[Comments have been added, Saturday 8:50 a.m.]
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Disclaimer: This post is for people who for whatever reason want to shoot with film or are interested in it. It's all just my opinion. You're the boss of you, and you do what you want to do, and power to you.
My opinion is a version of something Carl Weese once said: digital imaging was the Coming of Age of color photography; black-and-white was already perfect.
A corollary is that black-and-white is neither native, nor particularly natural, nor done very well (except by a dedicated and skilled few) in digital. With film, color methods and materials were difficult and complicated, and, with the exceptions perhaps of Kodachrome (no longer available) and dye-transfer printing (no longer practical) also never terribly attractive. (And both Kodachrome and dye transfer were certainly difficult and complicated—end-users just didn't see the difficulty and complexity.) Many people had aversions to one color process or another: I thought Cibachromes were garish and more or less the opposite of the qualities I appreciated; John Szarkowski reportedly refused to acquire carbro prints for MoMA because he thought the process was so alarmingly ugly. Well, now, in digital, it's black-and-white methods and materials are difficult and complicated! I just received some prints in the mail from Richard Man, a wonderfully skilled B&W printer, and he has been working for a long time to perfect his digital and hybrid B&W. To be honest, I don't know why people would go to the trouble of shooting color film with old cameras, especially 35mm cameras. Why would they do that—because they want to spend more on something that's less practical and looks worse? If you're going to work in color, digital imaging is for you. If you're going to shoot film, work in black-and-white. Those conclusions just seem logical and sensible to me. Of course, if you don't agree, like if you want to shoot bushels of color neg film in old Leicas like Bill Eggleston, or if you like the look of some particular color film, you do you. This is just my 2¢, like I said. But when I say "film" I'm talking mainly about B&W.
High ISOs
Assuming you want to shoot film (this is not the old film vs. digital debate), what are the actual problems with it?
I'm going to set aside expense, because different people have different price sensitivity. A lot of people have lots of money, and some people don't have much at all. So talking about expense really has nothing to do with the activity; it has everything to do with individuals' own circumstances, to which I cannot speak meaningfully when talking to a room.
As I see it there are three main problems with film these days.
One is that film isn't fast enough.
I remember a period in the growth of digital when digital cameras couldn't do high ISOs. My Sony F-707 (2001) could barely provide a usable result at ISO 400, and 200 was a lot better. I recall hearing seasoned professionals opining online that they would consider switching to digital "as soon as digital does high ISOs as well as film." (Italics mine.)
Well, that's solved now. Larger sensors do higher ISOs better, but you can get mainstream APS-C cameras that will provide excellent results at ISO 1600, and some legacy-size sensors ("full" frame, a ridiculous name) will yield good results up to ISO 6400. (Most sensors, however, yield optimum results in a range of lower ISOs, usually from base to about 800.) If you think my numbers here are too low, well, I have high standards.
Film can't keep up. Digital is several stops better in most cases. Since film speed was always a headache in the old days, the advent of a solution has just made the headache that much worse.
I can remember when art photographers (well, in the D.C. area anyway) started feeling like they could depart from the old trusty Kodak VPS (ASA/ISO 100) and start using ASA 400 color films. Until T-Max P3200 came along in the mid to late '80s, Tri-X and HP5+, both 400 ASA films, were the best you could do for speed, and photographers swanned around with all sorts of generally self-defeating schemes to "push" them to be able to shoot at higher shutter speeds. The highest ISO I ever shot with film was 1000, with P3200. (The "P" in P3200 stood for "push.") If it had been ISO certified, it would have been an ISO 800 film, pushable to two stops. I pushed it a third of a stop. I got excellent results with it that way, but then I was kind of a virtuoso.
Lens speed
A second problem with film is that, apart from 35mm (and why would you want to use miniature format now?*), the camera lenses aren't fast enough. Although there are exceptions, most medium format lenses top out at ƒ/2.8, and most view camera lenses at ƒ/5.6. In addition, older film lenses weren't as good wide open as modern lenses are. Consider for example the Fuji GS645s 6x4.5 cm camera that Ben Marks mentioned the other day. That "wide" version of the GS645 folder had a 60mm ƒ/4 lens that was really good...as long as you didn't shoot it wide open, where it was pretty useless. So what that meant was that the camera, which was designed to be small, light, and portable, effectively had an ƒ/5.6 lens! So, bring your tripod along. Which kinda defeated the point.
Tone über alles
A third problem is that people scan film now. It's not inherently a bad idea, but it's usually badly done. It's badly done in the great majority of cases. It's not that peoples' scanning skills are poor. They will proudly tell you that scanning captures exactly the information in the negative, all of the information. And that's true. So what's the problem?
Taken from an article about the pioneer of sensitometry Loyd Ancile Jones
The problem is the film curve. Originally called the H&D curve, for Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield (a short but nice biography can be found here); Kodak assigned an angle to the straight-line section of the curve in the '30s and called it Contrast Index; later it was known as the characteristic curve. It plots density against exposure. And the problem is that it is not linear! Nor does it account for human perception. To correct it, it needs to be counteracted by the paper curve, which is also not linear. The matching of the film curve to the paper curve is essential to get the best results from film because that's how it was designed to be used. So to reproduce exactly the information on the film is a bollix; it is a tragedy; a mistake; it misrepresents the tones; it is ugly; it sucks.
A few film photographers now understand how to introduce the counteracting paper curve to the scanned negative file (I explained a basic method here and boy, am I prolix. Sorry). Most camera pointers out there on the wilds of the Internet don't. There are actually two reasons why the typical scanned film photography commonly seen online is ugly, and this is the main one. The other is that it takes some experience to come up to speed with exposure and development, and it was well known in the film days that newbies were often not up to speed yet. This is of course still true of people trying film today. I often see, for instance (accompanying bad-looking B&W JPEGs supposedly representing film photographs), reports of truly dubious film-developer combinations ("stand developed in Rodinal" seems to be a popular crime). Newbies. Led down the garden path. Not enough experience yet.
What's worse—the icing on the fallen cake—scanned B&W negatives tend to have compressed highlights. Since highlights are the single worse feature of digital capture (now thankfully being ameliorated by the high-megapixel FF and large- [AKA "medium"] format sensor cameras), this just makes a known problem worse.
+ = + = + = + = + = +
So those are the problems with film circa 2021, as I see it. Of course that's not to say that there aren't people out there doing very fine work with film; there are. There are also people doing perfectly fine work scanning. (You don't have to protest. I know you're out there.) They're in the minority, is all I'm saying. Just because there are problems doesn't mean everyone is affected by the problems.
Of course, I suppose good workers in any craft have always been in the minority, and traditional photography is a beautiful craft. And an ancient one, dating back to just before 1839 (our Year Zero).
Eye and heart
So now let me say a few more words about this, under the principle that once you are up on your horse you might as well ride it. (Here it might be a good idea to return to the top of this post and read that first sentence again).
There is no longer ANY need to be practical with film photography. That is, you do not need to have a handy, portable camera; digital cameras can be as portable as your pocketable phone. You do not need to "push" film to achieve higher ISO speeds, at the lamentable expense of the beauty of the image; just look at DxOMark's "Sports" rankings (which, by the way, have nothing to do with how useful a camera is for shooting sports; it's just what they choose to call low-light capability) for the leading high-ISO contenders**. And please, don't try to mimic the look of digital images using film. Film photography has its own beauty. Go for that.
I would suggest, if you choose to master film, that you shift your priorities to go for the maximum beauty of the medium. Don't try for fine grain; just use a bigger negative and enlarge less (nobody cares about film grain in 8x10 sheet film, n.b.); grain is a concern with high enlargements. If you don't like it, just enlarge less. Don't push it; give the film all the exposure it needs to look best. And so forth. Ignore all the tweaks and strivings and conceits we applied when film was all we had.
Trying to achieve the maximum beauty of the medium is the only thing that makes sense to me today, in 2021. Do it however you see fit, though, for your definition of beauty...Carleton Watkins' pictures are beautiful but so are George Krause's.
George Krause, Fountainhead.
Original prints for sale at his website, at the link.
Finally, don't be afraid to settle on your own style. That's one of the big advantages of black-and-white film photography—it has a very broad range of interpretative and expressive possibilities. This encompasses both techniques and also concerns. Don't mimic. Be yourself. Go for what satisfies your own eye and heart. Be as quirky and weird, or as classic and formal, as you wish to be.
I could go into that all that at great length, but it's already almost 1:00 p.m., so it'll have to be a different day.
Have a nice weekend! I'll be back here on Monday, and here's hoping you will be.
Mike
*I'm joking. Don't kill me.
**Note that DxOMark leaves Fuji out of its rankings—calumny by omission!
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Andrew: "Re 'If you're going to work in color, digital imaging is for you. If you're going to shoot film, work in black-and-white': I couldn't agree more. That's my current approach to photography and I've never been happier!"
Leonard Metcalf: "I hope you do come back to this and go into it in great length…I still see them as two different mediums. Film / digital. It helps me separate out their differences and celebrate the strengths of each."
Stan B.: "Wouldn't disagree with anything stated, although for what it's worth, for someone (like me) who uses wide angles and can have such a wide variety of minute details and various lighting scenarios all in one image, a hybrid B&W film and digital printing workflow provides a more than acceptable compromise balancing image quality and ease/superiority of image manipulation/editing that analog only yields to the absolute masters of darkroom printing.
"Speaking of B&W mastery, Mimi Plumb's 'The White Sky' is on exhibit at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco. If anyone wants to experience the absolute beauty that is traditional black-and-white photography, aesthetically and technically (35mm B&W analog, far as I can tell)—I urge you to see these prints first hand whenever possible...one visit is the equivalent of 9,000 YouTube videos on how to do B&W right."
Mike replies: The White Sky is yet another photobook I will never own, and I'm unhappy about that. It sold out very quickly. By the way the prints at Koch are inkjets from vintage negatives, looks like. When done well, these can be even a little better than darkroom prints.
John Sparks: "I have recently been playing around with film.
"In the pre-digital days, I was trying to get the best, most perfect, most beautiful print I could and went from 35mm to 645 to 4x5 to 8x10 and finally settled on 6x7 as the best compromise between quality and the kinds of photographs I wanted to make. I have printed for professional photographers, had prints in museum shows, and sold prints.
"Then came digital. At first it really wasn't good enough for me, but replaced the snapshots in color that I had been doing in 35mm. Then in 2008, I got a Sony A900 and it became good enough for just about everything. I stopped using film. I have better cameras now (even my Panasonic G9 is better than the A900). The photographs are technically great and easy to print. I have some B&W prints that I like as well as some of my prints from 8x10.
"The current digital cameras do everything that I was trying to do when film was the only choice.
"Now, I playing with film again. I'm not trying to do what I did in the past. I don't want to make the most perfect prints that I tried to make with 8x10 or 6x7. I can do that with digital with ease. I want to make the prints that Mike calls ugly, some of which actually work and look beautiful. I want to see tons of grain. I want to see the warts that were hard to work around in the old film days. I want to have to work hard again. I don't want the film prints to look the way the digital prints look. I also don't want to make them look the way I wanted to make my film prints look in the days before digital."
Mike replies: This has a parallel in the history of furniture making, as recounted by Prof. David Pye in The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Apparently surface perfection was once highly valued until machine finishing, which could be more perfect much more easily, came along. Then, handwork that showed roughness, variability, and the inherent nature of the materials began to be treasured above smooth perfection and high finish.
Bob G.: "I going to have to comment and put my two cents out there for whatever it’s worth. I’d like to agree with most everything you say on this comparison, but like to add that the end result of the archival medium of having a film negative seems to me better than having a digital file. I have over a hundred years of old negatives by my grandfather and his camera to copy and print; the tones are wonderful. Digital files are a pain to keep copying onto the most recent media or method in vogue. But, I follow your argument that color is now in the digital world and black-and-white makes better images in film, by shooting color with my digital cameras and shooting and developing B&W with an array of vintage and modern ones. I always have the two when I’m out shooting. As long as the final result is a print, the plan works. Film negatives and color digital files hopefully will back these up for the future."
Mark: "Well you said all that much better than I ever could. I get a lot of enjoyment out of BW film photography and darkroom printing, and will most likely continue. Hobbiests/amateurs do all sorts of things with less-than-optimal gear. My steel-framed bicycle doesn't match up against the latest carbon fiber machines by any measure, but it didn't detract in the least from my ride this morning."
Ray Foxlee: "An interesting post, especially to those of us wholly or partly wedded to film photography. My journey with film is now in about its 60th year and despite that many years, I certainly don't count myself an expert at dealing with film. I shoot digital as well as film (scanned and printed digitally!), and in many respects I agree that digital is the way forward for colour, but the fact remains that I still can't replicate the colour palette of Kodak Portra through the digital process, at least to my satisfaction. That film, especially shot on my Rolleiflex, is just beautiful—at least to my old eyes. I don't doubt that a darkroom print would look even better than the hybrid process that has to do the job these days.
"Film for black and white?—absolutely, especially medium format and larger. Old style films like FP4+ still have a magic that is both hard to beat and also define, especially when using some of the fine older lenses, such as the Zeiss Planars.
"But it is not just a 'film' issue to many who stay with film, as the simplicity of using film cameras comes as a relief, when compared to the increasingly complex digital camera experience.
"The 'price' paid for using film is often a steeper learning curve in achieving a satisfactory result. A case of 'no gain without pain'?—perhaps!"
