Tag Archives: Ilford FP4 plus

Normal views and wide views

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Many photographers lust after new cameras and lenses. Indeed, many spend more time lusting after new equipment than they do consummating - err… working on the relationship they have with the cameras and lenses they already own.

For my large format camera I have one lens. It is a 180mm lens, and that roughly corresponds to a ‘normal lens’, i.e. one that has about the same perspective as the human eye, or, in 35mm terms, it is about the same as a 50mm lens. It’s a very fine lens, but there are times when I want a lens with a wider view (say, 90mm), and another with a telephoto view, such as a 300mm. It is simply(!) finances that preclude me from buying these lenses, I lust after them all the same…

So what to do when trying to make an image that would benefit from a wider view? In July I made a series of photographs on a very foggy morning at Glen More on the Isle of Mull. I was trying to photograph the glen near the edge of a lochan in the valley, whilst showing something of the scale of the valley - but the 180mm lens only covered about half of the valley. So one of my studies involved a triple exposure, moving the camera round a little at a time to include one side of the valley, the bottom of the valley, and the other side. The ground glass of the large format camera includes grids and markers for various purposes, so it was relatively easy to measure this out. I think the resulting image manages to communicate something of my view of the scene that morning:

Glen More, Isle of Mull (Ilford FP4+, triple exposure)

Glen More, Isle of Mull (Ilford FP4+, triple exposure)

The use of a 90mm lens would have enabled me to capture the entire breadth of the glen, but the image would have been different: is it important that the image doesn’t ‘look like’ the glen did? For me this communicates what I saw, even though the hills are not really this precise shape. I would still like to have a wider lens, but my lusting after such a lens has lessened somewhat since seeing the interesting and rather pleasing result that can be achieved with just the 180mm lens that I already have - in this context it was perfectly possible to communicate the image in my head using the equipment I already had.

 

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Intentional Film Movement

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No, the Intentional Film Movement is not a radical revolutionary brigade, forcing all digital camera users to move to film…! It’s just my play on words in relation to the current trend for ‘intentional camera movement’ (I think ICM - a bit like HDR - is interesting the first few times you see it and then it just gets tedious, mostly because it’s rarely done well, and is often done just for the sake of being able to do it, with little underlying narrative).

Anyway, rant over. Holidays at home are wonderful: I have been tidying up this week, and came across 19 rolls of film (14 rolls of 35mm and 5 rolls of 120) that I had had developed but then never really looked at. I knew there were some portraits in amongst them that I was somewhat concerned at having lost, but also some experimental images.

Un-Intentional Film Movement - a typical 'accident'

Un-Intentional Film Movement - a typical ‘accident’

My old Rolleiflex, with six decades behind it, works really well. Except for those times it doesn’t. In particular, the film transport mechanism can be a bit dodgy: the film doesn’t always quite engage the way it should, and then the winding mechanism fails: it becomes possible to wind through the whole film without making a single image, as it doesn’t ‘lock’ for each exposure, even though the shutter can be cocked. That has resulted in some rather strange double (triple?!) exposures, in part covering the bottom or top of an image, but I found that when the film fails to engage properly (and in the meantime I can tell when this happens with the first winding of the film to get to the first frame), it also becomes possible to wind the film on whilst having the shutter open. Some of the ‘problem’ images I was getting were like this one here (oops - some of my wife’s family at a celebration last year!).

Intentional Film Movement

Intentional Film Movement

However, this also offers some interesting opportunities. Rather than being annoyed about the film mechanism, I began to experiment, whilst also still making ‘proper’ images in between the experiments (after all, this can easily be done, if you guess how far to wind the film on - does cock the shutter, it just doesn’t move the film on evenly). I tend to used Ilford FP4+ in this camera, which has such a wide latitude that exposure doesn’t really matter - and that makes it ideal for things such as this. I began to try doing two or three things simultaneously to create new images:

  1. using a small aperture, open the shutter
  2. turn the film crank whilst the shutter is open
  3. at the same time, also move the camera.

I was using a tripod (I find that easiest with the Rolleiflex - I struggle to keep the image even vaguely straight without a tripod, and so if it’s important to keep straight, then I need a tripod!), but even doing the first two of these three actions requires a degree of coordination that I struggle with - and moving the camera at the same time becomes much harder! However, the images do then become more interesting.

I tried several experiments with these techniques, using several films, all of them in this pile of unexamined films that I found this week.

Only having seen the negatives, I have been aware of the effect I was generating, and did see how moving the camera also played a role (I didn’t do so for the first roll, and, of course, just ended up with a blur). So here are some of the attempts that have resulted in more interesting shapes.

Intentional Film Movement

Intentional Film Movement

This one, which has a floaty lightness to it, is perhaps my favourite of this group of photographs - it involved a longer exposure, a smaller aperture, and slow consistent movement of the film (I think the darker line is when I stopped winding consistently). I was actually seeking to make a portrait of a friend, but I’ll not give her name here - suffice it to say that the subsequent images of her worked really rather well, even if this one doesn’t actually look anything like her!

Intentional Film Movement - a landscape

Intentional Film Movement - a landscape

I think this last image is interesting for a different reason. I intended to create a ‘cloud’, but this worked exceptionally well: what I am including here is not just the image on the film, but the jagged edge where it has been cut, and the straight line from the scanner’s film-tray. It may be quite hard to see on smaller devices (and perhaps I should have processed this a little more to bring out this contrast - all of these are simply straight from the scanner with no adjustments of any kind), but on a larger screen, I can quite clearly see a night landscape here. The jagged edge is a curved hill, and the lighter areas further up the image are (strange-looking) clouds. Of course, it is not just landscapes that can represent more abstract concepts - abstract concepts can also represent landscapes!

There is a pleasant mix here of images. Creating them involves an element of randomness, but I have tried to create certain kinds of shapes and patterns too, even if I don’t see if they’ve worked until the film has been developed.

Do I think this is going to be something I do more of? Probably not, unless there is a motif that I think might be made more interesting with this technique - AND I happen to have the Rolleiflex with me AND the film hasn’t loaded properly! The one thing I can’t predict is when the Rollleiflex will work properly and when it won’t, so there is a further element of randomness in these kinds of images - most of the time I don’t know when I might (have the opportunity to) create more!

This is exciting…

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… though probably mostly to me!

On 5. January this year my wife and I were in Strathpeffer, and in the morning we went to the nearby Rogie Falls. I decided to go back there in the afternoon on my own and try to capture a scene I had noticed in the morning. A bit of a miscalculation in terms of timing (err… yes, I know, Scottish winter…!) meant that it was rather late in the day to do this, but I was keen to persevere, so I set up the Chamonix looking down into a little gorge. I started setting up at about 14:45, had a composition I was vaguely satisfied with at 15:15 bearing in mind the decreasing light levels, and took a series of light readings. I was mortified to find that any reasonable chance of a decent exposure would necessitate at least 30 minutes by the time I included the film’s reciprocity failure. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, ‘FP4 has plenty of latitude!’ and went for it. By 15:45, I could barely see anything in the woods around me. So I decided that another 15 minutes would do no harm, meaning the exposure was 45 minutes long. It then also started raining which was a good motivator to move on, and I could only pack up and find all my bits and pieces by getting out the head-torch (one of the most useful things to have in a camera bag!).

I finally managed to get the film to the lab and picked it up today. The resulting negative is slightly under-exposed (another 5-10 minutes would no doubt have helped), but it is perfectly usable with some relatively minor adjustments to levels and curves:

Rogie Falls, Chamonix, Fujinon 180mm, Ilford FP4, f22, 45 minutes

Rogie Falls, Chamonix, Fujinon 180mm, Ilford FP4, f22, 45 minutes

My first reaction to the image is two-fold. I think it does represent the balance between tremendous chaos and small signs of order that I felt in the woods: all these twisty branches contrasting with the clear white trunks and branches. I like the way the whiteness of the tree trunks directs my eyes - I can remember seeing this and wanting to achieve precisely that. And yet I am not completely happy with the composition: the gorge with the fallen-down tree feels a bit lost as the trees on the left dominate the foreground. I could crop the image to exclude the large tree on the left, but then the other smaller trees seem a bit irrelevant and the white trunks almost seems less prominent - perhaps the large tree is not so much a dominant tree as a counterweight to the thin white lines?

In any case: this is all very exciting for me, because it is the very first large format image I have taken completely on my own, AND I managed to use tilt and movements successfully in achieving reasonable focus across the frame. I wanted it to be a technically decent image, and it does enough of that for me to be confident to continue what I’m doing, even if it is not (yet?) that emotionally engaging for me. It may have taken me half-an-hour to set up, it may have been too late in the day to use a sensible exposure time, and it may not be perfectly composed - but I am very happy!

With my large format camera in the Pentland Hills

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The Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh are gentle Scottish hills, certainly when compared to the bigger and more spectacular mountains further north. But they are my local hills, and I do like spending time in them. When fellow photographer and Twitter-user Mike Colechin visited Edinburgh for work in September, he brought his camera with him, and on his last day here we went into the hills in the morning before he took the train home again.

Mike is a large format photographer, who very generously gave me some film and lent me some of his equipment so I could take my new large format camera out. I made three images that morning - the first one by accident! I didn’t manage to put the dark slide into the camera properly and so half the image is basically white, as light leaked in from the side. This is the successful version of that scene (slightly underexposed, but as it was on my favourite black and white film, Ilford FP4+, that’s irrelevant and easily recoverable with a little adjustment of levels and curves in Photoshop):

Castlelaw Hill Fort, Pentland Hills (with a Nikkor-W 150mm lens, f16, 1/4s)

Castlelaw Hill Fort, Pentland Hills (with a Nikkor-W 150mm lens, f16, 1/4s)

It’s not a fabulous image, but I do like the valley and the lines on the hillsides that are apparent here. Perhaps I could have worked on these a little more in Photoshop, but I don’t quite see the point - at the time, we both agreed that this was going to be difficult to work at, and I’d rather leave it to be a little more subtle and hard to follow. For me, this is what the Pentlands are like: deceptively simple little hills that don’t require very much effort to get up (at least, not when compared to some of the afore-mentioned more northern hills!), but they have something intriguing about them. This particular area, past Castlelaw Hill Fort heading northwards, is deceptively bland at times, but there is actually so much to see, if only one can be bothered to look.

The third image is not quite what I wanted: I was trying to photograph some grasses, but somehow my focussing didn’t… er… quite work out. The grasses in the foreground are in focus, but the context is not - it is basically an image that is ok, but could have been made on a medium format or 35mm camera, and not what I intended.

My large format adventures are about to move up a gear: I expect to take delivery of a lens (180mm f5.6 Fujinon-W) this week, as well as some double-dark-slides and a changing bag. I have some Velvia on order (who knows when that will come!), but what I will buy next is a large batch of FP4+, partly because I feel I need the forgiving nature of exposure errors that this film allows, and partly because I think my composition skills will improve using black and white. It is all very exciting - if only I didn’t have a day job to distract me!

Our debt to other photographers

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Over the summer I’ve been making several portraits, almost by default just with the Rolleiflex. This is in part to do with my 1953 project (at the time of writing, I need to add lots of portraits to these pages… I’m way behind with this!), but I’ve also just found it pleasurable to photograph some of the people I’ve encountered. Here are two of them.

Alex (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

Alex (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

This is Alex, my brother-in-law. He was somewhat sceptical when I asked him to close his eyes, but I hope he likes this! I think it softens the portrait considerably: not that he doesn’t photograph well, but I think he looks really relaxed here.

Gwendolin (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

Gwendolin (Rolleiflex, on Ilford FP4+)

And this is Gwendolin, a long-standing friend: my wife met her parents at university, and we first met Gwen when she was a bump! We’ve seen her almost every two years since then and she even lived with us for a little while some years ago. Now she makes me feel quite old - she has become an assured, adventurous and beautiful young woman, rather than a toddler running through our flat with her toys muttering ‘ticka, ticka, ticka…’

There are, of course, portraits I have made this summer in which the subjects have their eyes open! However, the ones I have put here owe their look in part to another photographer: I have been following a fascinating project that Jenny Wicks is pursuing. Jenny is creating astonishingly striking portraits - and all her subjects have closed their eyes at her request (do click on that link to her work, and maybe read her blog too - I very much admire her use of photography for this kind of social engagement). Many people do not like being photographed by a large camera, but I have found that by copying Jenny’s idea I can put my subjects at ease, and other portraits - with eyes open - then become more relaxed. So thank you for that little idea, Jenny!

I mentioned this sort of thing in a blog posting some time ago, but I think it is important to note more explicitly that we should acknowledge our debts to others. So often as photographers we create images borrowing ideas of technique, composition and form from other photographers, but fail to acknowledge that we have done this, pretending something is entirely our own work. As more and more people attend photography workshops, this happens ever more frequently: surely there should be some acknowledgement that the workshop leader has (hopefully!) helped in some way with an image, perhaps even stood by and offered suggestions at the time of exposure? After all, none of us create images in a vacuum! We are indebted, whether we are aware of it or not, to countless other photographers (and other artists and creators) - and not only is it good to show these other photographers that we appreciate their ideas, but consciously acknowledging our indebtedness also helps us to critically examine our own work and identify what is really distinctive about it. Of course, if we come to the conclusion that our work is largely derivative rather than distinctive, perhaps we need to re-examine what it is that we are doing…!

P.S. If it is not already obvious, given that ‘Bruce Percy‘ is one of the largest tags in my tag cloud on these pages, I see myself as being substantially indebted to Bruce for what I do photographically. You can see his incredibly beautiful and engaging work on his website.

New camera, new challenges

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I’m just back from two weeks’ holiday in the Highlands and Islands. Before going I was beginning to toy with the idea of a pinhole camera, but something else has come up…

New camera

Last year I went on a large format photography day workshop – a kind of taster to see if this kind of thing might be of interest to me. It was… and soon after that I was nearly tempted into buying one of Mark Banks’ view cameras that he was selling, but I couldn’t quite afford it at the time (have a look at his website, by the way - wonderful images!).

Whilst on holiday near Inverness a couple of weeks ago I found myself in Ffordes – a fantastic camera shop selling all kinds of new and second-hand camera equipment. I was there to buy a spare plate for my tripod head (which I did, second-hand, at £7, and my bank balance would have been very happy had I just walked out of the shop at that point). But I also asked about prices for wide lenses for my Mamiya MF camera, and somehow the discussion then moved on to other things… and before long a Chamonix 4×5 view camera was mentioned…

Chamonix view camera

Chamonix view camera

Almost completely unused and on sale at a pretty good price, I went away to think about it, consult some Twitter users of 4×5 cameras, and the next day, I went back to buy it. Gulp!

Chamonix view camera

Chamonix view camera

So now I have a rather beautiful view camera! It is one of the cameras that Dav Thomas and Tim Parkin recommended when I was on their large-format workshop last year, and I know that other photographers like Tim Smalley have used Chamonix cameras after being on Dav and Tim’s workshops. I don’t yet have any lenses for it, nor do I have any of the other accessories I’ll need, but I’ll be working towards acquiring these just as soon as I have paid off the credit card bill for the camera! ;)

Chamonix view camera

Chamonix view camera

The Chamonix is very light, and folds down to become fairly small and rather elegant. I don’t really get very excited about modern cameras: my digital Nikon is a great camera and does the job well, but it is pretty soulless. However, there is something absolutely exquisite about this view camera, which is partly, I think, to do with there being no plastic - it’s made of metal, wood, and glass, with board for the bellows.

Chamonix view camera

Chamonix view camera

This makes handling it a very tactile experience, even before it’s seen any usage. I also like the attention to detail in the construction of the body, which makes me want to touch it and use it right away. I know that a modern digital camera is designed and made with amazing attention to detail: every component is precisely formed within fractions of a millimetre so as to squeeze in every last little bit of technological wizardry, but still… this is somehow different. I never thought I’d be this sentimental and romantic about a camera, but it really is a beautiful piece of equipment!

Chamonix view camera

Chamonix view camera

Of course, it’s all very well being excited about the tactile nature of the camera - I need to use it properly and create images with it that work for me and communicate something of what I understand and see in the landscape. Given that I don’t have any of the necessary accessories yet, that might take a little while, but it will come… I would hope that I’m able to start working with it in a couple of months’ time at the latest (afore-mentioned credit card bill being a key factor…!).

New challenges

Calanais, taken on my iPhone the previous evening

Calanais, taken on my iPhone the previous evening

A few days after buying the Chamonix I was on the Isle of Lewis - an amazing experience, of which more another time (my films are being processed at the moment and I won’t get them back until later this week). The house we were staying in didn’t have much of a mobile signal, but I was out one afternoon photographing the second and third group of Calanais standing stones where the mobile reception was pretty good, and Twitter chatter from a few days before that confirmed the news that Fuji are withdrawing Velvia 50 and 100F in 4×5 format - just as I buy myself a 4×5 camera! As it is for many other people, Velvia 50 is my favourite colour film for landscapes, so I found that news rather depressing, and I even found myself wondering if I had made a mistake buying the Chamonix if my favourite colour film was being withdrawn.

At the time of writing, I’m not sure whether this means Fuji UK are no longer importing 4×5 Velvia 50 to the UK and therefore it might still be available elsewhere, or if it is going to be discontinued globally. I’m not bothered about the 100F being discontinued, which has always seemed to me to be a pointless film, but it seems odd that the 50 is being discontinued and the Velvia 100 is being kept (for now) - if Fuji thinks cutting down the Velvia range is necessary, then ditching both the 100 and 100F would seem more sensible to me.

Anyway: there’s not much I can do about decisions by a global company like Fuji (beyond signing this petition - I’d encourage you to do likewise!). My first reaction on Lewis was to come home and try to buy lots of 4×5 Velvia 50 so that I have a stock of it to use with my new camera. I did look into different suppliers in the UK, but they are mostly out of stock (other photographers - clearly not on holiday at the time of the announcement! - seem to have bought up everything they could). I even checked some suppliers abroad: it appears to still be readily available in Germany, for example.

But now I am beginning to think that I should just leave it: I think that perhaps the challenge for me should be to look at doing something new with the 4×5 camera and to keep the Velvia 50 for my medium format Mamiya (it is still being produced in 120 size). My thinking just now is that perhaps I should be photographing landscapes on the Chamonix using black and white film - I love Ilford’s FP4+ film, for example - at least to begin with. There are two good reasons for this:

  • a practical one: FP4+ is wonderfully forgiving about exposure errors in a way that Velvia is most emphatically not, and perhaps this will stand me in good stead as I get to grips with a new process;
  • a process one: I want to engage more with my composition and I can imagine that photographing in black and white on a view camera could enable that, not least since the image on the ground glass is, of course, upside down! This means shape and form and tone are more accentuated when composing, at least, that was my impression from the workshop I participated in last year.

So my sadness at the apparent loss of Velvia 50 in 4×5 format is turning into a further kind of challenge. Again, I’ll have to see how I get on with this, and I’m sure there will be plenty of ‘misses’ - but I hope the ‘hits’ to ‘misses’ ratio improves over time!

Chamonix view camera

Chamonix view camera

More about this camera and my trials with the image-making process to come over the next months. And yes: the pinhole will now have to wait a little longer…

On the beach with the Rolleiflex

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What is there not to like about winter? I fell out of bed at 7:15 and was on the beach at the bottom of the road twenty minutes later - marvellous! In the summer, I’d have to be up at some horrific time to do the same thing (and the light isn’t so good…).

It was lovely to watch and photograph (sort of) the sunrise, seeing the light change and transform the shapes on the beach. I wasn’t too interested in the sun itself, of course, but the patterns of the beach and the water on black and white film will hopefully work.

I wasn’t the only one out there: apart from the perennial dog-walkers, two other folks with cameras and tripods were on the beach. Of course, I felt terribly superior: they had some new-fangled digital camera-thingy, whereas I was using my 60-year old Rolleiflex TLR… and now I’m off home to breakfast (whisper it: and to my digital camera for some family photos later on!).

Tomorrow morning… beachscapes with the Rolleiflex

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The weather is looking good for early tomorrow morning, and so I think I’ll take the old Rolleiflex down to the beach and try out some monochrome beachscapes (I have Ilford 125 film in it just now).

Tomorrow's forecast!

Tomorrow's forecast!

And I must start getting my film developed - I have rolls from October 2011 and perhaps even earlier waiting here! I know that I should, of course, start developing my film myself… that will come…

Musings on film latitude and related matters

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I’ve posted very little here recently, and have only added a couple of incidental items on my micro-blog. This has two main reasons: I’ve been very busy travelling for work (Germany, Norway, England in the last four weeks), and I’ve also had quite a backlog of films to scan and process. Concentrating on film and finding a revised routine to my workflow - now that I think I’ve understood what I’m doing with my new Epson scanner - takes time, and after various false starts, I think I’m finally getting there. There is now, of course, a bit of a backlog of both film and digital images (I’ve not stopped photographing!), and coupled with a desire to redo the galleries here, you’ll appreciate that I’m struggling a bit…

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

However, this posting is tangential to all of these thoughts! I have, partly because of the 1953 Project (and yes, there are images to go online from that, too!), occasionally been carrying the Rolleiflex with me as a ‘casual camera’. This regularly elicits interesting conversations with complete strangers, which can be surprising and very nice. For example, last week I was dining with a friend in London and after our meal I wanted to photograph her with the Rollei; a couple at a neighbouring table began talking to us about the camera, photography and so on… culminating in a request that I might consider photographing their wedding next year; of course, I declined!

Adobe Lightroom settings

Adobe Lightroom settings

The film I’m using for the 1953 Project is Ilford FP4Plus, which is rated at an ISO of 125. Ilford’s website says it has ‘enormous latitude for exposure error above and below‘ this speed. I chose it for the project partly for this reason, thinking it wouldn’t much matter if the exposure was slightly off on my portraits because I could always recover the images once they were scanned in. I didn’t realise quite what ‘enormous’ meant to Ilford, but these images clearly show that. The first image above is the scan from the negative (Vuescan reversed the negative for me). I made adjustments in Lightroom, as this screen capture shows: upping the exposure by four stops, pushing the fill light and brightness up, and then reducing the contrast and clarity settings to bring the grain under control. Aside from dust removal, these are the only changes I made to the image, revealing… Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at Oxford University, with whom I had a stimulating lunch at the beginning of September (click on the photograph to go to her blog):

Elizabeth Eva Leach

Elizabeth Eva Leach

It’s not a great portrait, but it astonishes me that it worked at all, not just because of the film exposure issues: the café was relatively dark and I could barely see anything on the ground glass (so focusing was mostly a lucky guess), the lens was wide open at f2.8 with an exposure speed of 1/10th of a second - and yet it’s reasonably sharp despite all this! And this isn’t a coincidence: another portrait taken under similar circumstances was just as underexposed and with similar Lightroom adjustments it came out fine too:

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

What I love about all this is the visceral nature of the film and the process. For sure, I could have taken these portraits on a digital camera and bumped up the auto ISO settings - but I’m not convinced they would have looked any ‘better’ (they would have been different…). Of course, even the process of ‘extracting’ an image from an almost entirely black square of film gives me enormous pleasure - it’s like finding a treasure! I don’t regard myself by any means as a format fetishist, but returning to film does give me huge pleasure: my use of the Mamiya for landscapes makes me photograph with much greater consideration and precision than I used to with the digital camera, and I LOVE that.

For example, here’s a dawn image from the Mamiya taken on Velvia 50 of the Ratzeburg Küchensee in northern Germany this August. I remember taking quite a while to compose it in order to make sure the twisted twigs were below the tree line, whereas I think with a digital camera I might have fired off a good half-dozen shots at different heights and then hoped one had worked when I was back at the computer - but here I composed slowly and carefully, got it right, and then made… two exposures (er… the first one had a misplaced graduated filter that I noticed after squeezing the cable release!).

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

(I’ve lightened the exposure by half a stop and added a little fill light, otherwise it’s as it came from the scanner.)

In a few weeks’ time I’m off to Assynt with Bruce Percy. I’m really looking forward to this, and though I’ll take my Mamiya, I will mostly use the Nikon D90 so that images can be readily critiqued by Bruce and the group. I’m keen to observe myself with this, as it were: I’m sure my recent return to film will have changed how I use the digital camera for landscapes. Before going to Assynt, I’m also going to the Isle of Mull for a week of secluded reading - and I may just take a photograph or two whilst I’m there…

First experiments with scanning medium format film

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Yesterday my Epson V700 arrived - purchased specifically so that I could scan my images from the Mamiya and Rolleiflex. I plan on this being by day-to-day scanner, with really special images being sent to Tim Parkin.

First impressions are very good. The scanner is really solid (and pretty big), though as many others have said, the plastic film holders seem to be very flimsy - a strange contrast to the heavy scanner. Even just from one day’s careful use, I’m wondering how long these will last (it feels like a ‘when’ not an ‘if’ question). Replacements are, apparently, available. I find it slightly irritating that although a FireWire 400 connection is available, there is no Firewire cable in the box, meaning I need to make do with a USB connection for now (I expect the FW connection to be faster). Photoshop really struggled with saving these large files (several minutes the first time), but I did have a number of applications open and I don’t have much memory for this kind of thing on my Mac.

Regarding the scans: I have done the typical male thing (according to my wife) and just plunged straight in, scanning some colour transparencies and monochrome negatives. I had used the monochrome film (Ilford FP4 Plus) before in 35mm form so had some idea of what to expect, though I didn’t know exactly how the Rollei would impact on it, and my use of my lightmeter obviously needed to be up to scratch. The colour transparency film was completely new to me: Fuji Provia 100F, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect; this was shot using the Mamiya and mostly using the camera’s meter, rather than relying on my lightmeter.

So, with auto sharpening, broadly similar settings (though I am intrigued that the Silverfast software has a specific setting for the Ilford film, which I used) and general playfulness, I think I can say with some certainty that buying the Epson was a good choice. Here are two images that I have scanned yesterday at 6400dpi, along with 100% sections - this is not necessarily the best dpi to choose, but the files were already coming in at around 500mb with this size, and for playing I didn’t want even bigger files as they just slow everything down. I don’t want to make excuses but these are the first (monochrome/Rollei) and second (colour/Mamiya) rolls I have shot on these new (to me) cameras. I can see from other scans that I need to work on greater stability for the Mamiya when I’m not using a tripod - it’s heavier than I think, and perhaps my recently injured arm means it’s harder to hold still at slower shutter speeds. Neither of these images have had any post-processing.

With this first image of my friend Toni (taken on the spur of the moment in a pub garden, and yes, that is a fresh pint in front of her!), if you can ignore the fact I didn’t have e.g. a yellow filter with me, there is clearly a richness in the tones that does just what I would expect the Ilford to do - and the Epson scanner captures the depth of these tones rather well, I think.

Ilford FP4 Plus/Rollleiflex

Ilford FP4 Plus/Rollleiflex

And here we have a 100% detail of the edge of Toni’s glasses. It’s hard to know if I had focussed entirely accurately (almost certainly not, and depth of field was very shallow; I think I was resting the camera on the garden table as I had no tripod with me), but even so, I find the definition reasonably ok (bear in mind that at 100% and the more usual 300dpi, these images would be enormous!).

Ilford FP4 Plus/Rolleiflex

Ilford FP4 Plus/Rolleiflex

Here is the Provia, first the image as a whole (which, if I use it, I will ultimately crop, rather than leave at this size/aspect ratio):

Fuji Provia 100F/Mamiya

Fuji Provia 100F/Mamiya

And here is an excerpt at 100%, which again shows considerable definition (and the tif file shows good shadow detail - some of which seems to have got lost in the conversion to the jpg file):

Fuji Provia 100F/Mamiya

Fuji Provia 100F/Mamiya

I’m not sure I like the Provia 100F that much, but perhaps that is because the colours didn’t quite come out the way I thought they would; everything seems to have a slightly purple tinge, even when there is no obvious purple in the scene as there is here; I think that is very unlikely to be the scanner. In any case, I look forward to using the Velvia I recently bought - I already ‘know’ the Velvia from 35mm photography (the Provia was given to me by the same person who is passing on the Mamiya - he had it in the fridge but never really got around to using it, so it is quite old and maybe not at its best).

My preliminary conclusions: getting consistently decent scans will require some effort, as well as consultation with the manuals (don’t tell my wife!). But early results are certainly promising, and working with something like the Epson V700 will be enjoyable, I think; the time needed to learn how to do scans properly is perfectly normal (I expect to learn how to use a new camera, so why not a scanner?). There are some early niggles: for example, I would like to use a different colour space/ICC profile: I’m using the recommended proPhoto RGB in Lightroom as Adobe itself says this is better than Adobe RGB, and yet the scanner defaults to this older setting (somewhere in the manual there must be something on this…!). Above all, using something as good as this Epson scanner will require me to produce much better images in camera to get the best out of the scanner - and creating better images is, after all, what this is all meant to be about!

The wonder of film

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This evening I needed to be in nearby Musselburgh, where I would be waiting for half-an-hour at the harbour. Musselburgh has a lovely small harbour, and at the moment all the sailing boats are ‘parked’ in the car park round the harbour (in spaces that are marked ‘dinghy parking’!).

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

On the way out of the house, I took my camera, tripod, spirit level, filters, a 28mm and a 50mm lens - and looked forward to capturing some of these boats and the harbour scenes. I took my favourite film camera, the old Nikon FM2, with one of the last three rolls of Fuji Sensia that I have: this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, since I used to use Sensia a lot before switching to Fuji Velvia for colour landscapes; Fuji have recently announced they are stopping the production of Sensia so I have just bought three rolls of it to play with for the last time. It was fairly dark when I arrived in the harbour, and as I took my bag out of the car and began to set up, I realised that I had left my light meter at home - since the FM2′s slowest shutter speed before getting to the bulb setting is 1 second, the camera’s meter would be useless and I would have had to more or less guess all my exposures… so, sadly, I packed everything away again and went to buy a newspaper instead. Next week, when I expect to be there again, I’ll remember the meter!

I’ve read two nice postings on other people’s websites recently about using film. The first one was from the great Bruce Percy, who discussed how much he enjoyed using a particular kind of Kodak Portra film for a recent trip he made to Ethiopia and then, referring to Canon’s 5D digital camera, noted:

I get a lot of correspondence from people wanting to know how to get the same look with their 5D. You can’t.

If you want the look of film, then shoot film.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that! The other piece I’ve come across is more of a short essay by the wonderful Max Marinucci (though the second part describes how he develops film, so you may want to skim read that bit if you just want to pick up on his philosophy about film):

…patience and parsimony are virtues to be cultivated and nourished. When shooting film, you immediately accept the fact that it may be a little while before you see the fruits of your work and, by living with this, you will become a more disciplined shooter, which will in turn carry on to your digital side as well. It also means that shooting everything in sight without any thought into basics like light and composition is out of the question since you only have 24-36 shots in a roll of 35mm and it makes no sense in spending time/money developing simple, careless snapshots. This is a valuable exercise in restraint and it brings us to actually THINK before we shoot. Would you have taken a picture of your toes with film just because you can? I sincerely doubt it.

Although I use my Nikon D90 digital camera a lot, there is something wonderful about film that cannot be beaten by the more ‘clinical’ nature of digital… and it has to do with all these key components of photography that often go missing in the techno-madness that camera manufacturers obscure from us as they add ever more silly functions to their cameras: patience, composition, light, perspective… I’m not a dogmatic film shooter: of course digital cameras have their place (I couldn’t be involved in the same way in the African film festival if I wasn’t using digital, and I do like my D90). I think it is just a question of being reminded of that at times, of using film and digital in different circumstances as appropriate, and above all, appreciating film for all the wonder it can bring to the craft of photography.