FILM PHOTOGRAPHY / DARKROOM TIP AND TRICKS THREAD

I believe that both film and digital have their place the digital is more covenant for fast uploading and some jobs. But the film negative last longer

 

Oh now that is neat

 

It's Great to see other film shooters on here

 

Yeah I was about to buy one and she just sent me one. I sent her some of my digital prints on canvas to thank her.

 

I'm about to purchase a Nikon FM 2 and a 35mm soon

 

saaaaaweeet. I’m in money saving mode. I want a new body. But its digital so no place for it here lol

 

Use to shoot film a long time ago. Mostly Velvia in 35mm and a bit of B&W on 4x5. I remember fretting about exposure on the Velvia - what a pain for landscape especially. All sorts of deciding whether a given feature in the scene was in which zone and compensating metering for that. Of course if you were made of money you could just bracket like mad. I was a poor college student so...

Also remember budgeting out how many shots per day and what not on a trip. Then when the trip was over you could either wait weeks for mail processing or pay through the nose for local E-6 processing (assuming you shot slides like I did). For the B&W you got to spend an evening in the darkroom before you saw anything at all.

Still the anticipation was fun to a degree. After a few day trip up in Death Valley or the high desert my first stop back in LA would be the lab to drop off for three hour E-6 processing. While it processed I took a shower, unpacked, cleaned the car and ate some nice non-camping food. Then back to the lab and straight to the light table. So many hopes dashed on that light table... It was a very slow pace for learning compared to chimping an LCD.

The one benefit to have grown up shooting that way was I don't really suffer from the more modern digital disease of taking way too many crappy photos and then having to sort through thousands of exposures when I get home. When each click of the shutter cost you about $0.33 you learned to plan shots and make them count. But even more than that was shooting 4x5 where you might have all of 16 exposures for an entire multi-day trip and each one cost you a few dollars. Not to mention the pain of hauling the camera and tripod around and doing all the setup and so forth.

As the "digital disease" crept into my shooting (too many poorly thought out exposures) I found a solution. Leave the camera in the bag and compose everything with the eye and a little cardboard finder. Only after getting a great composition with the cardboard does the tripod get set down and the camera taken out. By making it nearly as inconvenient to shoot digital as it was to shoot 4x5 the result is the digital images begin to look like they were shot 4x5. Best of both worlds - a "film" look without the pain of film.

The other benefit of shooting film was learning to edit down a shoot. In the early web days you paid through the nose in either money, time or both for scans. So you really only scanned worthwhile stuff. For B&W the amount of effort that went into a darkroom session to get a good print with complicated burns and dodges could be multiple hours for a single exposure. So again, you only bothered with the best (well, *your* best which for me was still pretty sucky). Too many folks these days spray the internet with huge galleries of completely unculled photos. My attitude has always been if I'm not willing to take a lot of time to edit down and select a few key photos why should I expect anyone to spend any time looking at them?

Anyway, I'll likely never shoot film again and haven't shot any in more than a decade. But I am really glad I had my time with film too. It did teach me some very useful things. I suspect you can learn them without the film though! The film just forced some lessons on me.

And there definitely is some "magic" to film - especially a transparency on a light table - that doesn't exist with digital.

The digital darkroom is just so, so, so much faster and more flexible too. I can do in 30 seconds what took hours and hours in the real darkroom. Still less magical. Maybe I should just set a dish of acetic acid next to the computer when editing to make it smell the same at least

Great thread idea. Look forward to seeing what folks are doing these days with film.

 

Film definitely slows you down and makes you think about every single shot you take. I am developing all my film myself and learning my way around the darkroom I am loving the experience with film.

 

What type of film are/did you shoot

I’m shootings HP5

 

patiently waiting for P30 to be back in stock

 

I mainly shoot kodak tri-x. I mostly do street photography, and love the results I get with it pushed to 1600. But hp5 is a close second favorite black and white film. I’ve been wanting to try out this new film buy a guy in Japan, film camera hunter, it’s called street pan. When I have another me extra cash I love shooting fuji velvia. But it’s now double the price per roll and same for processing.

 

Shot this during a treacherous San Diego winter. With my leica m6 on Fuji Velvia 50 slide film.

 

Haven't shot tri-x yet but I will and compare it to the HP5

 

Some film oldies of mine - all 35mm Velvia as I don't actually have any scans of my B&W 4x5 work! None of them particularly earth shattering - I actually made much faster progress once I started shooting digital and may a significant effort in better understanding composition.

Charcoal Kilns - Death Valley


Zabriske Point - Death Valley


Cedar Breaks - Utah


Monument Valley - Arizona​

 

Those are amazing

 

I think that you can learn a lot faster from digital than what you could with film.

 

Did you all know that if you turn your phone on negative view / display and turn on your camera you can look at your negative in color or B&W. Just hold your negative up to the light or put it on a light table and look with your phone its pretty cool tried it last night.

 

Wow, these are all great! The cedar breaks image is my favorite.

 

What type of developers do you guys use?