Yesterday we passed the milestone of 140,000 visits to this poetry/writing/photography blog. This is partly (largely) due to pirate activity. My favorite pirate is currently in Japan, where she is perhaps visiting family. This has had a huge impact on the blog statistics, where Japan has risen to the top and the US has sunk to the bottom of the top ten countries. She has worked so hard on stealing my content for her own purposes that I think she should simply be allowed to publish the collection on which she is working. Indeed, I shall allow it in her case, but in no other.
There has been some activity on the photographic front in recent weeks. I acquired, on a trip to a local thrift store, about $500 worth of used Canon 35mm equipment. I know the current values, because I checked them online at KEH Camera (this is a free mention, I am not being reimbursed for it). Naturally, I am going to use this equipment.
Why, you may ask, would I want to shoot film rather than digital? A big reason is the light-response curve of film, as opposed to photocells. Film emulsion responds to light geometrically, as the human eye does. The photocells in digital cameras and cell phones respond only linearly, resulting in flatter images. In digital, black-and-white photography, I compensate by increasing the contrast, typically by about 23%. This helps, but it's still not the same as what the eye would see.
The photo below was shot on film, Ilford FP4 Plus, at its nominal EI of 100. The camera was a Mamiya C33 Professional TLR (which I still have). The 2-1/4"x2-1/4" (6x6cm) negative was scanned on a Canon TS6220 printer, at 600 dpi (a real film scanner would have given me at least three times the resolution of this image, thereby regaining the advantage of medium format):
And here is a digital photo, taken under similar lighting conditions, with compensatory editing:
:
And here is the same digital photo, without the compensatory editing:
Convinced yet?
If you want shadows that are deep, yet have subtle gradation of tones, without losing your highlights, film is the way to go. You can clean up and edit your negatives digitally in just a few minutes, and print (if you want to) from the digital file. No more laborious hours in the darkroom, seeking the perfect print. In fact, if you have a changing bag and light-tight developing tanks, you don't even need a darkroom.
I might add that handling a well-made, high-end film camera from the days before everything became plastic is truly a sensual experience.
The two rolls of film? They are 400TX, brand new, expiration 5/20/2023, made by Kodak in USA. About $13.95 each (for 36 exposures) at my local camera store, or about $10 per roll in other places.
Text and images Copyright © 2021 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
