Bob Gary was right in saying that the "Complexification" post the other day "hit a nerve." I think so too.
The best thing I got out of the discussion was the "aside" in the Featured Comment by Dennis, who wrote:
I know plenty of people who have turned away from entry level cameras (ILC or fixed lens) in favor of their phones, but I think that's due to the ease of sharing photos taken with a phone.
As an aside, I truly believe that many people do not think that their phone is a 'good enough' camera (how many times do you read that phones are good enough for most people?)—it's just that the ease of use/sharing is worth the compromise. I think a lot of people who shoot phones as their primary camera would love a better camera in their phone (and that is driving phone manufacturers to compete on camera capabilities).
That's brilliant, and I think it's spot on—"many people do not think that their phone is a 'good enough' camera...it's just that the ease of use/sharing is worth the compromise." Couldn't have said it better.
It highlights a really astonishing development in photography as a whole. Just to make the point a little more deliciously, I'd like to digress with a description of how I was practicing photography in the late '90s in my little house in Woodstock, Illinois, USA (the town where the greatest movie ever made, Groundhog Day*, was filmed). This is long, but I think you'll find it entertaining, whether or not it sounds familiar to you.
Before I start, though, I should mention that I shot Kodak Plus-X, at an exposure index (E.I., meaning a film speed that departed from the official ISO rating) of 64, and Kodak Tri-X at E.I. 200. I made no adjustments of the film speed from picture to picture or roll to roll, or for that matter from year to year. And I got 35 exposures (more on that later) per roll of film, so you had to be mindful how many shots remained, and "pick your spots" for changing rolls to minimize any chance of missing the action. And there was no possibility of shooting color with the same click of the shutter—if you had B&W film in the camera, that's all you got, B&W.
So here we go. First, using a contraption called a Watson loader, I took 100-foot rolls of 135mm film—it was originally movie film, and, in long rolls, still looked like it—and loaded it into a number of reusable cassettes, leaving the leaders sticking out. Then I had to clip the leader into a "tongue" using scissors, for easier loading into the camera. After shooting the pictures, I collected the exposed films, and went upstairs to my bedroom closet, which I darkened completely by stuffing a bathrobe under the door. I could only do this at night, by the way, or the daylight bouncing around the bedroom would overwhelm my defenses. I prepared by cutting the tabs or tongues off square across and attaching the end of the filmstrip, sticking out of the cassette, to the inner core of a "King Concept" stainless-steel film reel. Then I switched off the light. In pitch darkness, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the closet, working by feel, I wound three films on to reels, and placed the reels into a large four-reel tank, with the three loaded reels on the bottom and an empty reel at the top (I got better agitation by using a generous airspace, but leaving the airspace meant the solution wouldn't quite cover the fourth, or top, reel). All done, I put the light-tight top on the tank, turned the lights back on, and set myself free from the closet.
I shot only 35 pictures per roll so that all the negatives, cut into strips of five, would fit into a single Printfile negative sleeve and could be proofed (contact printed) on a single piece of 8x10 photo paper. So I was preparing to develop 105 pictures.
Downstairs, by the kitchen sink, I had already "tempered" the solutions (i.e., brought them to the right temperature) by preparing a 66°F water bath in a large Rubbermaid kitchen tub. While I rolled the film onto the reels upstairs, I had the developer, stop bath, fixer, and surfactant standing in the tempered water to bring them to the 68°F processing temperature. I tempered the water using a plastic gallon jug of plain water I keep in the refrigerator to keep it cold; sometimes the water from the cold tap was warmer than 68°F.
To prepare the developer, every couple of weeks I had to mix a "stock solution" of Kodak D-76 from packets of powder and heated distilled water, which I then decanted into 16-oz. amber brown pharmaceutical bottles. Mixing developer stock solution took the better part of an hour, but I got eight 16-oz. bottles of stock from each mixing session, enough for 24 rolls of film. The developer stock had to be aged. Because D-76 took a few days to stabilize and got more active as it got older, I didn't use it for the at least 72 hours after mixing it, and after 90 days, if there was any left (there never was), I threw it out. But that meant that the bottles had to be labeled with the date and time of mixing.
Before processing, I took one bottle of stock and mixed it 1:1 with distilled water, tossed out four ounces to leave 28 oz., and cleaned and dried the stock bottle. That 28 oz. of 1:1 developer was what I was bringing to the processing temperature.
Using two bi-metal dial thermometers and one mercury one for calibration, I then performed a ritual I had performed well over a thousand times: I processed the film. First, the tank was brought to temperature with one-minute tempered water bath. Then the developer for 8.5 minutes, with ten precisely choreographed agitations by inversions. The agitations took ten seconds out of every minute. Then the developer was dumped into a beaker so I could check the finishing temperature, and then stop bath was poured into the tank and agitated continuously for a timed period, then ditto for the fixer. The processed film was then rinsed and washed under the tap. Finally, I poured in a solution of four drops of Edwal LFN, a surfactant, and distilled water to prevent water spots when drying.
Then I took the wet films to another closet, on the ground floor of the house, and hung them up to dry overnight. By the way, this closet had to be wiped down and spritzed with Endust every few weeks to keep dust at bay.
The next morning, I carefully clipped the three films into strips of five frames each and loaded them into the transparent Printfile negative sleeves, which had three holes on the left for insertion into a binder and were about the size of letter-sized paper. This was my least favorite chore in the process. Then the Printfile sheets went down to the darkroom to be added to the pile to be proofed.
Once I had maybe nine, or 12, or 15, or 18 sheets ready to be proofed, I went into the darkroom, mixed three trays of chemicals, and contact printed each sheet. I used 8.5x11" paper that I kept for that purpose (I also liked that size for work printing).
At that point, I was ready to begin dealing with the pictures I'd taken.
The first step was to determine which frames to workprint. My rule was that I had to workprint at least one frame from a roll of film (this was to prevent laziness, since it kept me from tossing the whole roll aside as worthless), and no more than six (this forced me to make hard choices when I was examining the contact printed frame with a lighted loupe). Sometimes I took a number of days and repeated viewings before marking the contact sheets for workprinting.
A "workprint" for me was a quick-and-dirty 8x10 full-frame print of the image, so I could further evaluate the picture, edit them, and strategize how to print the selects. The next step was a darkroom session for workprinting. As with contact printing, I had a standard exposure time, contrast, and enlarger head height setting for workprints, and the job was simply to rotate all the selected negatives into and out of the negative carrier and expose all the paper, which I kept in a paper safe as I worked. I might make 10 to 50 workprints in one session, but I processed them about every 15—that was as many sheets as I could comfortably put through the solutions together, agitating by "interleaving," which meant continuously rotating the sheets of paper from the bottom to the top of the pile. Once processed and washed, all these prints were squeegeed and laid out on our couch or the carpet till the next morning to dry.
The next step in my workflow was to figure out which negatives to make "fine prints" of. As I mentioned earlier this week, I made finished prints on 11x14 fiber-base paper to several standard sizes. A 2–3 hour darkroom session was usually good for four to seven finished prints.
I won't even go into the process of making finished prints.
Here's what's funny about that...
It's kind of hilarious now to reflect that I was doing all this because it was the most convenient alternative!! Makes me laugh, now. But with 2 1/4 rollfilm, I could only develop 24 exposures per tank; with sheet film, I could only tray-develop maybe six to 12 exposures in one session. Both larger formats had other costs, such as smaller maximum apertures on the normal lenses, more expensive lenses of more limited focal lengths, more film changing, and fussier film handling. With 35 exposures per roll, fast lenses, and the ability to develop a whopping 105 exposures per tank, I was making the "slacker" choice...I was "compromising" (cf. Dennis's quotation) with the smaller 24x36mm negative size because, well, yes, it was easier.
I'm sure you don't need me to compare all that preposterous effort to today, but I'll mention a few high points. Now, I can:
- Carry the equivalent of dozens of film cassettes on one tiny card
- Shoot hundreds of exposures per card, with no film changing and no appreciable per-exposure cost
- Use ISOs of up to 5000**
- Shoot B&W and color simultaneously
- Carry much smaller lenses thanks to having a sensor that's much smaller than the 24x36mm of 35mm film
- Stitch frames together easily after the fact
- Review what I've shot instantly
- "Develop" my shooting instantaneously and with almost no effort
- Proof and store with a few clicks of the mouse and some keyboard notations
- Manage colors much more easily
- Make color prints that are arguably the most beautiful and longest lasting of any method in history
And so on. The list goes on. You know what I'm talking about...all the advantages of large-sensor (I mean anything over 1"), dedicated digital cameras.
Here comes the amazing part
But that's not the amazing thing I wanted to point out. With all that—all these vast, overpoweringly superior. hugely more convenient advances in photographing, affecting almost every aspect of current workflows, which taken together amount to approximately the same qualitative change as traveling from one place to another using a horse-drawn buggy vs. a Camry—even with all that, it's not enough.
It's not convenient enough. Or it's getting to be that way. For some number of people, a number that's growing all the time, Dennis is exactly right. They will accept picture quality that's not quite good enough in exchange for the improved convenience of having their camera in a slim little pocket-sized wafer they have to carry with them anyway, and for the convenience of superior pointing-and-shooting abilities (the iPhone really is better than a "real" camera in the software department—it balances exposure, corrects color, and applies HDR more intelligently), and for the ability to share with others and post on social media immediately.
When I shot 35mm Tri-X with my old manual, metal, mechanical 35mm cameras, I was actually compromising for the sake of convenience. In May of 2000, by the time the $3,000, three megapixel Canon D30 came out, convenience had improved by—what? Ten times? Fifty times? over the old-fashioned film workflow described above that I was using in Woodstock. The D30 (I couldn't afford one) was the camera that Michael Reichmann of Luminous-Landscape famously declared to be as good as 35mm film (as long as you uprezzed carefully!). At Photo Techniques we sold Michael Reichmann example prints in our Collector Print program, to show people what was possible with "affordable" digital.
But in 2019, Y2k-era convenience is not only no longer news, it is no longer sufficient.
As I say, amazing.
Change is gonna come
You know what I'd really like to see? A comparison of image quality between a Google Pixel 3, Samsung S10, or Apple iPhone XS of today and a Canon D30 of the year 2000. That would really be interesting. Because it's possible we're at a similar stage in the third really major change in cameras in my lifetime. The first was the advent of point-and-shoots in the 1980s. The second and by far the most significant was film to digital. And the third might turn out to be standalone, large-sensor cameras to smartphones. (The one prior to those was rangefinders to SLRs, but I was two years old when the Nikon F heralded that the era of the SLR had arrived in 1959, so I didn't witness that.)
Time will tell.
Mike
(Thanks to Dennis)
*Is so. And since we're talking about Zen Buddhism, is this a good time to mention the concept of the Root Teacher? That's when you trace your teaching lineage from your own teacher, to your teacher's teacher, to his teacher, and so on. Well, my first photography teacher was David Vestal (I learned photography with his book The Craft of Photography open in my tiny darkroom under the basement stairs, and later hired him to write for Photo Techniques), and his teacher was Ralph Steiner, and Ralph's teacher—and thus my "root teacher"—was the pictorialist Clarence H. White, the founder of the first photography school in the United States. During one of his most creative periods, according to Ralph, Clarence White could only afford to expose eight (8) plates of film per month—two per week, and "he would spend every spare moment planning what he would do with those two plates on his weekend." And a surprisingly large percentage of those pictures were among his masterpieces.
There's probably a lesson in that, but I suspect I'd have to rewrite this exact same post for an infinite number of days before I achieve enlightenment as to what that lesson is.
**I don't believe I've ever shot a "keeper" picture at an ISO higher than that. Your mileage may vary.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Dave Jenkins: "It was complicated, shooting film. And of course, Photoshop has complications and difficulties of its own. It's just a different skill set, and I found the complications of film much more satisfying. On another note—I think yours was the first mention I've ever read or heard anywhere about D-76 gaining strength as it aged. I experienced that effect when I had my studio in the '90s—I used to mix a gallon at a time and found it giving me denser negs as I got toward the bottom of the jug. Rather than go through your process, I just switched to T-Max developer and mixed as needed."
Stan B.: "The complexification part in the analog days came from the shooting/developing routine described above. It was arduous, but...just that—routine. Today, endless choice is readily available; the complexification arrives when accessing that cornucopia of choice—it often comes with deciphering programs that are seldom routine and forever changing, evolving and becoming more...complex."
Mike Ferron: "Mike, I would describe your ritual when shooting, developing and printing film based photos now simply as 'keeping the faith.' About a month ago I picked up the most beautiful Leica IIIf and Summitar 5 cm ƒ/2 lens that was screaming at me from the local dealer's showcase. A total jewel to handle and admire and a PITA to actually use. And I love that. From the crazy loading of film to taking off my hat and glasses to actually be able to use the rangefinder then the viewfinder. Load Tmax 400, meter at 320 and the world is a better place in the end!"
Joseph Reid (partial comment): "There are cameras these days that will get your pictures to your phone wirelessly, such as the Nikon Z line, but they lay off the real work, processing your pictures and distributing them via the interweb, to the app and phone makers. As others have said, the old-line camera makers need to fix this. It's blisteringly obvious...."
[Ed. Note: You can read the full text of partial comments in the comments section. Click on "Comments" in the post footer.]
JOHN GILLOOLY (partial comment): "I purchased a very low serial number Nikon D1 the week they were available. The early days of digital were very difficult as the flash technology was crap and lab printing didn't really exist. My 64MB cards (32 JPEG fine images on a card—no chance you were shooting RAW) cost $349 and I eventually purchased a 1GB CFII card for $1200.00 after dropping a 'very delicate' IBM Microdrive. Everything was painfully slow. Downloading from the card was excruciating. Burning a CD took 40 minutes! Your description of B&W darkroom sounds so painfully slow and work-intensive from where we sit now. The first ten years of digital was a constant trial and error process with sacrifices in quality for many years relative to our analog world. I felt the time of the Nikon D3 was when digital finally came of age."
[Ed. Note: The next two comments came in one right after the other in this order. Coincidence?!? :-) ]
Christopher Mark Perez: "Sony could easily solve the problem of convenience by replacing their mirrorless product line display interface with a full Android OS. Marry their high quality imaging system with a high quality fully functional networked OS and call it done (for now). They are an electronics company, after all. They could do that and make a whole lot of people happy."
Martin Doonan: "I love the irony that Android, as an operating system, was originally intended for digital cameras."
Neil Swanson: "Fifty years of shooting in formats from 35mm to 8x10, 22 years of making my living with a camera and what do I miss? Prints. I just don’t print or pay someone else to. It’s not a photo till it’s a print and yet I’ve got no idea what to do with dozens of boxes of prints I did make and nobody ever sees. But I miss prints."
Tom Frost: "I saw a cartoon that showed a roll of 2 1/4 film, a 35mm cassette, and a compact flash (CF) card. The caption, one under each device, said '12 exposures, six are good. 36 exposures, six are good. 600 exposures, six are good.'"
Ian: "Found one of the very first images I shot on my D1 and my then new iPhone 8. Interesting to see how far things have come."
David Lee: "Loved to read your story Mike. I had a similar workflow. The part I enjoyed the most was the printing of full-frame negatives on 8x10 or 11x14 paper. I was using a Heiland Splitgrade that would give me a perfectly good working print at the first try 99% of the time. I designed a mounting and framing work table with slots for glass, cotton rag mats and frames. I was in total control of the photograph, from the shutter release to the hanging of the framed print. Almost eight years into digital and I still don’t have a printer. Shame on me."
