.
The weak link in all of this is the digital camera. Expensive, poor quality, little more than a gimmick compared with its traditional counterpart...
Why was it I've just bought one?
John Dix' Pixel Impressions
photo gallery.
dlab7.com offer excellent E6
printing and processing, but lousy film scans.
Fotango
offer on-line printing and a variety of novelty items from film
and digital uploads. They have recently subcontracted all their
wet photography to a third party, of whom I know nothing, but sound
very competent if their helpdesk emails are anything to go by.
Gallery is high-quality
open-source photograph/movie gallery software, on SourceForge
The
Travel Insider page on X-ray film damage.
Kodak's
advice on travelling and X-rays.
What the CAA
says about having your hand baggage examined.