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Matt Sawyer has been photographing the world in the last several years: Tulsa, OK, the east and west coasts, Canada, Japan, and northern Europe. He occasionally does wedding, engagement, event photos and public relations work, as well as architectural and commercial photography work.
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Well, the future is now. And I’ve invested in a scanner. I decided to go with the Epson V500. After a lot of research (and after not having much cash to spend), I figured the differences between the V500 and V700/V750 were not worth the money at this point. I would say that I’m dreaming of one day getting a Nikon 8000 or 9000. However, by the time I can afford one of those, I think either A) medium format backs may actually be within reach, or B) the quality of upper-end full-frame DSLRs may punch through the dynamic range barrier that medium format digital kits currently transcend.
As of now I’ve scanned around 7 or 8 rolls of 120. And I see what everyone was talking about when they mentioned a scanning “learning curve”. So without further rambling, here’s a nice little list of what I’ve learned:
Hardware:
- Can’t speak for 35mm film, but for 120, you might as well throw away the film holder that comes with the scanner and get one of Doug Fisher’s Better Scanning holders with the glass insert. Without one, you’ll invariably experience 1 or 2 major problems: newton rings, and out-of-focus scans.
- The Epson V500 is rated at 6400 dpi. For all practical purposes, this number is meaningless. Kinda reminds me of the annoying and useless feature called “digital zoom” on most point-and-shoot digital cameras. The V500, from my not-so-scientific testing, seems to me to have a maximum resolution of around 2000 dpi. This would yield a decent 5x7” print from a 35mm shot, or about a 12x18” print from a 6x7cm shot. Not too shabby. But this depends on whether your scanning and post-processing technique is adequate, and ultimately on how sharp the negative/positive is in the first place.
Software:
- Forget about the software that comes with your scanner. Get Vuescan Pro. It gives you just about every feature you could want in a scanner: multi-pass, multi-exposure, raw scanning, DNG files, 48-bit, and more. Silverfast AI is too expensive. Silverfast SE is possibly the most laughably horrible software I’ve ever seen. EpsonScan isn’t bad, and actually it’s probably the easiest to use. But it doesn’t give you enough control. The only thing that drives me crazy about Vuescan is that its multi/auto cropping tool is amazingly bad. But since I’m not scanning a zillion frames at once, I can live with it.
Film:
- The new Ektar 100 is awesome! My style in digital photography lately had been shying away from any vivid colors, prefering an aged, desaturated look. But seeing the poignant colors come up on the screen from the Ektar made me revisit my thinking here. Not that I’ll abandon the desaturated look though.
- Using old, cheap, expired film has its drawbacks. The quality from edge to edge of the frame is unpredictable. Sometimes this gives a nice pastel washy effect, but sometimes it looks dingy and unintentionally dirty (not in a cool way, in my opinion). The Fuji Superia 400 I used was also somewhat crinkly and difficult to work with in the scanner.
- Fuji Neopan 400 is an awesome film to scan (and great for home darkroom processing, so I’ve heard). It lies very flat, has moderate, pleasant grain (in 6x7 anyway), is pretty sharp, and has just beautiful tonality. The histograms show a nice soft falloff, making the digital files extremely easy to work with in Lightroom. I was able to overexpose it by several stops to retain all the shadow detail and I almost never lost any of the highlight detail. Highly recommended.
Technique:
- If you’re going to do much beyond just posting the images to the web, take the time to learn how to sharpen your files well. This doesn’t just apply to the digital processing of film photos, it also applies to digital photography (albeit less importantly). Files straight out of the scanner are going to be pretty soft. Here is a great tutorial about sharpening in Lightroom: here and here. Here is a great post about 3-step sharpening in Photoshop.
- The dynamic range and tonality of film are a lot of the reason why I love it so much. I was pleasantly surprised that my V500 was able to capture this decently well. Of course this was after painstakingly perusing Vuescan’s features, doing lots of tweaking. I think there are two reasons why I was able to capture great tonality and range: 1) scanning in 48-bit mode, and 2) using the multi-exposure feature of Vuescan. This produces giant files but I don’t mind. The quality is totally worth it to me.
- Vuescan totally confounded me at first. It was producing crazy, useless, color-shifted images until I found out how to get the proper settings and calibrate it for the particular film:
-
- Load the film up in the scanner and hit Preview.
- Drag a selection window over a strip of film that is blank, in the margins of the film.
- Hit Calibrate.
- Preview again.
- Check the box for “Lock Exposure”.
- Preview again.
- Check the box for “Lock Film Base Color”.
- Turn off any color correction that may be applied automatically by Vuescan. You’re probably better server by adjusting these things in Photoshop, not Vuescan.
- In the output section, make sure you’re Saving “As Film”.
- Hit Scan and you’re on your way.
That’s all for how.
In my book, Apertures currently counts as costing an arm and a leg. It cost me $5/negative frame + $6/CD for the two high-res scans. EIGHT DOLLARS per image. Add on the cost of the film, processing, and initial low res scanning, and the cost per high res image piles up to almost $10. Simply crazy unless I’ve already sold the print.
I’m all about supporting local business, especially art-related business. But at this rate I can’t afford to shoot much film, especially when the revenue-generating dept of my business is currently called “wedding photography”.
short-term plan:
Send a few rolls to Miller’s Imaging in Kansas (one of the largest labs in the world) for processing/scanning. They’re a little bit cheaper and I’m curious to compare the results to Apertures.
medium-term plan:
1: Get a scanner. I’m thinking about the Epson V750. Not a film scanner but in the ballpark. I would not consider this scanner to be good enough for great 35mm scanning, but we’re talking about 6x7 negatives here. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that good.
2: Get black and white processing equipment. This stuff is super cheap right now. I mean almost free-cheap. The cost isn’t really what’s holding me back on this one. It’s more of a time and learning curve thing. I’ve never done any real darkroom work before. It’s a little intimidating. But my wife is going to take a film photography class next semester. She will be able to process my film then (if she enjoys it, that is). Of course this means using the camera for mostly black-and-white photography. I’ve grown more in love with color in the last couple of years but I deep-down never really stopped loving black and white. Maybe the cost savings from black and white processing at home will help subsidize sending color rolls to the lab.
medium-long term plan:
Get a nice inkjet printer and really learn printing and color management. If I ever get to selling enough prints, that is. It would have to be a high enough volume to justify obviously.
long -term plan:
Get a digital back for the RZ67 (and a new computer to handle the giant files that will ensue). Right now these cost as much as a nice car. But in a few years surely not. My hope is that a real, full 6x7 back will come to the market. I realize this is quite possibly a pipe dream. If so I may say goodbye to 6x7 and just start shooting digital 6x6 or 645. Who knows.
After many games of ping-pong in my head about where/how to get my 6x7 negatives processed, I finally decided to bite the bullet and take a few rolls (not all, because it’s so darn expensive) to my nearest pro lab, Apertures Photo. I had them processed and scanned to a CD. It was something like $5/roll for processing, $5/roll for scanning, and $6 for the CD itself. The images produced by their Noritsu lab were about 5MP, 8-bit jpegs. Not the greatest quality or even usable for anything other than proofing or posting on the web, but I guess this is the digital counterpart to the old light table. The images actually looked decent though they were a little noisy and couldn’t be manipulated much on a computer. I was quite happy with most of the black and white shots (Fuji Neopan 400). Great tonality, range, and sharpness, but noticeably grainy. The color shots were all expired Fuji Superia 400, a cheap consumerr-quality film that had been sitting in my freezer for a couple of years. I was not terribly impressed with the color of the Superia or anything else about it for that matter, except that it seemed to have adequate sharpness (and that was shooting wide-open, handheld).
Well I decided I really like two of the shots I’d had processed so far, so I took them a step further. I brought those two negatives back to Apertures for a 4000 DPI scan on their Nikon 8000 film scanner. The files produced here were just enormous: 270 MB TIFF files, approximately 85 MP. My little Macbook had trouble opening each of them in Lightroom, lots of spinning pinwheels happening that day. The resolution on these files was obviously supreme, but I think a bit overstated by the technical specs of the files. I think the real resolution was probably somewhere around half of the stated 4000 DPI. And the other problem is that I’m still getting 8-bit files. So far my opinion on film scanning: why would you give up the dynamic range of the film by compressing bit-depth like that? I’d like to have a 16-bit file that’s about 2400 DPI. That would be perfect I should think. Now if I can find a lab that’ll accomodate without costing me an arm and a leg.
Click here to see some of the results (as well as old film shots).
I eventually pulled out the camera and started shooting with it. I was addicted after the first few snaps. Obviously the camera is huge and heavy as you’ll read anywhere. But I found handling it to be surprisingly easy. It took me almost no time to get used to handling it (maybe because it’s so simple?). The hard parts were using the waist-level viewfinder (where the picture is reversed from left-right) and using a dedicated light meter for the first time. I wasn’t really too happy about having to carry this extra device around, but that’s about the only way to get perfect exposures with this setup. (Speaking of perfect exposures or a lack thereof: I learned later that night that the first roll I shot was loaded in the wrong way, and so I’d wasted it completely. Oh well.)
As far as slow, pensive landscape shooting goes, this camera seemed to be well-suited. There was plenty of time to manually meter the scene, setup the camera on the tripod if necessary, adjust the exposure on the camera, compose, focus (which was almost always at infinity anyway) and click. Oh and there was often the added step of using a cable release to prevent mirror slap.
At some point I really want to shoot people with this camera. I’ll have to get a more portrait-friendly lens and I haven’t decided which one to get yet. Maybe by then I will be more proficient in metering/setting up on a tripod/exposing/composing/etc with this thing and portraits won’t have to be too tedious.
more details on the film experience coming soon…
Well it’s been a couple of months. A couple of months of the day job and other projects dominating my life. But: the never-ending project has launched, Damion and I have finished mixing our album, our band, Ithica, has played at DFest 09, we’re almost done with the film score to The Rock and Roll Dreams of Duncan Christopher, and, wow that is a lot of stuff.
The good thing is that I’ve had a couple of months to soak up and collect my thoughts on returning to film. To kick off the experience, I bought a Mamiya RZ67 with a 50mm lens, and Lance Miller and I headed out to the Wichita Mountains (via Route 66) for a couple of days. I very briefly mentioned the trip and posted some of the digital photos in the last post. But I haven’t really discussed the experience of going film (not to mention medium format film).
On that first trip, I was very shy about getting the RZ67 out and using it for the first part of the trip. I stuck to my familiar Canon 30D/10-22mm lens combo, and got some nice shots. I found after a few hours that I was simply going to have to pick up the Mamiya and start shooting with it. Check out the next post for details.
I had some old Fuji Superia 400 in my freezer, and my Yashica has been sitting silently in the back room for so long. So today I loaded it up and shot for the first time in a few years. Granted it was only a few frames of my dog Beck. But it felt great. It also helped reinforce my latest decision to get a film camera.
I’ve been fiercely debating and researching film vs. digital in my head for the last 5 years, really. I’ve had heated arguments about it first from the pro-film side and then from pro-digital, and now I’m sitting in the middle, realizing that digital has come so far that it’s almost insane not to use it for many applications (best example: weddings). But film won’t seem to die, and for good reason at least as of the time of this writing.
The quality of each has its merits. Almost as if debating 24-bit digital audio vs. a phonograph, at some point the technical discussion about quality runs off the tired and worn scientific road and into the subjective wilderness. For example, you can’t simply look at megapixels to compare the resolution or sharpness of each. You can’t simply look at dynamic range response of a digital capture of a step wedge to compare tonality and range. And a lot of the old pros will acknowledge this. It’s more of a feeling. Reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In the past it was easy enough to see the quality advantage of film over digital. Digital technology was still in its infancy (and some might argue it still is). But now the comparison gets a little tougher. Especially when you consider the newer full-frame DSLRs and moreso the latest medium format digital backs. Enlargement from these systems will probably beat medium format film in terms of cleanness and sharpness, really. And I have to imagine that at some point in the future, it may become downright silly to use film.
But for a guy in my position, film has begun to look attractive again. For one thing, I can’t afford a new full-frame camera like a 5DII, D700, or A900 (and I darn sure can’t afford a medium format digital back). But I can afford a film camera that shoots medium format with a wide angle lens, and that’s why I decided to go ahead with the Mamiya RZ67. (Trivial fact of the day: Annie Liebowitz has used them extensively.) And I really believe that at some point digital backs for an RZ67 will become affordable. At my pace, It would take a long time for the cost of development and scanning to overcome the cost of a Canon 5DII.
If the argument needed any more scale-tipping, here is a thought I had today which is inspired by Doug Menuez’s recent post about zen of film vs. digital gratification, and also inspired with a conversation I had with my friend Micah about playing poker. When you’re playing for money, you play differently. All of the sudden, each frame, or each moment, or each bid in a round of Hold ‘Em takes on a psychological value that is simply impossible to induce in a world where each moment doesn’t cost you anything. You do begin to shoot differently. If you can let go of the pain associated with money being consumed with each shutter click, the results have to be different, and maybe even better, somehow.
Don’t get me wrong, I will invariably use my trusty Canon digital gear for weddings, portraits, and stuff which actually makes me money. But I think I may have a new opened door or inspiration or at least impetus to shoot the kinds of photos I love the most with the new system.
Results coming soon, hopefully…
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