Japan gear

So, I’m heading for Japan on Saturday, and I figured I’d talk a bit about what I’m packing.  Photo-wise of course, I’m sure you aren’t interested in how many pairs of socks I’m bringing.

Well, this is it. One camera and it’s film.  I decided on my old Hasselblad 500cm just to make things interesting and slow me down a bit. When it’s all folded up, it’s surprising how compact they are for a medium format camera.  It’s from about 1973, and I bought it from KEH a few years ago with an 80mm lens for around $800, bargain grade and it works great.  I did replace the focusing screen with a acu-matte that I found online used.  It had a couple small scratches on it, but it cost $30 instead of the usual $120 for ones without a scratch. I think I can handle the damage.  I’ve also added an op/tech strap like I use on my Canon as well.  They’re comfortable and I like the way they just click disconnect when they get in your way.

Next is a meter, since the 500cm doesn’t have one. So I’m carrying my Sekonic 308. It’s not fancy like some of my friends have, but it does the job for what I need it for, which is mostly purposes like this and when I’m shooting film with a strobe. Actually in this case I wish I had a smaller one like the 208.  Some little old school analog one that took up a little less space, but at the moment I’d rather not spend another $100 for a marginal size decrease.  One thing I like about the lens I’ve got is that the aperture and shutter speed are linked and related based on EV which is a measure of the amount of light there is available.  So your meter reads 12EV, you left the lever and set your lens to 12 and then all of the correct combinations of aperture and shutter are available at a twist.  So maybe f/2.8 at 250th, f/4 at 125th, and f/5.6 at 60th are all options for 12EV.  Well the lens is locked to 12, so just select the combination you want. Makes it really easy, especially when your traveling and your head gets fuzzy.

And since it’s a film camera, I’ll be bringing film.  It’s all in a plastic bag so that I can ask TSA security to hand check it and not have it go through the machine.  Apparently they have to if you ask nicely and make it easy for them.  I always bring a roll or two of Ilford 3200, both because it’s handy when there’s no light, and also because it’s really fast, so you can say, “Well, there’s high-speed film in there, so it absolutely can’t go through the machine.  I plan on getting the film processed there when I can, just so I don’t have to deal with security on the way back, and I’ve heard that I can buy film there, but I’m more of a Kodak guy than Fuji, so I thought I’d bring some just in case.  So in the bag I’ve got:

Kodak E100G Chrome
I love this stuff, something about the subdued colors it’s got.  Shot some in Paris a few years ago and they were my favorite pictures. Plus looking at travel positives on a light table is so satisfying as well as making scanning easier. Some of the more observant of you might notice that there are a couple rolls of Provia in there as well, but I’ve replaced them with more E100G since I took this photo an hour ago.  I figure I prefer the Kodak, and I’m sure I can get Fuji over there.

Kodak Portra 400VC
I usually get NC, but they didn’t have any in stock so I figured I’d try the more saturated stuff.  My girlfriend Holly at Calumet assured me that it wasn’t too garish, I’ll find out for myself. Went with 400 for times when 100 chromes are just too slow.  I also threw in a roll of Portra 800 just in case.

Ilford 3200 B/W
This stuff is really fast, really contrasty, and pretty grainy, but fun for dusk and nighttime in the city.  I imagine it could be magical in Tokyo.  We’ll see.

My goal is to shoot about 1 roll a day, which would leave me with about 200 photos over the two weeks.  That’s a lot of scanning, and processing fees, but when’s the next time I’m going to be in Nara?  Exactly.

Noise, and why it’s not a big deal anymore.

Look at any review of the latest digital camera and you’ll see at least a page or two of 100% crops of noise at different ISO speeds, and endless comparisons with 23 other cameras.  At this point I think it’s fair to say that the engineers have successfully slayed the noise dragon. Both Canon and Nikon have full-frame cameras that are comfortable at 6400 and higher (notice I say “comfortable”, that’s actually usable and not just in special circumstances.)

One side note I’d like to make about those noise comparisons before I go on. They’re not at all real world.  Usually they’ll shoot the same scene on a tripod with the same lighting. All very scientific and objective, but most people are not sports shooters who need fast shutter speeds and so up their ISO when they’ve got decent light. Most people are like me and up the ISO when they don’t have enough light and thus high-iso noise is accentuated buy dark tones and shadow. That’s why I said 6400 is comfortable.  Ok, done with my mini-rant, now on with the show.

My old 5D was for a long time the leader in the noise race, then the Nikon 12MP cameras came out and upped the ante, then the 5DII came out with similar noise but twice the dots, etc.  The thing is, the noise we’re dealing with now is leaps and bounds better than on film at the equivalent speeds.  Last year I was walking around with my sister carrying my Leica filled with a roll of Portra 800 and when I got home and scanned it, I was very surprised how much grain there was. Here’s an example to the right, and that’s a 50% crop (here’s a link to the whole image in a post from last year).  I’d say it’s the equivalent of at least 3200 or even 6400 on my current digital.  That’s at least a two to three stop advantage.

Yes that’s 35mm, and medium format and large format are better when it comes to grain.  I’ve shot the Ilford 3200 speed film on my Hasselblad when traveling and loved it.  The grain however was definitely there.  Medium format film compared to 35mm digital, I’d give the edge to digital.  Don’t even try to talk about 4×5, what was the last time anyone shot anything over 400 speed film.  I’ll agree large format is amazing, but it couldn’t be further from 35mm digital in workflow or convenience.

You could also argue the differences between digital noise and film grain.  Sure, I’ll agree that as a general rule of thumb I’d rather have film grain.  But noise has been getting better looking, and as resolution goes up, it gets smaller relative to the pixels.  Which is something that people who compare the relative noise of the D3 with the 5DII rarely mention.

Here’s the kicker though: Lately I’ve been adding grain to my images, especially ones shot at 100-400 ISO.  That’s right, I’ll open the image up in 32bit Photoshop (yuck!) and create a layer of medium gray and run the Alien Skin Exposure plug-in to add film grain to it (I choose the 120 size grain).  Then I change the blending mode to overlay and opacity to taste. Now, you might ask, “Why in God’s name would you want to ADD fake film grain to a clean digital image!?”.  Well to answer that, I’m going to have to take you on a quick little ride down my memory lane.

I went to school for music and not visual arts and did a lot of production work where I soaked up just about everything I could get my hands on about digital audio.  I could write for days about how different aspects of the digital/analog battle in audio correlates to the digital/film battle in photography, but for the moment we’ll keep it to one facet, and that’s dither.

The process of analog to digital conversion in audio is much like a A/D converter in a camera.  Most importantly in that the louder or brighter the signal, the more information that is used to capture it.  So in audio that means that really quiet things down near the noise floor tend to flirt between being on or being off. For example, if the scale of loudness, for the sake of our conversation, goes from 1-100 (100 being clipping) then there will be some really really quiet sounds (or overtones and harmonics within other sounds) that sometimes register a 1 and sometimes register a 0.  Basically coming in and out of existence as far as the recording goes.  This shows itself as all kinds of low level distortions and some people say it’s audible, blah blah blah.

The point is that recording people decided a long time ago that if you added really quiet noise to the signal, those quiet sounds wouldn’t go from on to off, but would rather go from audible to being lost in this very quiet noise floor which sounds much like hiss on an analog tape (remember that stuff?)  The crazy thing is that listening tests showed that adding this noise, or dither, actually made the recordings sound better, even though technically, you were making them less perfect.

So, how does this effect photography.  Well I guess is does in two ways.  The 1 to 1 corresponding  effect would be to add grain to a digital images which has a lot of dark tones which have “blocked up”.  That is, that there aren’t enough numbers in the data to describe enough levels in the darkest stop of the image right next to black.  By adding grain, you’ll make the transitions between those levels less noticeable because the differences will get lost in the randomness of the noise pattern instead of being an obvious line between black and one level above black.  You might be losing ultimate image quality, but you’ll end up with a more visually appealing photograph to the viewer.

But after all that explanation, that’s not how I’ve been using the film grain lately.  Mostly I’m using it to hide my mistakes, primarily in skin.  Using the clone tool and healing brushes most of us can handle a few blemishes and wrinkles. But if the need for cloning is extensive or you’ve got to clone out a big chunk of hair from in front of someone’s face, it’s not as easy to make it look natural and blend with the skin around it in a believable way.  Film grain to the rescue. By adding the grain you’re bringing back some of the texture that too much 25% opacity cloning can smudge, as well as blend different work areas into each other.  Plus, I think that our eyes do find film grain a pleasing artifact.

Here’s a 100% example from yesterday’s image.  First is the original RAW file, second is hair removed and skin smoothed, and third is the a layer of film grain added.  Pretty cool eh?

6×6 through a dirty window

Lindsay

From Mary super done-up on digital with studio lights, to my lovely friend Lindsay on film with sunlight.  Gotta keep it interesting…

Melissa at All Points West

While at the festival, I reached into my back and loaded a roll of portra 160NC film. Or at least I THOUGHT that it was 160NC. When I rewound it later that day I realized that I had grabbed a roll of T-Max 400 instead. So I had a b/w roll that I thought was color, exposed one and a half stops too hot. Oops.

Connie down at Accurate Photo near my place in Park Slope just pulled it back a stop which smoothed everything out. Good thing I did it with the b/w and not the color film. I’m not sure that would have fared as well.

Anyway, here’s a photo of my sister.

Oh, and I’ve made a revision to my main portfolio site if anyone wants to take a look. http://www.billwadman.com/

Mary Beth in Black and White

Horsepower

In the dark at the Met

Organized? HA!

Computers make things pretty easy for the most part.  As long as you take a moment to actually rename your photos from ‘img1052.cr2’ to ‘TomMcCarthy_24.cr2’ then you’re well along the way to being able to find that image at a later date. I also have a hierarchy of folders on my hard drive that keeps things in order even if my LightRoom database gets gassed.  So to find Tom McCarthy from May 22nd of last year, I’d go into Portraits > Tom McCarthy > 070522 and there they would be.  Easy peezy…

Hell, if you’re one of those crazy (pronounced ‘[eyn-l]’) people who actually tags their photos with keywords, well then you’re in even better shape.  The point being that most of us have more digital files than prints and negs but the computer does a lot of the legwork for us. But how about the physical stuff?  The prints and developed negatives?  How to keep track of them?

I was in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders studio a few weeks ago and he asked me how I keep things straight and I said Lightroom, etc and then he said, “…no, your prints and film”.  The only answer I had is that I really don’t keep them straight.  He then took me down and showed me his cataloging system which involves lots of 11×14 and 8×10 print boxes full of polaroid prints and large format film.  He’s got a coding system starting with letters that correspond to what type of material is in the box, and then a catalog number.  All in order on the shelves and shelves that are his life’s work.  It was very cool.  But how to find what you’re looking for in those boxes?

In the old days, I guess the answer would be some sort of card catalog like back in your elementary school library, or in my case, like in my father’s record stores.  But today we have a better option, which is what Timothy uses, a database.

So, in keeping with trying to create a stable foundation to build my body of work on, I’m thinking of starting a database to keep try of my prints and negatives.  I’ve only got a few boxes of each, so it’ll probably be a weekends worth of work for me and an unlucky friend, but I think it’s got to be done.

I’m a windows guy, so I tend to lean toward Access as the database.  I could also use FileMaker Pro, which is what TGS uses, and is cross-platform, but being a computer geek I remember when Filemaker was a punchline in jokes that my sister and I used to about people in her museum industry.

Anyway, I’ve come up with a first draft of the database record schema. That’s fancy database talk for what information I’m going to keep about each print. And here it is:

Index number
Subject
Date
Type – film/digital
Camera
Paper Type
Paper size
Print size
color/bw
Printer
Location

I also did some google searches for anyone who’s already got a template set up for such a purpose, but typing in photography database template in google gives you a bunch of scrapbooking crap that’s exactly NOT what I’m looking for.  I need something that’ll scale.

So..  if anyone has gone through this process and has any advice on the
matter, please speak up and speak loudly.   Opinions on my schema and
what I’m invariably missing from it are also welcome. Thanks, and I’ll keep you abreast of the progress.

Lunch with Mary Beth, plus Red Mango or Pinkberry