The Online Photographer

Analog Photography, Dept.: New Age, Same Old Disease

It's around again. Never went away, actually.

It can't be eradicated. Suppress it here, it pops up over there. A dread disease that wantonly wastes time and ruins photographic work.

I'm talking about pushing disease. Even having to write it gives me a shudder of dread.

A whole new generation of young photographers has gotten into B&W film photography, as an enthusiasm and a hobby, or a way to distinguish themselves from the indistinguishable digital masses, or a steampunk affectation, or because they want to experience it before it vanishes—or just because they like it.

And they are falling prey to the same disease their elders did. Because my generation failed to stamp it out, it is afflicting a whole new generation.

You see it everywhere. "HP5+ at 800." "Tri-X at 1600." Etc. ad nauseam.

Ooooh, pushing! I push my film. I can push more than you! See how much I can push? I'm special, I push. This developer allows me to push even further. Push! Push! Push!

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Our generation did it too, though. So did the one before us.

But why, oh why, would anyone take the time and effort and care to particpate in an obsolescent art form—to choose nice materials and equipment—to expend the effort to get out into the world and hunt down promising pictures—to struggle with craft—to use beautiful, precious films that cost money to buy and process—and then not expose the film enough?

BANG! Shot right through the foot.

People think the basic rule of B&W is "expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights." But that's not the most basic rule. That's the refinement of the most basic rule, because it presumes people know how to meter shadows—and actually have a sense of what shadow detail ought to look like. The more basic form of the rule is:

Expose enough. Don't develop too much.

(David Vestal said that.) So what do legions of happy B&W photographers do? Poor, pathetic, pitiable, disease-afflicted photographers?

They expose too little and develop too much.

Otherwise known as "pushing."

The new generation has been infected, I'm afraid.

JPEG of a severely pushed film photograph, albeit one we cannot envision any other way now. In the old days, they pushed as a necessary evil, because getting the shot was much better than not getting the shot. Photo by
Bill Eppridge, courtesy life.com.

JPEG of a film photograph given adequate exposure. Photo by
Yoichi R. Okamoto.

It makes even less sense these days than it did in days of yore, when men were men and darkroom work was a PITA for most. Much less sense. In the old days, at least, there was always the argument that if you didn't push, you could lose the shot you had to get. But these days, that argument vanishes. Nobody has to shoot film now. We do it because we like to and want to. If the light gets low, just get out your DSLR. Remember your DSLR? The camera over which you obsessed endlessly about high ISOs and low noise before you bought it? Ninety percent of film photographers own a DSLR. If not 98%. I shot a D700 for a while at ISO 5000 for B&W conversions. No B&W film can be pushed that far. And the results looked fine in B&W. (Film only looks better in good light.) The lowliest one- or two-generation-old entry-level Canon or Nikon or Pentax will look better in really low light than your film camera will. There's absolutely no reason any more to push.

And yet people are still doing it.

The #1 thing you should do to make film picture look good is to expose enough. Given adequate exposure, films come into their own. They sing. They bloom. They blossom. One of the surest ways to make your film pictures look like merde is to cripple your chosen film by never giving it enough exposure.

The holiest, highest mantra among B&W film photographers of today, I really feel, ought to be: never, ever push.

Eradicate disease, I say. Do your part! Expose enough!!

Mike

ADDENDUM: For general photography in good light, the best, easiest, most immediate way to improve your B&W film technique is to halve the manufacturer's ISO rating and subtract 20% from the manufacturer's recommended development time. Don't take my word for it. Try it.

UPDATE (Saturday): Despite certain accusations from a small faction of our Commentariat and some private email correspondents, I was not feeling at all cranky about anything when I wrote this post. (Just so you know, I'll never write "shut up" in anger on this site.) Truth: I hardly ever get cranky about anything that happens here. Probably a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn't be doing this.

Nils Jorgensen found this page from an old photo magazine...he thinks it was Modern Photography but wasn't in a position to check.

But it actually does make me a bit cranky when people won't accept my stated premises. This post was written for, and directed at, newcomers to film photography. Didn't I say that plainly at the beginning of the post? Or at least implied it plainly, for those with what I hope are ordinary levels of reading comprehension? I used Bill Eppridge's two-stops-pushed news photograph (and yes, it's pushed—see above. Would I get that wrong?!?) of the tragic RFK assassination on purpose, to make a concession—the concession that pushing at least used to be sometimes necessary, and resulted, occasionally, in photographic masterpieces. Back to the point: I wouldn't presume to tell Jean-Loup Sieff, or Ralph Gibson, or indeed any experienced photographer who knows his or her stuff about technique and is doing what they do deliberately, what to do. If ya follow. If you're making a conscious decision, you'll decide for yourself. You have—you always had—my blessing, not that you need it.

I was addressing in that post the fact, or what I perceive to be the fact, that many newcomers are slavishly following a style I dislike because they've been looking at too much crappy B&W online (and there's lots of that: I've looked, and seen it, firsthand, and no, this contention is not the same thing as saying there is no good work online, so don't pick up that ball and run with it, please). And/or they've been told to do so by some guru somewhere, and they therefore think that it's the way they have to do it because it's "the way B&W is done." I was using my own modest bully pulpit here on TOP to advocate that they try the opposite style instead—the style I like. As a counterweight.

Long story short, unless it's too late for that: I know I've said this before, but if anyone is going to get their dander up over something I've said, it would be nice if they'd first determine whether I actually said it.

I'll have more to say on the original subject soon, but I'm taking tomorrow off to watch football and despite working on from seven thirty this morning till now (half past noon), I won't be able to get it written today. Look for a possible post at some point in the future called "Masters of Tone."

—Actually-somewhat-cranky-for-once (but not that much) Mike

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Featured Comment by Craig: "Pushing gives images a particular look. When that's the look you want, why not push? Come on, you sound like a narrow-minded audio engineer who doesn't understand why these rock-n-roll kids want to push their amps so hard that their guitar sound gets all distorted. Maybe the kids like the sound of distortion. Is that really so hard to imagine? I tend to think that people who think there's only one right way to make art don't really understand what art is in the first place. Not all photography has to be 'correctly' exposed for the same reason that not all paintings need to be strictly realistic."

Mike replies: No, there's nothing wrong with departing from standard technique to get specific effects, and I'm not talking to experienced photographers, as I took pains to make clear at the outset (paragraph 4). But, Craig, go look at random pushed film images on the 'net for half an hour. There's your argument rebutted. Rebuked, even. The people who "think there's only one right way to make art" in this case are the newbies who are reflexively pushing to 1600 and stand developing in Rodinal because of some idiotic thing they read somewhere.

Featured [partial] Comment by Bill OBrien: "Here at work many years ago one of the engineers was heard saying, 'He shot himself in the foot and then congratulated himself on his marksmanship.' Neat extension of an old saying."

Featured Comment by timd: "Thanks for the advice on halving the ISO and –20%. By the way here's Bill Eppridge holding that image:

[The photo is by Tim Mantoani and comes from an extensive—and wonderful and valuable—project he's been working on called "Behind Photographs." —Ed.]

Featured Comment by Kelvin: "I am so glad to leave push processing and high speed film behind me. I remember shooting stage performances in the '80s and '90s and pulling my hair out trying to get images of decent quality. We're talking high contrast, with spotlights and deep shadows. I don't know how Jim Marshall did it, because I certainly couldn't! Unpushed HP5 and Tri-X was just too slow. T-Max 400 was just horrible (and almost unprintable) no matter what I did with it. Pushed HP5, TX400 and T-Max 3200 had little resolution. I would have committed unspeakable acts to have something like a D700 back then!

"Despite this I'd occasionally get a result:

Featured Comment by Stan Waldhauser: "There's the story of the film representative talking to the media at a press conference to announce a breakthrough technology in film emulsion. He explains that the new film has a super-fine grain and an ISO rating of 204,800. All the hands in the crowd go up and in unison they ask, 'How far can you push it?'"

Sensitometry and the Plotter/Matcher, Part I

Backing up a bit from yesterday, I acknowledge that a number of people were mystified as to, well, what the heck I was talking about. A densitometer, more specifically a transmission densitometer, is simply a device for measuring densities—usually, for our purposes, on negatives.

As you know even if you've never shot one in your life, a negative is a tonally reversed image; dark things in real life (called "shadows" through the photographic process even if they aren't literally shadows) expose the negative very little, resulting in clear (transparent) or close-to-clear areas on the film; bright things in life (called "highlights") result in heavily exposed areas of reduced silver metal in the negative—the dark parts.

A negative. Photo by John Loengard. Extra points if you
recognize whose negative it is.

A transmission densitometer merely measures how much density there is in any given area of a negative. It's just a measuring device, like a scale or a thermometer or a ruler.

Of course, the fun doesn't end there. Because anything you can measure, you can plot. (Mathy types rub hands together, twirl ends of mustachios.)

What sensitometrists do—well, the activity we're mainly concerned with here, anyway—is to expose a film to various measured amounts of light, develop the film in a particular manner (i.e., with the developer you're interested in, at a controlled time and temperature), read the density, and plot the amount of exposure against the density it creates on an X-Y graph.

If you do this a bunch of times for a bunch of different exposures (again, with the same film and development protocol) and plot all the points on your graph, you can then draw a line between all the points. Voilà—the film curve.

 

Courtesy nfsa.gov.au

The parts of the curve are labeled in this nice illustration I found (thanks, Australia!), so I won't belabor them further. Except to note that "base + fog density" (commonly written fb+f and pronounced "film base plus fog") is simply the "background density" of an unexposed but developed and fixed piece of film. You can see the fb+f at the edges of the negative in John Loengard's photo above.

The curve was first devised by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield, the fathers of sensitometry, in 1890, and was called the "H&D curve" in their honor for many years. Now it's more commonly known as a "characteristic curve" or "film curve." Sometimes you encounter the terms "D-LogE curve" or "Y'know, that charty thing for, like, the films or whatever" ('80s highschoolese*). All different names for the same thing.

Now, see that straight line section of the curve? How steep that is describes the contrast of the negative. Develop the test films for more time, the straight-line section gets steeper or more vertical. Develop for less time, and the slope gets milder. That's the origin of the term "Contrast Index" or CI, which was an method developed by C.E.K. Mees and Loyd [sic] Jones of Kodak Research Labs to describe contrast with a single number; there were even handy CI protractors for measuring the angles of curves. Mees and Jones, by the way, are responsible for our current system of B&W contrast management: developing to an average (or ballpark) CI and then fine-tuning contrast with paper grades. Different story for a different day.

More usual in more modern times has been to plot a "curve family"—several curves describing the same film in the same developer but developed for different amounts of time. Here's one of those, also clearly labeled if you'll look at it for five seconds. Note that as the development times go up, the curves get steeper.

Now, if you think about this, that represents an awful lot of test exposures if you're exposing one sheet (piece) of film at a time in, say, a 4x5-inch camera. So, naturally, a shortcut's been devised. What photographers do now to get this information relatively quickly is to use a pre-made piece of transparent material called a "step tablet" or "step wedge" that has a number of steps (usually 11 or 21) of known density already on it. One such is sold by Stouffer Industries. So what you do is expose your film to this step wedge, then read the densities on the film with...you got it, a densitometer.

A densitometer, as I mentioned yesterday, is very easy to use. You turn it on, put the film over the sensor, press the button or lower the sensor arm on to the film, and the reading comes up on the readout. That's all there is to it.

The other type of densitometer is a reflection densitometer, for reading densities on prints.

So what's sensitometry for?
Ctein said yesterday that he has a densitometer but has no use for it. That makes perfect sense to me, because he's mainly a color photographer. Consider this passage from Ansel Adams's fine book The Negative, in its various iterations over the years possibly the most inspirational technical book ever written (cited as such by literally generations of photographers):

Many consider my photographs to be in the "realistic" category. Actually, what reality they have is in their optical-image accuracy; their values are definitely "departures from reality." The viewer may accept them as realistic because the visual effect may be plausible, but if it were possible to make direct visual comparison with the subjects, the differences would be startling.

—Ansel Adams, The Negative, from the Introduction

A densitometer to my mind is really only useful in creative photography in helping to manage the "departures from reality" of the tones in black and white photographs. And, for the most part, they're used by people who can develop film one picture at a time, which means sheet film, which means large-format photographers, who use view cameras.

How any B&W photographer departs from the norm in terms of tonal values is an indivisible part of that photographer's style, from the high contrast of a Ralph Gibson to the low contrast of a Henry Wessel. It's one thing that makes B&W photography so different from color photography: every good black and white photograph is an interpretation.

Ralph Gibson, Priest Collar

Henry Wessel, Albuquerque, N.M.

Note that I've named two photographers who've probably never used a densitometer in their lives. That's entirely by design, because most photographers don't...and don't need to.

Yr. Hmbl Ed. hopes that all the above has been relatively pain-free. Even more fun stuff to come, so please stay tuned.

Mike

*Working with high school students can cause one to crave nouns.

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Featured Comment by Dennis Mook: "This brings back memories of the mid-1970s when I was learning the Zone System by reading books by Picker, White/Zakia & Lorenz, Adams, and others. I was a forensic photographer at the time and was fortunate to have all of the resources of the police department's darkroom at my disposal. I dutifully exposed many, many rolls of 35mm Tri-X (our standard crime scene film), Plus-X, and Panatomic-X as well as sheet after sheet of 4x5 Tri-X (my personal work) according to procedures laid out by my literary teachers. I then used a transmission densitometer to plot film base + fog and establish characteristic curves for these films with several developers. I found myself totally caught up in the technical side of photographic chemistry at the expense of getting out and making aesthically pleasing photographs! Did all this experimentation make me a better photographer? Maybe in some way as it allowed to understand the very simple 'expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights' axiom, albeit at the cost of a lot of time. I believe the one other thing it taught me was to be very disciplined in my approach to making my art which paid off in my photography as well as printmaking."

Densitometers for Large-Format B&W Photography

When I took the helm at Photo Techniques magazine in 1994, the outgoing Editor, David Alan Jay, told me that the three things readers most needed to "fully participate in the life of the magazine" were a large format camera, a spot meter, and a densitometer. I subsequently became good friends with the late Phil Davis, the magazine's de facto Technical Editor (he didn't want the actual title because he felt it would make him responsible for what he considered other peoples' idiocy). Phil, a Professor Emeritus of Photography at the University of Michigan who had made his fortune as an advertising photographer of Detroit cars, was a devoted user of the densitometer; he loved nothing better than to test new films. He computerized his efforts with a wondrous program called the Plotter/Matcher, which unfortunately now only runs (as far as I know) on antiquated Mac operating systems [UPDATE: This is wrong—Don Bryant tells me there is a version for PCs sold by the View Camera Store, keeper of the BTZS flame —MJ]. I keep an old Mac around just for it. The P/M's usefulness was severely limited for most people because Phil refused to share his data (my privileged position earned me access)—he wanted people to do their own plotting. Being a degenerate populist, one of the things I'd do if I won the lottery would be to create an online version of the Plotter/Matcher with the data for every existing black-and-white material available to everyone at the click of a mouse. Information wants to be free, as they say.

Before I go on too long (and I do go on), I remain delighted by David Jay's incongruous apotheosizing of the transmission densitometer, which is probably the most arcane accessory in a still vibrant but admittedly small niche of photography. Even people who have multiple LF cameras and lust after things like lantern Petzvals don't have, and in some cases have never even used—or even seen—a densitometer. The devices therefore exist on a cloud-wrapped sphere of esoteric extremity, a sort of photo-mysterium, bathed in obscurity and familiar only to a closed priesthood of insider initiates. In reality, they are relatively simple, pleasing, and robust optical-mechanical devices, and almost laughably easy to use—you almost don't need to read the manual. Plotting Hurter & Driffield (a.k.a. characteristic) curves or film testing for the Zone System become easy-peezy.

Models that survive
With the recent cave-in of film, the product market for professional (real professional, I mean, not consumer-marketing professional) equipment related to film has imploded. Only a few transmission densitometers suitable for black-and-white film photography remain. Of the two I've selected here, one is made to special order, and the other is aimed at the X-ray industry—itself making the changeover to digital, albeit at a more deliberate pace. There are of course others as well—this isn't a comprehensive list. These are just the ones that appealed to me.

With the caveat that I have never used (nor seen!) the following specific models, an evening's research last night and some time on the telephone this morning have caused these to bubble to the surface as most likely being good ones for darkroom hobbyists. The first is the Fluke Biomedical 07-424 Digital Densitometer, previously known as the Nuclear Associates 07-424 or the Victoreen 07-424. These are now made to order, with a six-week lead time, at a cost of a little over two grand. Used ones often go for very little on eBay, but beware—they require three little insertable apertures, little aluminum disks that resemble washers. Most resellers of densitometers online aren't users of the devices, and commonly don't know how to test whether they are working properly or whether or not all the requisite parts are included. I believe Fluke may be able to sell you the apertures as replacement parts, however.

The other photo densitometer that looks promising to me for hobbyist use is the Eseco Speedmaster SM-10T. Made in Oklahoma by a going concern noted for good customer service, the SM-10T is a simple-to-use and robust little device that sells new for $1085, which is very reasonable as new densitometers go. It's only 11 inches long by 4.5 inches wide and high, and actually runs on two 9-volt batteries, although you can plug it in using a power supply if you'd rather.

I'm going to ask the folks at Eseco-Speedmaster and Fluke if they'd like to have these models reviewed. They might not care; we photographers can't be much of a market for them. If they do (and maybe even if they don't), I'll write more about how you use densitometers and what photographers use them for.

Mike

UPDATE #2: Mani Sitaraman informs me that the excellent Heiland TRD2 is still available from the very interesting John Bicht at Versalab. My web-rummaging last night failed to uncover that. The Heiland unit was reviewed by none other than Phil Davis at Photo Techniques during my tenure there. (By the way, I will say that the version that appeared in the magazine was better edited!)

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Featured Comment by Karl: "I once set up a small lab to service a really large customer, and bought processors from Eseco. They're really a great little company, with top-notch people."

Featured Comment by William Schneider: "Some commenters asked about calibration targets. They are still available from Stouffer Industries. Available are both transmission and reflection targets, and the items come calibrated and uncalibrated. I bought some reflection and transmission step wedges to calibrate both an Eseco Speedmaster, and to do some experiments to see if I could get a flatbed scanner to work as a densitometer. (Yes, I could.)"

Featured Comment by Ed Cornachio: "Ah, nostalgia! What next? Extinction light meters? I remember graduating from an "extinction" to my first Weston light meter (placed detailed shadows on Zone III and developed detailed highlights to Zone VIII.) Etching 4x5 negatives with bits of glass shards to reduce density in small, local areas. Making my personal 'palette' of Spot-tone (warm, neutral, and blue) on a sheet of clear glass sandwiched to white cardboard, and carefully swiping my #1 and #3 sable-haired spotting brush on the tip of my tongue for just the right amount of moisture. (Very distinct taste, Spot-tone.) Varigam paper: primary exposure with a five, but kiss it with a ten for a couple of seconds for extra zip. Ah, nostalgia indeed!

"Bring back the soothing, hypnotic light of red and amber, and the sea-like odor of sodium thiosulphate."

Mike replies: Ed, you laugh, but I actually have an extinction meter—a gift from Phil.

Featured Comment by g carvajal: "You lost me at 'When I took the helm....'"

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "Freshman art school photo major: 'So what's this densitometer thing that the sign says I can't use until the second year?' Graduate art school photo TA: 'It's the thing we use to see if you are smart enough to stay in the Photo Department or if you are so dense that you will have to transfer to the [Drama, Music, Painting, Animation, Dance, Film, Critical Studies, pick the one most likely to offend] Department.'"

Random Excellence: The Lazy Aussie

The Lazy Aussie (Andrew McDonald), Falls

"I've just taken my first film shot for at least a decade, dragging the ole 1965 Autocord twinlens [TLR] from a damp shed. It works perfectly! I really never thought I'd shoot film again," writes the self-described "Lazy Aussie," Andrew McDonald of Perth. "I also tested a roll of Kodak transparency, and the colour was so magnificent I have already ordered more rolls. And the difficulty of using the stupid twinlens was almost pleasurable. It's a dumbarse machine that gives superb results only under the most stringent and ridiculous conditions. Love it."

The Minolta Autocord, from the instruction book (courtesy Butkus.org)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Adam Lanigan: "I have been absolutely head over heels for my Yashicamat 124G for the past year since picking it off off the 'Bay. I even took it on vacation recently to NYC (a return of sorts for the wife and I) and snapped barely a dozen digital shots, but filled 13 rolls of 400TX 120. Just getting through the development now (also a new venture for me) and I am in love.

Marcel

"Here's an early scan from that bunch...I met Marcel and his owner outside of a coffee shop early one morning. He very politely obliged me with a nice pose.

"Good on ya, Andrew! It's just such a pleasurable way to shoot."

Fixer Doesn't Sink

By Ctein

Here's a coincidence. When Mike wrote his column about the craft of black-and-white darkroom printing two weeks ago, to the applause of film photographers who felt they were becoming depraved on account of being deprived, I was already in the midst of writing this column on the craft of black-and-white darkroom printing. Great minds running in the same gutter, I suppose.

Then Mike made me an offer I wasn't about to refuse (two weeks off) and so here we are.

One of the modest burdens that photography writers and editors have is revisiting basic topics. It always annoys advanced readers to see yet another article covering Something 101. I know it annoyed me. But it's necessary, because everyone doesn't absorb the message the first time, there are always new people coming into the field (yes, even black-and-white film photography today), and every single person on the planet does not read every single word we write.

Yes, I know that last one is a real shocker. Don't we have the ear of the entire universe?

Anyway, this is one of those basic topics.

A reader of my book Post Exposure (available for free here) wrote me asking if it was important to have a print washer whose water entered from the top and exited from the bottom, because fixer was heavier than water and would sink to the bottom of the print washer.

A lot of people have thought that, including some otherwise extremely knowledgeable darkroom folks.

It doesn't work that way.

Yes, fixer has a higher density than water (density is what counts, not weight). Pour it very carefully into pure water and it will sink to the bottom. It won't stay there. There are countervailing forces at work. Gravitational potential energy drags the heavier stuff down. But diffusion/entropy/statistics favors mixing everything up uniformly. They compete. On a molecular scale, diffusion almost always wins.

I recapitulated an experiment from elementary school science (at least, when I was in elementary school). I squirted a heavy liquid into a jar of water. I used dish detergent, but sugar syrup will work just as well. I was careful not to move it much so there was very, very little water circulation going on. The left-hand picture shows what it looked like at the start. The middle picture shows the jar after it sat on my desk for four days, and the right after 10 days. Notice the direction of motion is not downward.

L.F. Deardorff and Sons Rekindled

For large-format photographers, the name "Deardorff" has some of the same luminosity that the name "Leica" has for small-format photographers.

Think of it as the Harley-Davidson of cameras.

Will Whitaker, himself a large format man of sterling reputation, tells me that L.F. Deardorff & Sons, Inc. has been resurrected in the hills of southeastern Tennessee. Barry Cochran, who once worked for the Japanese-owned incarnation of the Deardorff company in Athens, Tennessee, and who is known to many people under the Ebay handle "attrevida" as a purveyor of NOS Deardorff parts, has begun Deardorff production again in the small southern Tennessee town of Cleveland. Last year he and his wife Monica bought out the estate of Jack Deardorff, including original tooling and the rights to the hallowed L.F. Deardorff & Sons name. Barry's first offering is a run of 15 new 8x10 and 15 4x5 Special* Deardorff cameras to be delivered in 2011. I wonder how long it's been since you could buy a current-production Deardorff new?

Wooden view cameras are essentially immune to the larger trends in the camera market. They're not just under the radar, they're the kind of thing that the radar doesn't even detect. (To stretch that metaphor well and good.)

Barry had been splitting his time between Cleveland and a job in Greensboro, North Carolina for some time. Will says, "I was living in Greensboro and met Barry some time ago as the result of an Ebay purchase. I got to know Barry better and over several outings for Chinese food we discussed his plans as they developed. He's been working very diligently at this and is intent on making this venture work."

Let's hope it does. This market will never get so small that there won't be room for thirty new LF cameras. Especially genuine Deardorffs.

Here's the new website, and here's a link to the Introductory post Barry and Monica wrote on the LF Forum about their business, their history, and their plans for the future.

Mike
(Thanks to Will)

*The Deardorff 4x5 Special is a 5x7 camera available with either a 5x7 back or a 4x5 reducing back.

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Featured Comment by Karl: "I knew Jack Deardorff back in the '80s when I was shooting 8x10 daily, doing commercial work. Jack struck me as being a real artisan and a bit of a character, but no doubt lacked the business and marketing skills that might have kept the company afloat. It's great to see the name in production again, particularly by owners committed to the quality of the Chicago production. There are certainly slicker, lighter, slightly more sophisticated field cameras being made now, but none I'd rather shoot with."

Question from Andrea B.: "OK, this is a stupid question—how does a person learn how to shoot with one of these LF cams?? Is there a book?? Do I need a personal trainer?? I've always wanted to try this. And those Deardorffs are simply gorgeous."

Mike replies: At the risk of exposing the quirkiness of my enthusiasms, I simply can't resist answering this very not-stupid question at some length, so please bear with me.

At the very basic level, a view camera is exceptionally easy to use. Here are the basic steps:

• Learn to unfold and fold the camera from the "storage" (boxed, or closed) to the "ready" (working, or open) position and back again. This is not always easy right at first but you can work out how to do it slowly and it's always the same, never changes, so after a while it gets to be second nature.

• Find a lab that will process the film you choose. Let's say for the sake of this illustration that you're choosing Velvia film (E-6 process) and you live near New York. So you might choose Duggal, which regularly processes all sizes of E-6 films up to 8x10.

• Load the film holders. This consists of opening a light-tight cardboard box in total darkness, removing a sheet of film, then half-opening the film holder and slipping the film into it underneath the grooves or guides on the sides. Again, this takes a bit of working-out at first (it's fiddley but not difficult) but it's always the same, never changes, and once you get used to it it becomes easier and easier. The only thing you have to remember is to insert the film emulsion-side out, which you do by keeping the notches in the corner of the sheet of film in the "upper right" as you slip the sheet into the holder. Note also that you don't need a "darkroom" to load and unload film...you just need a dark room. I used to do it in a closet with a towel placed at the bottom of the door. You can also use a changing bag, although I've never cared for them. Whatever works.

• When you get to the location where you want to take the picture, you set up the tripod, attach the Deardorff, and unfold it. Then you mount the lens on the front, set it to the open or widest aperture, and open the shutter using a slider switch on the shutter (the lens is mounted directly to the shutter in a view camera lens).

• The lens then casts an image of the scene on to the ground glass. The image is somewhat dim, which is why you need the characteristic "dark cloth" that typifies the old-timey stand-camera photographer in story and song—that's the cloth you drape over your head. It's purpose is to block extraneous light so you can see the image on the groundglass better.

• Focus the camera. This is done by racking the lens stage in and out using a fingerwheel on either side of the bed of the camera, positioned roughly below the film plane. (On many cameras the knob on one side racks the lens in and out, and the knob on the other side is a lock.)

• At this point you might apply movements to the camera. The various movements do take a long time to master, and that's mainly why you would need a book on how to use view cameras. But in many cases you don't need movements, or you need very minimal ones. Many times pictures can be taken with no movements at all, by simply aiming the camera using the tripod. Very few smaller-format cameras offer movements, so you're most likely shooting without movements now. This is a little misleading, because smaller formats offer greater depth-of-field and hence less need for movements to keep various parts of the image in focus, but let's assume for now that you're not using movements this time.

• Close the lens. The image disappears from the groundglass.

• Take a meter reading of the scene. There are many aspects of view camera practice that can be complicated greatly for the sake of control or precision, and metering is certainly one of them. But you don't absolutely need to complicate it. Of course you can use a handheld light meter and simply take an averaging reading. But if you have a decent digital camera, you can use that too. Set the ISO to 50 (if you can)—the speed of your film—and find the proper exposure where the picture and the histogram look right to you. You're probably fine with this exposure. Note that you might have to adjust the EV (exposure value) to get into the range of the view camera lens. That is, most view camera lenses are at their optimum at ƒ/22 or ƒ/32; your DSLR exposure might be, let's say, ƒ/8 at 1/125th. So you'll have to count apertures down and shutter speeds slower...closing the aperture from ƒ/8 - ƒ/11 - ƒ/16 - ƒ/22 is three stops, so you'll have to lengthen the shutter speed by three stops too, from 1/125th - 1/60th - 1/30th - 1/15th. (If your DSLR only goes down to ISO 100, say, you'll also have to increase the exposure by one extra stop to match the film speed of your Velvia.)

• Set the aperture and shutter speed on the lens (in our example, 1/15th at ƒ/22).

• Cock the shutter. All these controls—aperture, shutter speed, slider for opening and closing the lens, and cocking lever—are on the lens.

• Insert the film holder in the camera. This is easy; it slides in right under the groundglass, which is held to the back of the camera with spring clips.

• Check to make sure the lens is closed.

• Pull the darkslide. The film is now facing the lens inside the camera.

• Do your best to channel Edward Weston, hold your breath, and click the cable release.

• Re-insert the darkslide. Many film holders have white and black sides to their "handle" ends, the end with the thicker bar where you take hold of it. Usually, white side out means unexposed film, and black side out means exposed film. This, obviously, is just so you don't expose the same $9 sheet of film twice without meaning to.

• Remove the film holder, remove the lens, and "knock down" (it's a figure of speech!) the camera and tripod.

• Back home, you transfer the exposed film to an empty film box (you can use old ones, or buy empty ones, or get an old one from a friend or from your processor). 

• Send or deliver the film to your processor.

• When you get the transparency back, mount it in a masking mat, put it on a light box, and marvel. Later, wow all your friends—and I don't mean just your photographer friends.

That's the basic process. The rest is refinement. Once you're equipped, you could be up and shooting the first day.

Classic Printmaking for Fun, Part I

Waukesha*, Wisconsin, June 2011 — I'm 54 this year, and film photography has certainly come a long way since I first seriously caught the photography bug in 1980. It used to be all there was. Up until the 1990s, the technology of photography hadn't really changed in its essence in a century and a half—although of course there had been a lot of improvements and refinements, mostly, although not exclusively, for the sake of convenience.

For the past ten or fifteen years, a period of time known as the Digital Transition, there's been a great deal of status anxiety among photographers. Early on—and sometimes lingering still—digital proponents were touchy about the initially inferior status of digital imaging—or simply the fact that it was the newcomer on the scene. Next, in the early aughts, came a phase in which many people were obsessed with comparing film to digital and arguing about the results. During this phase we saw a lot of grand pronouncements as people recounted their investigations and their reasoning and proclaimed they were sticking with film or switching to digital. Lately, it's been film (a.k.a. "analog") aficionados who have been on the defensive, as digital has decisively taken over the market and removed just about any real practical necessity to use film at all.

Although a lot of film is still sold on an absolute basis, sales are constricting all the time, and the new camera market has shifted over almost entirely to digital. As of this writing there are only a relative handful of film cameras available new, and many of those are essentially vestigial. Some are being sold out of what's called "New Old Stock" (NOS), meaning product already manufactured which is being sold out of existing inventory. When that inventory's gone, a number of those cameras won't be manufactured again. You can still buy the Canon EOS 1v and the Nikon F6 new, for instance, but it's highly unlikely that either company will manufacture another run of either of those cameras, and there certainly won't be successors. (At the moment there are clear signs, including the ever-rising price**, that Nikon is reaching the end of its stock of the F6.)

Also, the quality of digital has now in some ways greatly eclipsed film. I distinctly remember in about 2001 or 2002 talking to a professional photographer who said he was happy with digital at base sensitivity (widely, but incorrectly, called "ISO"), but that he wasn't going to switch until digital could at least match the sensitivity of higher-ISO films. Obviously, digital has now gone so far past film in this regard that digital photographers regularly complain about sensitivities that were never anything but pipe dreams to film users.

Cuyahoga, from a print made on a now-extinct Kodak paper

There are still a few actual, real advantages to film, which we'll get to eventually. But, for the most part, digital has it all over film—it's greatly more convenient, much more widespread, and for the most part, looks as good or better, especially in color.

My first suggestion is going to be that you completely ignore status issues. We primates just love to split up into groups and compete—it's just how we're wired—but there's no reason for it where photography is concerned. I'm a digital photographer, and you probably are too. There's nothing wrong with that. Similarly, there's absolutely no reason you "have" to get into film, now or ever, for any reason. If you don't want to, don't, and don't worry about it for a second. There's absolutely no reason to.

Crafts are fun
So why would you get into film photography, then? I think there's one basic reason: because it's a highly developed, beautiful craft, and crafts can be fun.

People love all sorts of crafts that are absolutely not necessary for their security or prosperity. Some people buy old cars and restore them to better-than-original condition or cobble together their own hot-rod creations. Some people love to build plastic models. People knit their own scarfs and sweaters and sew their own clothes. There's no reason you have to stencil borders on your walls, make jewelery, tie flies, or build your own furniture (is woodworking the king of crafts?). Yet people do all these things. Some people build their own electronics, soldering parts on circuit boards. Speaker-building is a thriving subculture in audio circles, even though 95% of the home-built (well, let's say owner-designed) speakers I've heard don't sound quite as good as the better store-bought ones. A photographer I know of in Kentucky teaches at a craft center where they also teach glass-blowing, which is not a skill that's of much practical use in modern life. My aunt Mary, in her basement workshop, used to make the most beautiful rustic chairs from branches she collected in the forest. I have a friend who designs and makes stained glass panels for windows and doors and such. She has recently moved over into making "pictures" by quilting together pieces made of all sorts of different fabrics. Gardening is another activity I'd put into this general broad category. Although in some sense practical, it's a hobby, an enthusiasm, and it can be very creative—although, since you're dealing with living things, it has a nurturing component that is pretty unique. You might not agree that it's strictly a craft. Still, what it has in common with all these other things is that people do it because they love it, not because they have to.

Practiced at the highest level by the very best craftspeople, almost all crafts can become art. But that's seldom the point for the majority of people.

With all crafts, there are practical byproducts. You do make things. Sometimes you can sell them. Often you can use the things you make yourself, in your own home and in your own life. But the real reward is in the doing. We do most crafts because we love the process—it's gratifying. We get satisfaction from it.

That's the extent of what I'm going to claim for classic photographic printmaking. It's a craft—still viable, lately becoming much more esoteric than previously—and, practiced as such, it can be fun and gratifying...its own reward.

Who needs to throw a pot?
In a sense, this restores photographic printmaking to a place where it ought to have been all along. When I taught photography in the 1980s, there was this pervasive sense in the air that the kids were learning skills that could well lead to paying work later on. I was asked to speak at a high school recently, and the teacher asked that I talk to the kids about careers. This, despite the fact that even many well-established photographers have trouble making significant incomes and that the supply of skilled and often inspired photographers already greatly exceeds the demand. (I once knew a professional studio advertising photographer named Toby who devised his own personal rules for living. Toby's Commandments were: "Do good, be kind, have courage, and don't be a goddamned professional photographer.") When I taught high school, I was once grilled about whether the skills I was teaching would be useful to professionals...by the ceramics instructor! What? My feeling then as now was, why should photographic printmaking be any different than learning how to throw pots? When was the last time a high school student desperately needed to be able to make her own coffee mug in order to succeed in life? Well, photographic printmaking is really no different.

So, over the next several months, very occasionally and in no great hurry, I'm planning to write a few articles about the craft of classic photographic printmaking***. (I can't believe it's already been a whole year since I first started thinking about doing this.) With any luck, I will get my act together sufficiently to make a few videos, although that's asking a lot of my currently nonexistent videomaking skills (anyone want to help?). I hasten to add, to forestall the inevitable jumped-to conclusions, that no, I am not "returning" to film. Unlike some (and no disrespect to them), I don't happen to see film and digital as an either/or proposition. I shoot digital. Just not exclusively. And no, TOP is not becoming a film-only site (I'm sure somebody's going to say that, somewhere). Our coverage by and large will not change.

So—why do this? Well, I'm hoping it will be fun for me, educational for some of you who have grown up with digital, gratifying for those who already love printmaking, and historical for those in the future who might be curious as to the state and changing nature of classic optical-chemical photography in the 'teens.

Mike

* It's pronounced "WALK-uh-shaw," or sometimes something a little closer to WALKIE-shaw." Although it's widely believed locally to mean "Little Foxes"—to the point that there are statues of foxes sprinkled around town (that might also be because of the Fox River, which runs through the middle of town)—it is actually a sort of bastardized or transmogrified version of the name of the leader of the local native tribe when the area was first settled by Europeans.

It's also a very good web name, because there is only one Waukesha in the world. Google it, and you get us.

**Cameramakers control the outflow of NOS by carefully manipulating the price. As the stock dwindles, the price rises, slowing sales. This enables the camera to remain "in production" for longer. This is typically done with higher-end cameras when the manufacturer knows that there is no longer demand sufficient to justify either another run or a replacement model.

***I've encouraged Ctein to write a bit about digital printmaking. He's thinking about it.

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Featured Comment by Carl Weese: "If anything, interest in traditional photographic print making seems to be on the rise. It looks as though we will fill three 'Introduction to Platinum' workshops this year at The Center for Alternative Photography. It's a very craft-oriented weekend course, starting by making ten pictures targeted for platinum printing, developing the film, and then making Pt/Pd prints on hand-coated paper.

"In the past the students have mainly been advanced large format photographers with lots of experience at silver printing. But that's changed. Recently, a lot of the participants have never used a view camera, never developed sheet film (or any film) and never made a silver print, much less a platinum one. It's all new to them, and they seem to love it.

"Practical benefit? Well, a couple participants have been photography teachers who want to be able to teach the medium, a few are professional photographers trying to transition into the Fine Art Market who wonder if Pt/Pd will give them an edge, but most simply have seen and admired platinum prints and want to see if they can manage to do the craft themselves."

Featured [partial] Comment by Lynn: "I haven't printed in a darkroom for 35 years—and I miss the fun of it, and the excitement of watching an image appear in the developer tray. Watching an inkjet incrementally spit out a print just isn't the same. However, my digital darkroom just astounds me with its capabilities, and the fact I can work in colour—an impossible dream 35 years ago—and that I can produce better quality prints now than I did back then is just wonderful."

Mike replies: I agree. Master printers in the medium are still relatively rare, but the digital medium itself indeed can't be beat for color printing. The only traditional color printing process I truly loved was dye transfer, and both of the best dye transfer printers I knew (Charlie Cramer and Ctein) now print their current work with inkjet printers.

Featured Comment by mark lacey: "I'm so looking forward to this. I teach darkroom work and am constantly amazed how many young people get the craft element and see it as a fun recreational activity, as a polar opposite to sitting in front of a computer all day which so many people do nowadays. I'm probably an extreme example because I'm the only person I know who even loves developing film, I get so excited looking at the negs as they come out of the tank, for me that's the magic moment. It takes all sorts I suppose."

Featured Comment by Steve Jacob: "Oddly enough, although I don't propose to use film again for any reason, I find the comparison quite interesting.

"With film, it was developing that put me off. I was impatient to get to the print stage, so it always seemed like a chore. There was always the risk that you could mess up a whole roll, and I sometimes did. A waste of both film and chemicals.

"Printing on the other hand was actually good fun because it was where you got final control over contrast. It was a creative process, you could see what you were doing and you finally got something to hang on the wall.

"By comparison, digital processing is a breeze, whether from a RAW file or a scanned negative. In this case, all the creative control is exercised during the processing, not the printing, so it is the creative part of the whole process. But the last step, pressing the print button, can be the most frustrating part of it.

"Calibrating and 'dialing in' a new printer and paper combination inevitably turns out to be a process of trial and error, which would be OK were it not for the cost of ink. It would also help if the documentation for most printer drivers was less opaque.

"Of course you can go mail order, but even so I think people who find digital printing a pain are excused. If Ctein can lend us poor suckers a hand (and save us some ink) it would be much appreciated."

Minority Report

By Ctein

Amidst the discussions a few weeks back of film and digital photographic practices, it occurred to me that it's much harder for me to get numbers today on the kinds of photographs photographers are making than it used to be.

In the film era, having friends and informants at the Big Three in filmmaking was entirely sufficient. Those companies accounted for over 90% of all photographs being made, and they could readily tell me what percentage of photographs were slides, B&W negatives, color negatives, 35mm, 8x10, you name it.

Understand that they were not always inclined to do so. Mostly I do not have detailed information. But I had a few data points and I could be confident of their accuracy. That's more than I can say now.

For example, between 1980 and 2000 almost every photograph made was on color negative film. In the early 1980s, Kodak told me that 90% of its still film sales were for a single emulsion in a single size: Kodacolor II, 35mm. This was shortly before the huge explosion in film varieties brought on by novel silver halide structures such as T-grain and new chemical tricks like DIR couplers. The market then fragmented into many subcategories. In the early 1980s, each film manufacturer made only a few emulsions of each subtype of film, and so it was possible for one single film to completely dominate a company's sales.

Altogether, all kinds and all formats, color negative photography accounted for perhaps 97–98% of photography during a 20-year span. That's pretty astonishing. I didn't get clarification on whether "film sales" meant dollar volumes, number of rolls, or number of photographs. Doesn't much matter. No matter how you parse it, the evidence is overwhelming that everything besides small format color negative had to be counted in the single-digit percentages. All the slide film in use? One percent. Give or take. All the black-and-white film in use? Ditto.

That says nothing about either the commercial or aesthetic import of the photographs made on those materials. That turns out to be important.

As I mentioned in a previous comment, the medium format film market collapsed well before the rest of the film business. The bulk of medium format film went into portraiture, with the second most popular use being weddings. Thirty-five millimeter had seriously eroded the medium-format wedding market by the end of the '90s. The major portrait makers jumped onto the digital bandwagon in the 1990s, because they could make effective use of the ultra-expensive cameras of the era. Were it not for the prestige of medium format it simply would have disappeared from the marketplace. Much for the same reasons that, based on market considerations, Kodachrome should have disappeared 15 years ago—there were an insignificant number of Kodachrome users in the total scheme of things. Fortunately, for the lovers of those particular media, those were users that the film and camera manufacturers courted assiduously. But, again, that wasn't about the sales numbers.

Today, it's much harder to make assertive statements about what kind of photographs photographers are making or would like to make in the future. Digital photography doesn't leave tracks in the snow. Once the camera and memory card makers have sold their wares, there's no way to easily track what photographers are doing with them. One can try to apply guesswork and intuition to the problem, but I'll wager that most of you readers were surprised by the film statistics I just ran out. Reality is not obligated to conform to intuition, no matter how well educated that intution may be.

Even Mike's TOP polls are not particularly helpful. In the best of those, maybe 10% of the readership responds, a phenomenal response rate but no indicator of whether or not it's representative of the silent 90% majority. It's especially difficult to extrapolate from that when you're concerned with the important minorities: those still using film, those working in black-and-white, etc. Even in this abnormal assemblage, those percentages will be small enough that separating them out from the noise is tricky and assuring that your polling is representative even trickier. Sociologists long time ago worked out ways to ensure the accuracy of self-reporting polls, but it's not easy.

With the 40-fold shrinkage in the film business, it would be most interesting to learn if the aforedescribed pattern of film usage has changed much. Is it still 95+ percent color negative, with all subcategories equally diminished in absolute number? Or has the very flavor of the use changed? Are film photographers now the cream skimmed off the top of the milk...or the sedimentary dregs at the bottom of the wine bottle? Or do they distribute themselves pretty much as they always did but in fractional numbers of old? I'd love to know.

Unfortunately my inside contacts in the film manufacturers have long moved on and I haven't bothered to cultivate new ones. If any of you have real insider information on how the film market currently breaks down, and wouldn't mind discussing that in public, please write.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Tom Kwas: "Interesting to note, and I've posted this before, in the mid-1970s, our studio Kodak TSR was trying to get us to shoot 8x10 and 4x5 color neg, because we were 'just lucky' Kodak still made transparency and could pull production any day. Of course, the pre-press and separation houses didn't like it and everything they separated from it looked flat, soft (as in film sharpness), and soft (as in color reproduction); plus, they had to make too many color decisions, whereas with transparency, they just had to match the film (which they had trouble doing anyway).

"...We never seriously considered it, but it's notable that Kodak was already acknowledging back then that they made far more color neg than transparency and it seemed that they were trying to set the stage for reducing production of certain lines. Guess they were just asking for Fuji to come in and hand them their hats by pushing their color transparency, and at the time, a far more stable emulsion that didn't have to be tested batch to batch either....

"Sorry to hear that 120 is practically a ghost town. When I look back on years of shooting, if I had to keep one film format that I've done the best work with overall, it would be 120. While I think 4x5 has the best overage usage by discipline (you can use it for product/people/architecture), the 120 format certainly excels when it comes to getting the right look, feeling, and expression in portraiture combined with having the best film size for quality while getting those expressions.

"After I got into photo management, I thought I could do everything I wanted to do from an 'artistic' standpoint by just shooting 8x10 film. Arguably it could do everything from portraiture to architecture, and I could actually ditch the darkroom and do everything with a few trays, a printing frame, and an overhead light. Trying to take pictures quickly 'on-the-fly' outdoors, cured me of that thinking pronto.

"What I've realized, is that their are two levels of hell for film users: will my preferred film format and preferred films still be made (and for how long)? ...And, will the ancillary services associated with film shooting be available to me in my town? ...Or, at a reasonable rate/time? I live in a city of a million in the metro area, and I can't even get same day E-6 processing done on a professional level, much less the old 90 minute 'usual.'

"What will be the last standing film format? Or at least, the last film format with the most options?"

Vexed by fb+f

There are some issues that cause in photography enthusiasts what in the past I've called "angst." That's just the German word for "fear," and it has different connotations in English than it does in German, as far as I can tell. (Ich spreche nicht Deutsches.) A better word for what I mean would be "fretting." A definition of "fret" in that sense is, "To cause to be uneasy; vexed."

I started representing Camera & Darkroom magazine online (on CompuServe) in 1991 and became chief editor of Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques, a newsstand magazine and quasi-technical-journal, in 1994. I wrote more than 100 columns that appeared on The Luminous Landscape, Photo.net, and Steve's Digicams, and was a columnist for Black & White Photography magazine in England for a handful of years, and I've been running this site since 2005. Believe me, I've encountered just about every form of photographic fretting there is.

All in our heads
Any field, but especially enthusiast hobbies, have esoteric aspects a) which seem like revelations when you first hear about them, b) which seem really important when you plunge into a spate of intensive research about them, but that c) you will be able to restore to their actual level of relative importance the tenth time you encounter them, and d) you recognize as a consistent pattern the 20th time you come across someone raising the alarums about them. Finally, e) you will get thoroughly sick of talking about them by the 50th time they come up...and, in this hobby at least, f) graybeard veterans* have heard them a hundred times—if not five hundred.

I'm not good at putting together comprehensive lists—how do you know you're not forgetting one?—but let's just say that if a bunch of veteran photo writers got together and started brainstorming, we'd come up with a pretty good list of the things that photographers like to fret about. (I even have my pet peeves among them, for instance, how people are so obsessed with sharpness but seldom pay enough attention to tonality.)

A fair amount of this is psychological. There are some things that people just do or don't like as abstract ideas. A simple example: people just don't like flaws and imperfections in the glass of their lenses. Tiny flakes of blacking resting on an interior element, minute scratches, air bubbles in the glass (in older lenses), areas where the coating has flaked or rubbed off—any of these things will reduce the value of a lens considerably. More to the point, they bother people far out of proportion to their actual effect**.

Cosmic rays
So anyway, on to the topic at hand. On Wednesday, a reader named William responded to Ctein's column about hoarding film by saying, "I can't get excited about...film preservation as a viable long-term plan. Why? four words: Cosmic rays fog film." He then cited a passage from a Kodak white paper about the effects of background radiation on motion picture stock. Good research, and a perfectly valid topic to bring up under the circumstances.

Ctein then answered this concern, saying, among other things, "I am well aware of this. Kodak standards for this, though, are extremely tight, far tighter than typical photographers need to worry about. [...] Moderate-speed B&W still films do not become unusable, not even after decades."

Asked and answered? Not hardly. Since then I've gotten half a dozen sardonic, scornful comments about how Ctein thinks he's such a know-it-all because he thinks he knows better than Kodak does, etc., etc.

So here, for the edification of those still following along, is the long version. Or the somewhat longer version.

There are some films that are known to be excessively affected by radiation; most notably, Kodak P3200 (which probably would have been as ISO 1000 film if it had ever been certified with an ISO rating, which it never was). Kodak lore at the time was that the only place new stock could be stored prior to shipment was in an abandoned salt mine, although I've never been able to confirm if they literally did that. With moderate-speed (ISO 100–400), conventional-emulsion black-and-white films, the very low doses of radiation emanating from the earth and from space—collectively known as background radiation—will not affect the usefulness of the film. On the other hand, it can have an effect on photographic paper, which doesn't last nearly as well in storage.

Why? Well, all you have to do is think about what's going on. Even fresh, promptly-processed film has some density in the "clear" areas—that is, unexposed areas of developed film. That density is known as "fb+f," which means film base plus fog. Why isn't that density significant? Because the clear areas of the film correspond to the dark areas of the print, and the contrast of the print can be adjusted in the printing process to account for slightly more fb+f density—just like it can be adjusted to account for the fb+f of fresh film. As for the highlights, the highlights in a B&W negative aren't "delicate"—they correspond to the dark areas of the negative, which have received so much exposure to visible-spectrum light that a tiny bit of added density from background radiation probably isn't even detectable—the same constant amount of added density capable of doubling the fb+f only adds a tiny percentage of exposure to the dense highlights.

A few cosmic rays just moves the whole characteristic curve up a tad, is all. It's inconsequential because you can adjust for it when you print the negative. It takes a lot of fogging to ruin a negative, far more than background radiation can provide with normal films—even over decades. And if your film does show excessive fb+f as it ages, just add a little more restrainer to the developer as the years pass, and that will control it. (You would be running new tests on your stockpile of film every five or ten years, of course.)

But now think about what's going on with black-and-white photo paper. What areas does a slight amount of fog affect? That's right—the paper base, a.k.a. "paper white"—the highlights. As soon as fog breaks the exposure threshold (paper needs a certain minimum exposure before it will begin to register as density), additional fog registers as a graying of the whiteness of the paper. As it happens, so-called "chemical fog"—the changes that take place within the paper itself as it ages—are more significant than background radiation fog, but in any event, paper can't accept much fog of any kind before it becomes degraded or even useless, for the simple reason that grayed-out highlights seldom look very pleasing. So paper doesn't store for long periods nearly as well as film does, even frozen. Your assuredly-safe zone is about two years, and your limit is going to be about five to ten years, maybe a little more if you're lucky (or if you don't mind a little tone in your highlights). This will vary depending on specific paper brands and types and with each specific storage situation, but it accords pretty well with actual accounts I've heard of or read about by or about photographers who have stocked up on a favorite paper when it was discontinued.

So now, armed with the above information plus your own Holmsian powers of deduction, you can figure out why Kodak has such high standards for the allowable fb+f of motion picture stock. What's a "print" of a film movie? How is it viewed? Which end of the viewable spectrum of tonality/density does fog affect?

Exactly. Kodak is right, but Ctein is also right—you don't have to worry about background radiation as a cause of degradation of moderate-speed, conventional-emulsion B&W (negative) films intended for pictorial use, even when you stash 30 years' worth in a freezer. The film can easily withstand the slight increase in fb+f caused by cosmic rays without becoming even slightly less useful.

Mike

(P.S. You're welcome, 11 people out there who have actually decided to stockpile film!)

*Note that Ctein and I both do have actual gray in our actual beards.

**Now that everybody's shooting digital, it's really easy to do the Don Nelson experiment. With your standard utility lens on your camera—normal zoom, whatever—focus your camera on some reasonably detailed subject that's neither particularly near nor particularly far; take a picture. Now tear a small corner off of the adhesive portion of a Post-It Note—maybe half the size of a pea. Stick in on the end of your lens. Now take the same picture again. Compare the two. Surprised? At least now you have a baseline for guessing how much effect that tiny scratch has—the one you can only see when the angle of the light is just so and that's so small you can barely see it without a loupe (and that caused your buyer on Ebay to return the lens to you when you tried to sell it...and the reason you tried to sell it was because that damned scratch just bugged you so much).

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Living in the Rochester, N.Y., area for many years and knowing many people who have worked in local undergound salt mines, I can confirm that Kodak P3200 was indeed stored there prior to sale. However, marketing hype surely played a large role. The mines routinely rented played-out areas for industrial storage because they provide an extremely consistent environment, requiring zero energy input to maintain 50°F forever. I suspect, though, that naturally-occuring radioactivity in the surrounding rock formations cancels out the reduction in cosmic ray exposure."

Featured Comment by Rico Ramirez: "I went to San Francisco this April and I used black-and-white film over there. Going back I requested the TSA to hand-inspect my film. My camera bag went through the X-ray conveyor for carry-on items. I thought I emptied all the cameras of film but my Hexar AF had a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 in it that was exposed to the X-ray machine. I developed the roll when I arrived home in San Diego and the film came out fine. It wasn't fogged."

Mike replies: I actually had a section in this post about airport X-rays, but cut it because I'm not competent to compare relative doses. (Well, not without doing more research than I want to do.) Generally speaking, though, airport X-ray inspection devices vary in their intensity by a fairly large factor—something like 30X if memory serves, depending on how modern the equipment is, whether you're traveling internationally, the relative wealth of the country you're in, etc.—and, like most radiation damage, the effects are cumulative. So running your film through once didn't hurt it, but running it through 50 times probably would. Now what we need is someone who can compare the rate of background radiation to the rate of airport X-ray radiation....

Featured Comment by John Camp: "There are many different kinds of people plying the waters (and developers) of photography, but because the Internet is what it is—a medium that appeals especially to technically oriented people—you see a lot of people who are more interested in the processes and mechanics of photography than in the images themselves.

"Maybe that's natural, because the physics and chemistry of photography can be endlessly interesting to people who are so oriented.

"As someone who is 'result' oriented, they often leave me bemused and sometimes astonished. I don't think I've ever been drawn to a photograph because of its sharpness, but other people obviously are—how often (on other forums, like Digital Photography Review or Luminous Landscape) have you seen side-by-side photos of a gorgeous model in a low-cut gown, or no gown at all, but the commentary is on the difference in separation of the eyelashes? Or the fact that Image A has more color artifacts showing around the fourth eyelash from the left, and therefore, that camera simply isn't usable for serious work? Maybe this is why geeks don't get laid...they're counting eyelashes.

"I can think of no famous art photograph—NO FAMOUS ART PHOTOGRAPH—in which ultimate sharpness is critical. Photographs need to be 'sharp enough,' and no more. (I can think of a few in which blur is critical, or at least helpful, like Caponigro's 'Running White Deer.') But you can repeat that endlessly—NO FAMOUS ART PHOTOGRAPH DEPENDS ON ULTIMATE SHARPNESS—and be endlessly ignored.

"It also seems to me that these technically oriented people take technically oriented photographs, most often, landscapes, which function as tests of the things they're interested in—sharpness, resolution, and other qualities that are essentially technical aspects of the camera-lens-sensor unit. You rarely see them writing about composition, values (tonal qualities), color, etc., which are aspects of the brain unit. And they are rarely street shooters, because it's very difficult to get test-like photos in real street shooting. What they really like is to get down in a slot canyon with a heavy tripod and a 60-MP medium format digital back, so that nothing moves, and then see how many striations they can separate out in the sandstone.

"So, it's fairly fruitless to talk about the fact that a small scratch on your lens is essentially meaningless ('The lens is unusable, unusable, I tell you!') or that a few cosmic rays won't make much difference in film. Their goal is perfection in the system, not in the image. They may well realize that can never get there (they're usually pretty smart folks) but that's the goal anyway. They are all about technical issues, and not really about art.

"I often think that they're a little wistful about the fact that they're not artists, so they attempt to reach art through more and more technical perfection. In the meantime, teenagers like the Turnley Bros. are out banging around the neighborhood with whatever camera and lens they can get their hands on...and making art."

Video: Paul Trevor

Photo by Paul Trevor

Here's a nice video by the English photographer Paul Trevor about some old work of his that's just been coming into its own within the past couple of years.

It's also quite pertinent to the discussion(s) in these 'ere precincts recently. A short digression about something that made me chuckle the other day: half tongue-in-cheek, I had sung the praises of Tri-X 400 in a joking comment. I then got an email from a reader who rather anxiously wondered why I liked Tri-X 400 and whether HP5 Plus was as good—what were the properties of Tri-X 400, he asked, that made it special? I'm sure he was asking about aesthetic properties, but many of the reasons I liked Tri-X 400 were purely practical: it withstands long latency periods (the time between exposure and development) gracefully; it doesn't deteriorate easily when stored temporarily in high heat, for instance inside a car or a trunk in mid-summer; it's got good low contrast, and high "latitude" or forgivingness for sub-optimal exposures; it prints fine even with higher levels of fb+f; etc.

Similarly, people always talk about the old "film vs. digital" question like it's all about aesthetic properties and workflow (and now materials availability, as we were discussing yesterday). But I'm lazy, and somewhat disorganized. Re that, listen to what Paul Trevor says in the video starting about 30 seconds in.

Purely by coincidence, almost the same thing happened to me not four days ago. I happened to find an old binder on the floor. Covered with dust, tucked away and hidden by a couple of stack of old CDs, forgotten, it happened to have in it my very first self-developed photographic efforts—photographs I made as a teenager 40 years ago. I was delighted to discover it again—I couldn't have found it on purpose if my life depended on it (at least not quickly). I always have to shake my head when people claim our digital work is permanent. There isn't one in 100 of us whose digital files will be recoverable 40 years from now—and I'm not talking about theoretically, I'm talking about actually. As in, someone will be able to find them, open them, and share the pictures or make new prints. Especially if the archives were not "curated" along the way, or if the curation gets interrupted by the inconvenient intrusion of our own demise (I don't mean to be macabre or morose, but let's be honest, that trend does look robust). The "store once" property of B&W film negatives is one of film's greatest advantages, if you ask me (or, I'm sure, Paul). Forget them, and they wait for you. Come back to them, and it's like you've never been away.

I really like Paul Trevor's work, but then, it's the sort of thing I'm a sucker for, like some people just love Westerns, or pickup trucks, or German beer, or Herman Brood and his Wild Romance at high volumes, or whatever. I love naturalistic B&W 35mm slice-of-life pictures with that offhand compositional dynamism that Paul seemed to get so skillfully back in Liverpool in the '70s. Just a sucker for it. It's "home" for me photographically, so I assume I'm less than objective about it. You'll have to decide for yourself what you think about the work.

That'll be a lot easier if you're within traveling distance of the Walker Art Center in Liverpool. The show (it's called "Like You've Never Been Away") is up until September 25th. (The pictures are nominally "available" on flickr, but only as snapshots from the discolored contact sheets, a way of seeing them you might want to actively avoid.) I have to confess the idea of flying to England just to see the show flitted across my brain. Not normally the sort of thing I do, or can afford to do. Then again, one only lives once....

Mike
(Thanks to Stephen Rees)

ADDENDUM: So this doesn't seem one-sided (many readers have trouble accepting that I'm film/digital agnostic—or, perhaps, that anyone should be), I might add that many of the reasons I like digital are completely practical too—for instance, I don't have to stand at the kitchen sink for an hour every other night performing a tedious rote chore, and I can shoot at 3200 without the fatalistic conviction that I'm completely wasting my energy. Etc.)

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Securing Your Film Photography Future

By Ctein

Last week there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the film fans in our group over the future loss of their favored media. If what you're concerned with is B&W film photography, then I'm here to make you happy. This is really easily addressed (color's much harder).

I'm serious.

I'm not just talking through my hat—I've used the following strategies with success at various times over the past 40 years, beginning when Kodak made the original Pan-X 120 go away circa 1973.

Buy a small deep freeze. Buy a 20-or-whatever-year supply of your preferred B&W film. Stick it in the freezer. Pull out rolls as you need them. I can guarantee they'll stay good for decades. You've spent, probably, a few thousand bucks (depends, of course, on your burn rate) to guarantee your future in film.

Commercial B&W developers and fixers may disappear, but they're very easy to compound—the raw chemicals are cheap, and they will be readily available for a long time. If you fear they won't be, buy a large sealed tub of each chemical—keep them sealed against air, moisture and light and they will also last many decades. B&W film processing is easy to do, too. Any photographer can learn it.

Darkroom print papers could become a problem, unless you stock up on your favorite. That's not a new problem; it's been vexing B&W printers since Edward Weston's prime. You can either live with possibly losing your favorite paper, as folks have for 70 years, or stock up and freeze it, just like your film. Your choice.

Darkroom equipment lasts the better part of forever, unless you're careless. Cameras? Not so much. Afraid your camera body will die on you before you're done with the film phase of your life? Then buy two (or three if you're really paranoid). These days, used, very-good-condition camera gear can be bought for an average of 10–20 cents on the dollar, compared to mid-'90s prices. If that's too rich for your blood, well, then photography's altogether too rich a hobby/career for you. Find something else. I mean it. The bargains are amazing; you can't hope for better. It's the perfect time to buy film equipment. Compared to the bad old days, your redundant gear is still quite the bargain.

Keep one body in reserve. Pull it out every few months, cycle the shutter speeds and other controls, send it to your favorite repair guy for a clean and checkup every few years (and, yes, such folks will be around a very long time, although their services may not come cheaply). If/when you break the first one, switch to the second...and the first one will be a ready supply of parts that will keep the second one in repair.

Can I promise that this will make you safe for decades? Nah, life doesn't come with guarantees. Odds are better than 90% though.

This works. It's not expensive. Over the long run, it will even save you money. The majority of your expenses are upfront, but they're not impossibly large, and, forever after, your running costs will be very modest.

Color's another story
Sorry. I've no easy answer for color. The hangup is the processing. If commercial processing goes away, most photographers will be out of luck—color film processing is a demanding thing, requiring accuracy and precision beyond most photographers' abilities. Color developers can be tricky to compound and some of the component chemicals are obscure and may become very difficult to obtain. You can probably drag out your color photography life for five years if commercial processing becomes unavailable, but I'd not count on more than that.

Any chance for Kodachrome or dye transfer ever coming back, as one reader asked? As close to 0% as you can calculate, for a bunch of very good reasons. For a start, running a K-14 line requires two masters-degree-or-better chemists, and the chemistry is not stable. If you wondered why Dale Labs didn't just decide to run one batch of K-14 a year, it's because they figured that most of you would balk at paying $100+ a roll for processing, which is what it would take.

But, as regards B&W? Easy! Stock up and stop worrying. You'll be a lot happier in both the short and long run.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "In case anybody is worried about power failures on their freezer full of film—film is much easier to store safely than food is.

"Food reacts badly to being frozen and thawed multiple times (it tends to mess up the texture, which is important), and can become unsafe with relatively short times (hours) spent at room temperature.

"Film, in contrast, is rated to last years at room temperature. If you lose power long enough that your freezer gets all the way to room temperature (which would be quite a while, if you don't open the lid), all that happens is that the film starts aging at a 'normal' rate. (If you're in some hideous climate like, um, mine, where it got to 103°F yesterday, letting the film get all the way up to 103° would not be good; but a closed freezer in the basement will take a very long time without power to get up to 103°; in fact a basement won't get up to the full outside temperature ever—the ground is a huge heat-sink. Of course, lots of hot places routinely build without basements.)

"You do need to be careful about condensation when refrigerating film. What you want to avoid is having warm, most air come in contact with the cold film; water will condense out, soak into the gelatine, stick the layers to each other, and ruin it. (120 film generally comes with each roll in a sealed wrapper already; plastic 35mm film cans are adequately air-tight for this, so you can toss those in an ordinary bag and take them out freely, but let them come up to room temperature before breaking the air seal. If you have film that doesn't have its own seal, a zip-loc freezer bag is perfect.)"

Film Falls Off a Cliff

It's a rather stunning graphic, there on the lower left (labeled "Fading Film")—sourced from the Photo Marketing Association (PMA). You can get the gist of it at a glance. It shows a fall in sales from a billion rolls of film a year in 1999 to a mere 20 million last year.

The article says that according to Yukihiko Matsumoto, chief researcher for the Jackson, Michigan based PMA, sales of film cameras in the U.S. "have tumbled from 19.7 million cameras in 2000 to 280,000 in 2009 and might dip below 100,000 this year." Informative article, I thought—especially the part about the "rich irony" halfway through the article.

What that all says to me is...time to shoot some film! We're in the silver twilight, the last gasp of a tradition that started a hundred and seventy-two years ago. What a privilege to be able to partake of it while it lasts.

(I do understand that that might not be the exact conclusion everyone will draw from this data.... :-)

Mike
(Thanks to Jim Loudon)

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Featured Comment by Andrew: "According to posts over on Rangefinderforum.com and according to my local film lab, which thankfully is a good one and knows how to properly do B&W film, film use is ticking up. The real question in my mind is, how long can it remain profitable for the companies that make film? There could still be a demand for it, but if it's a money-loser for Kodak, Fuji, Ilford, etc., then it might disappear for that reason. Any metrics on profitability for these companies?"

Mike replies: Film use as a whole is not "up" by any stretch of the imagination. The "film renaissance" stories you're seeing are derived from the fact that film sales at Harman Technology were up 8% in 2010. That means that use of Ilford black-and-white film—and possibly also black-and-white film across brands, though I can't verify that—is increasing, not that film use as a whole is increasing.

Then again, sources tell me that Harman just laid off 20% of its workforce and raised prices for the second time this year because of increases in the cost of silver. The article linked above—sourced from the PMA, which is the best source for such information outside of the companies themselves—mentions that film is still profitable for Kodak. I've been saying for a number of years that film will never go away entirely, and I still think that's true...but what I'm talking about when I say that is black-and-white film. It's at least possible that color film will become entirely extinct some day.

For decades, we read truisms about how photographers should be grateful for the mass market because it subsidizes the products we all need and benefit from. Well, that's what's going away—that mass market. The adjustments are wrenching for the major players, and are happening swiftly. But it's likely that there will always be enough of a market for a residual industry. A film coating line is just not so technologically complex or capital-intensive that a few small companies can't serve a small enthusiast market for the materials. We almost certainly have some adjusting left to do before some sort of stability is achieved, however—that much seems pretty safe to say.

Personally, I'm not sure I even care if color film survives or not. I never much cared for most commercially-available color materials, and after looking at digital prints by Charlie Cramer recently, I certainly can't be convinced that traditional color processes have anything to offer over and above what digital color does (the case is closer with Ctein, but dye transfer can't be considered a commercial process). Digital and its technological auxiliaries so far (Photoshop etc., inkjet printers) seem well-suited to color—as we regularly moan about around here, digital products are virtually all color-native as they have so far been designed and marketed—but the ancient Talbotian double-negative process for black-and-white has long been simple, effective, distinctive, and elegant, and I hope, trust, and believe it will endure.

Why My Gigabyte Film Scans Might Not Be Good Enough

By Ctein

Last week, in some comments to Mike's "Touch Once" post, I mentioned that I was on my fourth round scanning some of my film and that re-scanning my film seems to be something I have to do about every five years despite my best efforts to make scans so good that I could never imagine needing better ones. (Apparently, my wildest imaginings have a tangible expiration date.) This, of course, raised questions about how good a film scan really needed to be, and so here we are.

I'm close to wrapping up the task of scanning all the undigitized negatives of the photographs in my dye transfer portfolio. After several weeks of work, I've got a folder of image files that's about 100 GB in size. That's what happens when almost all your work is medium format negative and you're scanning it at 16 bits per channel color depth at a pixel pitch of 4800 PPI. My average file size tops three quarters of a gigabyte. Shouldn't this be enough for anybody?

Well, I really hope so. I don't look forward to repeating any of this five years from now; I truly can't imagine why I would have to. The problem is that I'm pretty sure these aren't the best of all possible scans. That leaves the door open to the possibility that at some time in the future I will come up with some unimagined need that demands even better scans. Be afraid, be very afraid.

The problem lies in the resolution. Forty-eight hundred PPI crisply images film grain, but it doesn't actually resolve it. What's the distinction? Point your digital camera at the night sky and open the shutter for a few seconds. You'll photograph stars, but the stars themselves are thousands of times smaller than an individual pixel in your camera. The stellar image expands to fill a pixel with some average level of brightness, but it's not resolved.

1200 PPI scan (click on these images to see them larger; the auto-resizing of the blog software obscures the sharpness of the images a bit). You can image film grain at remarkably low scan resolutions, as these comparison photos of TMAX 100 film scans show. An image of film grain, though, is not the same as resolved film grain.

2400 PPI scan

4800 PPI scan

Film grain is extremely small, even in coarse-grained films. Forty-eight hundred PPI scans don't resolve it. What you get are little square pixel-sized blobs in place of the original grain that mimic the pattern of the grain.

So what? Well, there are some subtle kinds of image degradation that occur when you don't sharply resolve grain. Good darkroom printers are familiar with the effects that occur when a print is just a bit out of focus or made with a less than a top-notch enlarging lens. Edge acutance gets subtly altered. More visibly, tonality and gradation in the extreme highlights and shadows gets distorted or muddied, because those tiny individual film grains (or spaces between grains) have a disproportionate effect on tonal rendition at the extremes.

The situation is not quite the same for film scanners, but it's close enough that there are issues to worry about. The losses are small; I think they may never matter to me. But there's that demonstrated lack of future imagination.

How much scan resolution would it take to satisfactorily resolve the film grain? I don't really know. The late Bruce Fraser and I discussed this on occasion, and we guessed the scans would have to resolve in the 10,000–15,000 PPI range, but neither of us ran any tests. I'd be looking at 5–10 GB scan files, and that would give pause even to Lloyd Chambers' uber-Mac.

There are other practical issues. Scan pitch is not the same as scan resolution, It's only the upper limit on the resolution. The real resolution is somewhat less, due to losses in the optical train. (A cautionary note there for any readers who want to report on their ultra-high-resolution scans. Do you know what resolution you're really getting?) I'm fortunate. I've tested my Minolta Dimage Multi Pro scanner, and it resolves 4200 PPI in the center of the field and 3800 PPI at the edges. 80–90% of theoretical resolution at a scanner's upper limit is very good performance.

Thing is, if I had a scanner that delivered 10,000–15,000 pixels per inch, I have to come up with new measurement tools to find out what was actually resolved. Nothing in my experimental arsenal is good enough. For all I know, there aren't even any film scanners of any type out there that can resolve 10,000 PPI, manufacturers claims notwithstanding.

If the gods choose to smile on me, I'll never have to answer these questions. All I can know for sure is that there is information in the original negative that I'm not capturing in the scans, and all I can do is hope that I never need to care.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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The Path to Freedom: My (Former) 'Touch-Once' Method

The subject of working methodology continues to fascinate me, so I hope you'll forgive me if I give it a little more air. I wanted to describe the methodology that I came up with after years of photographing and used for years. (To those of you who never shot film, this will seem strange and foreign, like a description of washing clothes on a stone at the river's edge. But bear with me.)

'Touch-Once'
I forget what post it was in which a commenter brought up the "touch once" concept. It comes from the field of Time Management. The idea is that if you want to stay on top of your organizing, you work out a method that requires you to deal with everything only one time, after which you never have to deal with it again (unless you want to, of course). That allows you to move into the future without being bogged down by the past (and without the necessity of Draconian solutions like burning all your past work, which seems...well, counterproductive, at the very least).

Here was my method: I'd shoot as I went about my life. Every second or third evening, I'd develop a tank of film standing at the kitchen sink—a chore than took about an hour or so from start to cleanup for three rolls of 35mm, which for me meant 105 pictures. (Why 35 pictures per roll? Because that's 7 strips of 5, which was the capacity of the PrintFile 35-7B archival sleeves I used. Why the PrintFile 35-7B? Because it was easily contact-printed on a single 8x10" sheet of RC paper, leaving room for the holes made by a three-hole punch.) I'd then hang the film in a closet to dry.

The next morning, I cut the filmstrips into sections and loaded them into the negative pages. Believe it or not, this was the most onerous part of the process for me. I hated doing it. I don't know why; it's not particularly difficult, or even particularly time-consuming. I just didn't like it.

When I had twelve or fifteen pages of negatives accumulated, I'd contact print them. Like most photographers, I had that process all worked out. Standard enlarger height, aperture, time. Very quick. I could knock off a set of contacts very quickly whenever I had chemicals set up.

My next step was to edit—to mark the contact sheets for workprinting. My rule for myself was that I had to look at every single frame on the contact sheet through the magnifier—no skipping. My reasoning was, I had cared enough to shoot the picture when I had the camera in my hand—I should care enough to look at the result for four or five seconds. (I wonder how many digital photographers spend five seconds just looking at every single exposure they make, "enlarged" on the screen. Not very many, would be my guess.)

And I had a rule for workprints, too: I allowed myself between one and six frames on each sheet (that is, out of every roll of 35 exposures). The reasoning here was that even on a contact sheet that seemed a total waste, that bored me, I felt I needed to resist the temptation to dismiss the entire roll just to get past it. The one-worprint minimum rule was basically a hedge against laziness. Having to print at least one picture made me deal with the roll and exercise editing discrimination. And limiting it to six was to counteract the opposite tendency—there were some rolls I'd get enthusiastic about; I would want to workprint nearly everything. But I knew from experience that workprinting an entire roll was too much work, and would bog me down. So I forced myself to narrow the choices down to six in those cases.

The mechanism was simple. The first time through with the magnifier, I'd mark every frame I was interested in with a red slash mark in the corner. When I was finished, if there were more than six so marked, I'd go back over the marked ones and indicate which to print by making the slash into an "X."

With a stack of sleeves and contacts, the next step was workprinting. Again, this was automatic. My negatives were consistent enough that I could simply expose the paper (8x10, usually) to a standard size and time, and get a good enough print to look at. I'd expose them all first, then batch-process them through the chemicals. (If I'd screwed up and one or two of them weren't adequate, I'd go back and re-do those.) It was quick and easy, although of course not as easy as clicking on a JPEG file and seeing it instantly on your computer screen.

The last step was to put all the workprints up on the wall. I long ago noticed a very curious phenomenon...I'm honestly not sure whether this is just a function of the way my particular brain works, or if it might work for other people too. What I found was that my brain sorted out my workprints without me having to do anything but look at them. Time and time again, I'd put two dozen workprints up on the wall thinking all of them were pictures of roughly equal quality. Two days later, I could safely get rid of half of them, because my interest in them was at an end. At the end of four days or a week, there would be two or three pictures I continued to love to look at, and the rest just seemed like duds.

Curiously, some of the more obvious, "pretty," successful pictures—the ones I thought were the best just after finishing the workprinting—would not last past this screening process.

That was it. The sleeved negs and contact sheets went into a 3-ring binder, and the workprints went into boxes. There they stay. I have a bunch of binders in the closet and thousands of workrprints in metal-edged boxes. The negatives can slumber in their binders till I die; as long as they stay dry they're perfectly stable, and they never have to be touched again. When I want to enjoy my photographs, I just grab a stack of workprints and flip through them.

Making fine prints is a whole different area for me. I'd do it when I felt like it, but it wasn't part of the process for me. As I never exhibited or sold my work, that wasn't a problem.

There's a rub
The primary limitation of the method I've just described was simple: intermittent poverty. The method worked fine when I could afford all the materials, when I had a darkroom or access to one, and when I had sufficient time to do the work. Those conditions were not always met simultaneously, however. Sometimes I was too poor to buy film in rolls, and had to bulk-roll my own; sometimes I would have to "hold off" buying sleeves; sometimes I had no workprint paper or had to workprint on whatever paper I could scrounge (I remember some particularly nasty out-of-date 5x7 "pearl" or "lustre" surface paper that took me an eon to work through. I forget how I came by it, but I came by an awful lot of it).

But when the system worked, it was beautiful. I now have all my negatives from various periods of time perfectly "dealt with"—no need to go back and spend more time or effort on them. Certainly no need to covert them into a different format every five or ten years! I could never do that. It's only the work from those periods of time in which my life was in disarray, or when I didn't have a darkroom, or when I didn't have the funds or the time to work, that my system broke down. The work from those periods is still in various states of incompletion. Fortunately, the former times were more common than the latter.

I have never worked out a sensible or methodical "touch once" method for dealing with digital shooting. Why? Old dog, new trick? Dislike of computers? Subconscious resentment of the fact that I have to relearn everything from the camera to the software to the printer every two to five years? The fact that I can't seem to take digital shooting as seriously as "real photography"? (Don't be offended by that last; I could never take color photography seriously either, and I could never accept using RC paper for finished prints. Those are all prejudices, not principles).

No idea. I just haven't, is all. That's all I can report.

I would think, though, that the "touch once" imperative is still very important—and the more work you have, the more important it is. And the longer you have been working, the more important it is. It keeps you free. If you deal with your work completely as part of your regular methodology, you are more free to move on, unencumbered by festering obligations to the past.

If only it were as easy to do as it is to say.

Mike

P.S. I really should have illustrated this post, but scanning a bunch of those old workprints is something I've never gotten around to doing...plus, I gave up on scanners after my fourth one broke five months after I spent $650 on it....

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Featured Comment by Martin Doonan: "Interesting, and almost exactly the same process I use for digital (except on the computer). I'm one of those who does spend several seconds with each frame enlarged on the screen. The trick, for me, to achieving 'one-touch' [I think the term of art is actually 'touch it once' —Ed.]  in the digital realm has been automation. One action to import and number the files. A simple system of cataloguing (part of the first evaluation). One click archive, back-up and filing into a working folder. Not a single other part of my life (digital or physical) is in anyway organised but I got onto the business of organising my digital photography early and haven't looked back. It also means I'm more inclined to want to take phoographs because I've made it easy to deal with them when I get home."

You Must By a Cartridge of Tape

...Richard Fee found this review of a Nikon F6 on Amazon, via R.O. Teague's twitter:

Now, this could well be a joke, and probably is. But none of the guy's other reviews are ironic, sarcastic, or humorous, and just the possibility that this could be sincere was enough to make me chuckle.

I especially like the line "You must by a cartridge of tape."

Mike
(Thanks to Richard)

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Featured Comment by Slobodan Blagojevic: "...And 83 people found his review actually helpful...now, that is really scary. ;-) "

UPDATE from Quan Ha: "The reviewer did eventually chime in to let everyone in on the joke:

Posted on Feb. 20, 2011 9:51 PM PST / Last edited by the author 1 hour ago / R. Sawyer says: Thanks for the compliments! Glad my review is HELPFUL to so many people (Holy moly—210 and counting!). I wrote this review after spending weeks on a mundane writing assignment while I was in my last year of law school. Tired of the lengthy techno-group-think reviews found everywhere on camera sites, I wanted to write something pithy, and satire is my favorite form of humor. [...] Hopefully this inspires more of you to sprinkle fun reviews throughout the web. However, be cautioned: as many of these angry comments suggest, satire is the fine wine of humor, and you may want to start with something more universally understandable like puns. The best part about this "15-minutes of fame" is that my wife now thinks that I might actually be funny. Sense of humor validated. Now for a shameless plug, Ken Rockwell style—www.HollisterRanch.com <—shameless plug for my business.

New Premium Silver Paper from Ilford: Art 300

One of the distinct strangenesses of my life these days is that TOP is almost so successful that I no longer have enough time to write for it. Any more going on behind the scenes, and the blog itself will become an arid wasteland with nothing on it. I assume that problem would eventually become self-correcting, but it's weird anyway. Right now, for example, we're in high gear preparing for the print sale, which involves a lot of planning; and, amazingly I think, Peter Turnley arrived in Cairo just in time for Mubarak's resignation and the explosion of celebration that followed it. I'm amazed at that—I've been in constant contact with Peter over the past week, looking on as he went through his decision-making process for a trip he knew would last only a few days, as he was trying to guess when the "visual peak" of the action would come. He hit it like a hammer hits a nail. That's not luck, that's a gift—what they call "a nose for news" and instincts honed by decades of experience. He had basically just hit Tahrir Square with his cameras when the news broke like a big wave over the crowds.

The above is an excuse: I haven't had time to research this post. 

But here's the short take. Harman Technology Ltd., in association with the German papermaker Hahnemühle, has announced its first new traditional photo paper in 13 years. Ilford Multigrade Art 300 is the culmination of 18 months of development with input from more than 150 fine art black-and-white photographers from around the globe. It's a variable-contrast silver gelatin paper with a neutral paper base and a warm-neutral image tone and a heavy 300 gsm weight. The surface is variously described as "matt" [sic—the proper spelling is matte] and "eggshell," yet early reports from beta testers (none of whom I've talked to—see above) say it has excellent Dmax (for the benefit of you darkroom virgins out there, the traditional knock against matte papers is weak Dmax, or maximum density—i.e., the blackness of the blacks). Art 300 is evidently an attempt by Ilford to create a no-holds-barred, premium, line-leading product for top quality fine art printmaking.

We'll definitely test it...eventually. It goes on sale in Great Britain in early April.

Mike
(Thanks to many readers)

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The Last Roll and Ara Güler Too

Steve McCurry has posted nine frames from the ceremonial last-ever roll of Kodachrome on his blog. Steve took the assignment very seriously, traveling around the world and including portraits of stars like Robert De Niro and Amitabh Bachchan (the second name won't mean much to readers in the U.S., but it will to readers in India) as well as some of the colorful native portraits for which is he is best known.

Ara Güler by Steve McCurry, from the last roll of Kodachrome

Much bigger stars to me are Elliot Erwitt and Ara Güler, no less! Ara, éminence grise of Turkish photography, is the auteur of Ara Güler's Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs, a splendid volume I added to my library only last year.

Always nice to see celebrity portraits. (Ebru Ceylan—yes, of those famous Ceylans; Ebru is Nuri's wife—has a nice recent portrait of the Armenian-Turkish maestro at her website, too—third one down at the link.)

The glittering locales, characteristic Asians, and famous faces notwithstanding, the best shot on Steve's roll might be the very last, taken at a Parsons cemetery when he went there to turn the roll in to Dwayne's. A fitting ending for God and Man's old warhorse, and a picture that, I predict, will remain known in photography's history, down through the years to come.

Mike
(Thanks to Luc Novovitch)

ADDENDUM: Oops! Speaking of expiration dates, I think the expiration date on this auction might have just gone past. :-) (Thanks to Oren Grad for this.)

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Processing Old Kodachrome

I thought it might be nice to publish instructions about how to expose and develop leftover rolls of Kodachrome as black-and-white film, but after looking in to it, I don't recommend it. The reason is that Kodachrome has rem-jet anti-halation backing like motion picture negative films. You can expose Kodachrome at about half its ISO and develop in any continuous-tone developer such as D-76 and get a usable (even good) black-and-white negative image (the film can also be processed with reversal processes to achieve a monochrome positive), but the problem is that you still have to remove the rem-jet backing, which sounds like a fussy, messy, and labor-intensive project to me (it involves soaking the film in a borax solution and wiping away the rem-jet by hand, with sponges. According to those who've done it, you'll use about four sponges per roll, because they foul quickly). I've been a darkroom tech in the past and I wouldn't want to have to do it. Whatever money you save by using the old film would be more than offset by the labor involved in processing it.

So here's my considered recommendation as to what to do with leftover unexposed Kodachrome: throw it away (or take it to a lab that does silver recovery), and if you want to shoot some old-fashioned looking B&W, buy some fresh Plus-X and pull it. Sometimes the simple solution is the best solution.

The only reason to process old Kodachrome would be if it's already been exposed at some point in the past and you have reason to believe the information in the images might be valuable (a deceased relative, top-secret spy stuff, etc.). In that case I would recommend finding a good custom lab willing to take on the task (try a lab that handles motion-picture film), rather than attempting it yourself.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Paul Glover: "There are a couple of places which will develop Kodachrome as B&W, Blue Moon Camera and Machine being one of them if I recall correctly. [I have not confirmed this, as Blue Moon is closed for New Year's weekend. —Ed.]

"By the time you consider the relatively high cost of doing this vs. buying some new film and developing it yourself the only reason to bother at all would be to get at the images on already exposed film.

"As others have mentioned, I'd rather support those who are selling new film so they're more likely to continue making it, which is the same reason why I don't go for cheap expired film deals on auction sites."

A Moment of Silence

I know we've covered this to death already, but just a brief moment of silence, please—today, December 30th, is the last day that Kodachrome film will be processed anywhere in the world, ending a remarkable run that began in 1935.

Props to "God and Man," Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, the inventors of Kodachrome. Props also to Eastman Kodak, which promised in the late '90s that Kodachrome would be available and supported for at least ten more years. Promise fulfilled. Final props: Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, for keeping the flame.

To commemorate the occasion, Dwayne's (which I'm told is experiencing extremely heavy demand for the final processing runs—the line is running around the clock), is selling a T-shirt in the classic Kodachrome box colors.

The T-shirt costs $12.95 and is available at the Dwayne's Photo website.

Note that at least two of the books in our 2010 Bestsellers list in the previous post contain pictures that were mostly shot on Kodachrome: Harald Mante's Photography Unplugged and William Albert Allard: Five Decades. Both books have outstanding reproduction quality and amply show what all the fuss is about.

Mike

P.S. Apropos of nothing, note the byline on the Times article. That's A.G. as in the son of Pinch and the grandson of Punch, now cub reporter, some day, Publisher.

UPDATE: A nice video of a segment from CBS's "Sunday Morning" about the demise of Kodachrome. About what you'd expect, but nicely done, and it's nice to see Dwayne's, and Dwayne, and the last shot Steve McCurry took on the last roll ever made—of a cemetery in Parsons. Thanks to ShadZee for this. (Warning: more Paul Simon.)

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Featured Comment by Maureen: "Although I've heard Kodachrome II was better, for my money nothing was as beautiful as a Kodachrome 25 slide with the right subject, exposure, and composition. Not garish Fujichrome colors, not grainy like Kodachrome 64 and 200, just subtle, beautiful, infinitely detailed Kodachrome 25. R.I.P."

Several Stock Kodak B&W Sheet Films Discontinued

Biyeun Buczyk's 8x10 camera, nicknamed "Zaphod." Photo by Graham Ramsey from mitadmissions.org

Sal Santamaura confirmed yesterday that Eastman Kodak, as rumored, has indeed discontinued both T-MAX 400 and T-MAX 100 T-grain films in 5x7- and 8x10-inch sizes. They will continue to be available as special order products, subject to specific minimum quantities.

There are more ways to analyze this news than the knee-jerk "film is dying," however. First of all, the T-grain films will continue to be available for 4x5, which is by far the sheet-film size in widest use. And Kodak will continue to make TXP (Tri-X 320 sheet film) available in the larger sizes. TXP has traditionally been the most popular Kodak film for view cameras because it's what Ansel Adams used and it's what most Zone System gurus most often write about.

Furthermore, this kind of thing can be seen as being in the nature of a realignment. Two related facts: Kodak long ago discontinued black-and-white paper, a category in which it had not led the market in many a moon; and, unless I'm wrong, I believe the T-MAX films were available in larger sizes only in 10-sheet boxes that made them significantly more expensive than the 25-sheet boxes its competitors sell.

Finally, I recall something Ian Brightman, the late CEO of Beseler, once said to my then-boss S. Tinsley Preston III: "In a down market, the last man standing makes out like a bandit." I heard it argued, during the Federal bailout of GM and Chrysler several years ago, that the biggest loser in the bailout was Ford, which at the time was more competitive and considerably healthier than the other two of the "Big Three" and didn't take Federal funds. Because if GM or Chrysler had been allowed to fail, it would have meant a bigger market share for Ford, which arguably deserved just such a reward.

Similarly—although admittedly on a far, far smaller scale—Harman Technology, which trades as Ilford in the B&W film and paper market, has enthusiastically staked out B&W products as its chosen market. Once a year, for instance, Harman accepts orders for odd-sized sheet films such as the hugely popular* 6.5x8.5 whole plate and 14x17 sizes. Clearly not a market in which Kodak cares to participate. And less competition for 5x7 and 8x10 film means more sales for Harman/Ilford, making them that much more healthy, not less so.

Film isn't dying; film is re-aligning, finding its new level in a post-digital world. As vinyl records did, it might go from a 95% market share** to a 4% market share, eventually; but propsperous trade for at least one company (and continued availability for aficionados) is still possible for a medium that has a single-digit percentage of a large market.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad and Sal Santamaura)

*I kid. These are niches within niches within niches.

**I believe vinyl records had something like this much of a monopoly in the 1960s, when the only competition from tape came from reel-to-reel tapes. Film's market share must have been closer to 100% at some point, before the advent of Polaroid. I haven't looked up or substantiated any of these actual numbers I'm throwing around, however, so don't quote me.

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Featured Comment by Sal: "A couple of clarifications, Mike. First, sheets of Tri-X are officially known as 320TXP. The TXT designation went away last time Kodak reformulated that film (some years ago). 5x7 TMAX 400 was previously discontinued as a stock item. This new action teminates 5x7 TMAX 100, as well as 8x10 TMAX 100 and TMAX 400. In recent years, the 8x10 films were packaged in 10-sheet boxes. 5x7 TMAX 100, however, has continued to be sold in 50-sheet boxes. The remaining 320TXP products will be 10-sheet boxes of 8x10 and 50-sheet boxes of 5x7. Since Ilford has been so responsive, I'll probably be purchasing HP5 Plus for all my needs, but also look forward to the introduction of ADOX PAN 400 (née Agfa APX400) at some point next year."