Shutterfinger

Scan versus Scan

One of your options when you have film developed at a retail mini-lab is to have it scanned and burned to a CD. This is undeniably convenient, especially if you don't have a scanner of your own. The quality of the scans is often better than you might think, but a lot depends on who's doing them.

How can you tell if a scan is of reasonably good quality? Aside from the quality of any accompanying prints, take a close look at the scans on your monitor to make sure there are no film scratches, dust, or excessive grain. If you've got an image browser or pixel editing program with a histogram feature, use it to see whether there's clipping in the highlights or shadows.

In general,  the less tweaking you have to do, the better the scan. This is important because mini-lab scans are almost always in JPEG format, so any edits and re-saves you do will erode the image data.

In case you're wondering just how good a mini-lab scan can be, here are two samples. One was done was done at a local camera shop, the other on my Nikon Coolscan V film scanner. Can you tell which is which?

Scan A

Scan B

Is This Progress?

It amazes me what some paper distributors are charging for "fine art" ink jet papers. Harman Gloss FB, for example, sells for around $28.00 for 15 sheets of 8.5 x 11" paper. This works out to about $1.87 per sheet. In contrast, 25 sheets of 8 x 10" Ilford Multigrade IV Fiber-based can be had for $24.00, which works out to $0.96 per sheet. The reason I compared these two brands is because a print on Harmon Gloss FB is supposed to look the most like a print on an air-dried silver-based glossy paper like Multigrade IV FB. From all accounts, Harmon Gloss FB is a wonderful paper, but why should it cost almost twice as much per sheet as one that's actually coated with silver? Keep in mind that your actual cost per print is even higher once you add the price of ink. Silver-based images are created with light, which is free. Ink jet inks can have an effective price of almost $7000 per gallon! And you thought gasoline was expensive...

Six Reasons Why Film Is Still a Viable Option

Even though I have a digital SLR and am very comfortable with using Photoshop to adjust and print my photos, I don't plan on selling my stash of film cameras any time soon. In fact, I might add to it. Here are six reasons why:

1. Excellent cameras are available dirt-cheap. Lightly used, top-of-the-line film cameras are selling on e-Bay for only a few hundred dollars. Even the creme-de-la-creme, such as Leicas and Hasselblads, sell for less than a Nikon D300 body.
2. Used film equipment has already depreciated so much in value it won't drop much further. This means that you can buy a film body a very reasonable price and still sell it a few years later for close to what you paid for it. You can't say that for DSLR bodies. The feature-packed DSLR you buy today can lose half its resale value the day its replacement is announced.
3. You've got more choices. Lower cost of entry makes it more attractive to try a different camera system or a different format entirely.
4. Excellent films are still available. Although film is harder to find in drug stores and small camera shops, if you buy from specialty retailers you can get excellent films that scan better than ever better, all at a cost of just a few dollars per roll.
5. Excellent, inexpensive flatbed scanners are widely available. There's less need for a chemical darkroom or increasingly scarce pro labs when you can buy an excellent flatbed transparency scanner for $500 or less. Today's transparency scanners can handle every film size from 35mm to 8x10" with ease.
6. Film is a reliable back-up medium. If you do nothing else but store your negatives and transparencies in a cool, dry, dark place, they're likely to last a lot longer than you ever will. You can't say that for magnetic or optical media. Even if the media remain intact, there are no guarantees that the supporting software and hardware will still be around.

One major "catch" to all this is that good, reliable film processing is increasingly harder to find, especially for anything larger than 35mm. You may have to resort to (gulp!) processing it yourself. If anyone's sufficiently interested, I'd be happy to share some tips on how to do it with minimum muss and fuss.

What You See Is Not What You Get

Does this photo look sharp on your monitor? It looks sharp on mine. How sharp would it be if it were printed? Who knows?

I was recently using Photo Mechanic, my preferred image browser, to sort through some photos when I noticed that almost all of them—JPEGs and RAW files—looked soft. This went beyond the slight degree of softness one expects from a pre-sharpened digital capture. These images were so soft I began to wonder whether I had accidentally left my lens switched to manual instead of autofocus.

They were all shot with a Canon 30D, so out of curiosity I tried viewing them with Digital Photo Professional (DPP), the RAW converter Canon provides with its DSLRs. Lo and behold, the same images now looked a lot sharper. But were they really sharper or did they just look that way because Photo Mechanic doesn’t apply a sharpening algorithm to image previews and DPP does? I repeated the same experiment with three other RAW converters I have on my hard drive: RAW Developer, Adobe Camera Raw, and Bibble Pro. Each one differed in how sharply it displayed the images. Imagine what happens when others view images you’ve uploaded to the Web.

Note that film shooters who make contact prints or enlargements aren’t affected by this phenomenon. A slide or negative that looks sharp when viewed through a decent loupe is sharp. Once you scan it, though, things get more iffy.

Since what you see on-screen is obviously not an objective standard for measuring absolute sharpness—if there is such a thing—the question is, which version is most reliable basis for deciding whether to add further sharpening or not? This question is easier to answer if you’re using the same software application for your sorting, adjustments and printing, because what you see is likely to be more consistent from step-to-step. It’s a different story if you’re using one application for sorting, another for adjustments and a third for printing.

Bottom line: Be careful about making permanent changes to your images based on how they look on-screen. When in doubt, print. In this brave new world of digital relativity, a print is often the only consistent benchmark available.

Cameras Do Matter (But Not as Much as You Think)

This straightforward street photo could have been taken with practically any camera that has a medium-wide or normal lens. It could also have been taken by practically any photographer. What's most important to most viewers is not who you are or what  you use, but what you shoot.

Ken Rockwell, a photography pundit with a website, has generated some controversy by claiming that your camera doesn't matter. Other pundits and online forum opinionators have felt obliged to argue the opposite: Your camera does matter--a lot.

Arguing strongly for either side is as pointless as arguing about which side of a coin is most important. Your camera does matter to the extent that it needs to be sufficient for your intended purpose. If you want to photograph birds or sports you'll need a camera that accepts telephoto lenses. If you're interested in architectural photography it helps to have a camera that accepts wide angle lenses and that allows you to adjust the lens and focal planes. If you just want a camera that will take acceptable pictures of a variety of subjects in good light, almost any general purpose camera will do.

The point that often gets lost by the "camera matters a lot" crowd is that a camera is just a tool. Owning an excellent tool does not automatically bestow expertise on the owner. At best, with enough automation, it may simply ensure that every photograph you take is in focus and correctly exposed. All things being equal, you'll get better results overall if you improve your skills than if you improve your camera.

Instruction Manuals That Don't

One of my pet peeves about photo equipment instruction manuals is that there's so little instruction. For the sake of context, I make my living as an instructional designer. Before that I used to be a technical writer, so I think I have some insight on the subject.

What I find is that, all too often, the manual will tell you what every control, function, button, and menu does, but very little about how it works, why you'd want to use it, or how various functions interact with each other. The average instruction manual impart facts but very little knowledge.

This a good thing for guys like me, who can earn a living writing the "expanded" manuals you see selling in bookstores for $20.00 and up. It's not so good for novice photographers trying to get a handle on the logic behind how their camera operates. In many cases, of course, there is no logic, but that's a subject for another post.

Freedom from Choice

One of the things that helped me get good at photography was that when I began there were so many limits on what I could do. I got passionate about photography when I was a student at a boarding school in Sedona, Arizona. I had one camera and one lens. My camera had only one exposure mode--match-needle--and only three controls. I could go into town (such as it was) only once a week, and that was usually to buy photo supplies. All I could afford was a few rolls of Tri-X, a quart of Kodak D-76 film developer, a quart of Dektol print developer, some fixer, or some paper. My subject matter was the stunning red rock formations, which didn't interest me much at the time, and my fellow students, which did.

Since my equipment, methodology, and subject matter had pretty much been decided for me, I was free from dwelling on other options. I got so familiar with my camera and lens that I could operate them without much conscious thought. I learned to see how different types of light reflected off of different skin tones. I learned exactly how to expose and develop Tri-X to get a negative that would make a respectable 8 x 10 print at 10 seconds at f/5.6. Even today, my film "workflow" is so ingrained (no pun intended) that I can slip back into it without missing a step, even after months of using a digital camera.

Today, there's practically no end to the options you have available. Exposure modes, AF modes, picture styles, white balance settings, JPEG vs. RAW... the list goes on. For some photographers, this list conveys a sense of power, control and limitless possibilities. For others all these options are intimidating and bewildering. What these two extremes have in common is the idea that your camera should be able to do "everything" and that you should know everything about your camera.

The question I suggest you consider is, "Says who?" Instead of trying to master endless possibilities, try mastering one. One exposure mode, one lens, one file format, one subject, one type of light. You may find that mastery comes a lot faster and is a lot more gratifying.

The Digital Challenge

The main difference between learning photography in the film era (which isn’t over, by the way) and now in the digital era is that with film and chemical processing, you had the sense that you were trying to learn a large but defined body of knowledge. With digital photography, the body of knowledge is constantly changing and expanding, along with the tools and techniques. The good news is that there's overlap. The fundamentals are the same no matter what medium you embrace.

For some photographers this is exciting. In exchange for a constantly receding horizon of knowledge, digital imaging has allowed more control over every aspect of image making than ever before. For others, the feeling of never being able to completely grasp what’s going on, much less keep up, is daunting and perhaps even discouraging.

I happen to fall somewhere in the middle. I like having more control than before, but I'm annoyed that things that used to be so simple are now more complicated and expensive than before. As this blog develops over time, I plan to explore what we’ve gained, what we’ve lost, and what was never worth much to begin with.

Fun in the Closet

The first time I ever developed a roll of film I was 12 years-old and sitting in a closet. At the time, that closet was the darkest room in the house, but even with a towel stuffed at the bottom of the door, a bit of light leaked around the edges. “Not enough to matter,” I hoped.

According to my reference source, a Boy Scout merit badge booklet on photography, all I needed was three trays: one for developer, one for water, and one for fixer. I had bought the chemicals at a local camera shop and could barely contain my excitement as I mixed them and poured the solutions into my trays (actually bread pans performing double-duty). I separated the film from its paper backing, grabbed the ends of the film, one end in each hand, then began moving my hands up and down, so that the film was in constant motion, in and out of the developer.

This became tiring after a while, especially since I had to avoid brushing up against nearby coats and shirts. I also didn’t have a timer, so I had to rely on my mother to knock on the door when it was time to switch trays. Despite these horrific conditions, 15 minutes later I was staring with excitement at a roll of fogged, linty, but still clearly visible, images.

That was all it took. I fell in love with photography from that moment on and haven’t stopped since.