Monday, May 09, 2011



Quilla, Kodak Tri-X

 This blogger happens to be a photographer who shoots with cameras that I load with film. I use film because the digital camera revolution happened when the sun was setting on my magazine photography career. My wife urged me to switch to a digital camera not knowing that at the time the only way I could get results close to my medium format’s camera was by getting a digital scanning back for my Mamiya RB-67. I calculated that I would have had to invest in the neighbourhood of $45,000 between the software and the hardware needed.

I also knew that for the bulk of the work I was doing my 35mm cameras were just fine so investing in a $3500 Canon super digital camera was also not in my budget.

My wife was right in that I did lose quite a few jobs were some of my clients (the ones that did not know me well enough to chose me for my style) demanded I use a digital camera. Some of these clients were events clients (ones I generally avoided) who wanted me to shoot an event and then retire to a nearby room with a portable digital printer from which I could then provide the guests with instant pictures. Losing these jobs did not upset me as much as they upset Rosemary who would always look at me with a face that silently screamed, “We need the money.”

Some six or seven months ago I did get an unusual (unusual because they are so rare now) request from the Georgia Straight to take an actor’s portrait. I satisfied their request and they unusually sent me an email telling me how much they had liked the portrait. I did not tell them until much later that I had taken the shot with my lowly 3G iPhone. In spite of the fact that I had used the iPhone the picture was still within my style since had used a portable softbox in which I had used the continuous light of the quartz modeling light and had not used the flash simply because there was no way I could sync it with my iPhone’s camera.

Quilla, Kodak Tri-X on Ilford paper

If anything the exercise proved to me what I had been telling my wife all along. I had been telling me that I was usually hired because of my style and not because I used film or a digital camera.

The digital camera has pretty well evened out the playing field of photography much as the Colt Peacemaker made the talented gunfighter irrelevant by the latter part of the 19th century. More shots could do the job of one well-aimed shot if done quickly.

But digital photography still seems to be mired with the past. The question of 10 years ago when someone showed you a pristine print was, “Was this taken with film or with a digital camera?” Now that question is moot as few shoot with film or process the film and print it themselves. And especially now most photographs are seen on monitors and ever so rarely are they printed as inkjets.



 With the increasing possibility of the demise of the digital point and shoot because the camera in hand is now usually also a telephone, apps are being offered that mimic the look of film. These apps, in an age of seamless perfection, made more so with the overuse of Photoshop and similar photo programs, provide the modern photographer with the random look and imperfection of film with the now, suddenly, popular overexposure, badly processed film look, and out of focus effects of cheap plastic lenses of the Chinese film cameras of yore like the Diana. These apps can mimic the look of fading Polaroids and a more recent crop of apps imitate the look of at least 50 kinds of film, many of which are no longer made. One of these programs is called Exposure 3 and it provides a photographer with “film filters”. The program is not cheap as it costs somewhere around $250 and is what you call a plug-in. This means that you must first have some version of Photoshop as it cannot be used independently.

Exposure 3 can be used to mimic various types of film. Clockwise from top left, Agfa APX, 25 Kodachrome 35 mm, Kodak HIE and Kodak Ektachrome GX.

To me this almost sounds like good news. Could it be that the hand of God is going to suddenly push up my sun as it plummets into sundown mode and give me a few more years of photographic life? I don’t think so. But as fewer and fewer photographers use and process film and print it onto photographic paper, like the butter ad that says, “Only butter tastes like butter,” I can say, "Only Kodak Tri-X is Kodak Tri-X."