Is Film Dead? - I

Back in 1968 or '70, I got my first fully adjustable camera. I was a penniless hippie at the time, so it was a Voightländer folding camera, made in Braunschweig, Germany in the '20s or '30s. I paid $5 for it, including the original leather case. When used correctly, it made glorious, 3-1/2" x 5" negatives, on 116 film, 8 exposures per roll. That film was discontinued a few years later, one of the first to go. Somehow, I acquired an old, horizontal 4x5 enlarger. With that, I made prints up to 16x20 inches, including a gorgeous landscape of the cliffs at Torrey Pines Beach, which I was never able to duplicate with 35mm. All of this was very exciting.

Over the years, I had great luck with some of the larger medium-format cameras, including several 4x5 Speed Graphics and a wooden 5x7 studio camera with a split back and a convertible lens. That split back gave me two 3-1/2" x 5" negatives, so it was like coming full circle. The results were delicate and beautiful.

Over the years, I did plenty of 35mm work, too, but what I loved was medium-format. It's still what I love, although I no longer have a darkroom.

 

What you see in the photo above is my last darkroom. I had to dismantle it and sell/donate it in 2012, so that we could move to Uruguay.

Aye, there's the rub: the darkroom. Now, at age 79, you couldn't pay me to spend hours in the darkroom, trying to get the perfect print of a single shot. But there was a time when some people did.

Film still has to be developed, but it can be loaded into the can in a changing bag. Light-tight daylight developing tanks take the place of the darkroom, at least for most purposes. The developed negatives are dried and then scanned into digital files on the computer, where they can quickly be edited using modern methods.

So why do this, if you're going to end up with a digital image anyway? There is one very big reason: film and light-sensitive digital-camera cells have very different light-response curves. In film-based analog photography, the light-response curve is geometric, a steep parabola; digital-camera photocells, though, have a linear (straight-line) response to light. Our eyes respond to light geometrically, not linearly. If you think your digital photos look flat, especially in black and white, this is the reason. Many people (including me) jack up the contrast of black-and-white digital photos to compensate. I typically increase the contrast by 23% for this purpose. It helps, but it's still not a true geometric curve of response to the light.

How much does this really matter? For me, the answer depends on the kind of photography you're doing. If you're shooting hard-edged subjects, with lots of contrast, like this:

then it probably doesn't matter much.

But if you're shooting soft-edged subjects, with subtle gradations of shading, for example black-and-white nudes (which is mostly what I shoot),

or if you are going for moody, evocative lighting, then film has the advantage.

I should mention that I don't yet have a true film scanner for medium-format negatives. I scanned these negatives using an ordinary printer-with-scanner (Canon TS6220), which has a maximum resolution of 600 dpi. A real film scanner would give at least 1200 or 2400 dpi. All photos were shot with a Mamiya C33 Professional (which I still have) and 80mm Mamiya-Sekor lens.

Is film dead? I don't think so. Not in my book, anyway.

(to be continued)

Text and images Copyright © 2021 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.