Perfection is Boring: An Ode to Film Photography

This may seem like a strange way to begin a post about film photography, but I must admit that I often feel a twinge of dissapointment when I first get my film back from the lab.  Sometimes, this is because of a technical issue (missed focus, light leaks, camera shake, and so on...), but usually this is because film doesn't have the same bling factor that digital does.  Of course, this varies quite a bit from film to film, but on the whole, digital just has more... more resolution, more saturation, more contrast, etc.  Fortunately for me, my days of wearing a lab coat are over, and I don't need to pick a camera based on numbers, statistics, and histograms.  I can choose my medium based on more subjective criteria, and I choose to shoot film because, despite all of its flaws, it has character and it has feeling - it manages to capture the subject in a truly evocative way.

Here are a few of my recent shots that have reminded me of why I love shooting film (and also, at times, why I hate it too)...

First up are two shots from the Wash DC metro.  The metro is full of photo opportunities - the people, the architecture, the constant motion of trains and crowds... I could spend a whole day just taking pictures of the metro. 

One obvious drawback to medium format photography is the lack of fast aperture lenses.  In theory, an F/1.4 lens could be made for medium format, but it would be very big and very heavy.  Besides that, most medium format photography is done in a studio, where the photographer has total control over the quantity and quality of the light.  When shooting medium format on location, the lack of fast lenses means that hand-held exposures indoors or at night will be difficult or impossible.  For these two metro shots, there wasn't quite enough light to get a hand-held exposure (at 80mm, ISO400, F/2.8, and 1/30 seconds), but since Kodak Portra has a very broad exposure latitude (it handles under exposure and overexposure very well), I went ahead snapped the pics anyway.  Since the pics were underexposed, the brightness was boosted during scanning, which brought out more of the film grain.  Alternatively, it's possible to push the film one stop during developement.  With either strategy, there is some loss of image quality (more grain, less shadow detail, and other issues), but the picture itself can still be very good, possibly even better.  It's not uncommon for a photographer to "push" film simply because it creates a unique look.

These next two shots were taken in the "Bishop's Garden" at the National Cathedral in Woodley Park, Wash DC.  With the first shot, I missed the focus by a bit, but it's still a very usable photo (serves me right for leaving the 'blad on the shelf these past few months... I'm out of practice with manual focus).  Since I meter my exposures using a Nikon D90, I always have a digital backup in case the film shots don't work out.  Once in a while I like to compare my digital and my film shots, and every time the film shot just has something extra, something that animates the photo.  Digital shots are a bit bland by comparison. 

It's difficult to shoot true 1:1 macro with a Hasselblad, but as with the metro shots above, the limitations of medium format can be a healthy challenge.  I generally prefer tight compositions - the closer the better - but when I shoot the Hassie, for which the minimum focus distance is ~3 feet, it forces me to step back and compose using the entire scene.  But nature is short on straight lines and well defined boundaries - it's tough to make a clean composition without the ability to zoom in (or zoom way out using an ultra-wide lens).  That being said, many of the most famous photographs have been made using even more limited equipment, so think deeply and then take some shots... you might just get a keeper or two.

Stone statues and monuments look great on film - the grain really complements the natural texture of stone.  That's not to say that post-processing isn't needed with film.  Adding a touch of contrast, or sharpness, or saturation, or even altering the white blance, will all improve the photo (if done in a tasteful way).  These are all minor tweaks - they won't fundamentally change the way that film renders a scene, which is the real reason to shoot film.  All of the pictures in this post were processed to some degree.  I prefer apple's Snapseed, although if I were a professional photog, I'd probably grit my teeth and learn Photoshop or Lightroom. 

For the following two pictures, one was given a mild "vintage" treatment and the other was converted to a high contrast black and white, both in Snapseed.

That's it for now.  Thanks for looking, and kudos if you took the time to read my photographic ramblings :)  Looking at these pics after shooting exclusively digital for the last few months has really gotten me back into film... hopefully they'll have the same effect on you.

Rice and Chopsticks: Taking things slow in Georgetown

Before you get too excited, this isn't a post about food, or even food photography (although that would make for a good post :)  ).  The title of this post came about as I was thinking of a way to explain what it's like to shoot with the Hasselblad.  It occured to me that photography with the Hasselblad is like eating rice with chopsticks.  It can be incredibly annoying at first, but with practice, it becomes second nature.  Now having said that, I must admit that shooting with the Hasselblad isn't second nature to me yet - I've only put 6 or 7 rolls of film through the camera.  To make things a little easier for myself, I first take a picture with my digital SLR, a Nikon D90.  This gives me the correct shutter speed and aperture, and if I'm not sure of a given composition, I preview the photo on the D90's LCD screen.  Back in the day, medium format photographers did something similar using polaroid film.

Here are a few of my recent shots from an afternoon that I spent walking around Georgetown a few weeks ago. These were all shot on Kodak Portra 400.  Like Portra 160, this is a color negative film (also called print film).  In my limited experience, I've found that I prefer the 400.  The extra speed comes in handy, the grain appears to be the same as the 160, and the colors are a bit punchier.  Portra is an awesome jack-of-all-trades film.  It may not rival fuji velvia for landscapes, but for everything else, it looks great, and when you need to take people shots, the skin tones on Portra are the best there is (after all, that's what Portra was designed to do).  I shoot Portra because it's the only 220 format film still being made, but also because it has the look that I want for 90% of my color pictures (and the B&W conversions look pretty good too!).

As usual, I've put my favorite picture first.  You'll have to excuse the black band at the bottom of the image.  My goal when shooting the Hasselblad is to never crop a picture in post.  If you see the black band, which comes from scanning the film, then the picture hasn't been cropped at all.

This one graffitied corner near the Key Bridge seems at odds with the generally yuppified atmosphere of Georgetown, but it makes for some interesting photography.  Pictures like this are the reason that I go to the trouble of shooting a Hasselblad.  It's film, so the colors and the textures are vivid but still believable, and because it's medium format, the resolution is superb, even with print film.  One day I'll get my Hasselblad set up to shoot slide film (also called positive film, or transparency) - the colors and the contrast of slide film are more vivid, and the resolution is better (less grain), but getting the correct exposure can be tricky because slide film doesn't have anywhere near the exposure latitude of print film.  On a camera that doesn't have modern matric metering, it's very easy to under- or over-expose with slide film.

Here's another shot from the same location.  Now that I think about it, this would make a great background for some portraits as well.

This is my favorite angle from which to capture the Key Bridge.  That being said, I think this would make for a more interesting photo with a wide-angle lens.  Alas, (for now) I have only one lens for my Hasselblad, an 80mm, which gives a normal perspective on medium format, similar to what a 50mm lens gives on full-frame (i.e. standard film SLR), and what a 35mm lens gives on most consumer digital SLR's (whose sensors are smaller than the film in a film SLR).  It's all a bit confusing, but the take home is that I need a 50mm or 60mm lens to get a wide-angle shot on my Hasselblad. 

Here's another, albeit less interesting, photo of some rowers crossing under the Key Bridge. 

Again, I'm stuck with just one focal length, so I can't zoom in on the rowers as might be done with a point and shoot or an SLR.  Luckily the Hasselblad has enough resolution that, if needed, we can crop way in to make the subject more central to the composition.  The blurry bits on the side were added in snapseed.  They're supposed to mimic the tilt and shift functions of a view-camera (which tilt and shift the plane of focus so that it is no longer perpendicular to the light entering the lens).

I should have entitled this post "how to deal with shooting a fixed focal length lens", because here is another shot where I couldn't get as wide as I wanted to with my 80mm lens.  In this case, I was forced to turn the camera sideways in order to get as much of the subject into the frame as possible.  I think it makes for a more interesting picture in this instance, although it would get old if I tilted every photo like this.  IMHO, it works here because the composition is all about the interplay of shapes and basic primary colors, and with the smokestack tilted, it bisects the frame into two pseudo-symmetric halves.  Some photographers like to talk about these compositional elements as if they were 100% planned before taking the photo, and perhaps that's true for some photographers.  In my case, the compositional balance that came from tilting the camera was a happy accident.

This next pic is a bit boring, but I like it because it shows just how well film is able to capture the textures and feeling of a place or thing, which is something that I've always felt is lacking in digital photography.  Again, that's just IMHO.  This is the old astronomy observatory at Georgetown University.

The old observatory sits right next to a small koi fish pond.  I'd gotten some nice pictures of water lillies and some other blooms there last summer.  It was too early in the season to capture those again, but the pond still made for some nice shots.  Because the corresponding focal lengths for medium format are all about twice as long as one would use for the same field of view on a film SLR, even when stopped down around f/5.6, it's easy to create some nice bokeh (which refers to the out-of-focus background, or technically speaking, the aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus background). 

And finally, here are some "macro" shots of spring blooms, all of which were taken using a +3 close-up diopter to allow for a closer minimum focus distance.  Some of these were taken in Georgetown and some were taken around my apt. in Rockville, MD.

I believe this first one is a cherry blossom, although not one of the famous "sakura" blossoms that we have here in Wash DC.

Lastly, two hydrangea shots.  One of these was shot at a shallow aperature (f/4, if memory serves), and one was shot stopped down around f/11.  The background of the f/11 shot was later blurred using the tilt-shift tool in Snapseed.  I'm including them both because it's tough to tell which one is the out-of-camera shot and which is the "fake" photo that I de-focused in snapseed.  The Snapseed app is probably the best $20 I've spent in photography.

That's it for now.  Unfortunately, I have no idea when my next post will be.  My real life is going to be very busy for the next few months, but hopefully I can still find the time to burn a few rolls of film.

...until next time, thanks for reading my Hasselblog!

Hard Knocks and Cherry Blossoms: The Hasselblad Takes me to School

This post is all about the Wash DC Cherry Blossoms.  Because the cherry blossoms were about 2 weeks early this year (thank you again global warming), all of these pictures were actually taken the day before the official Cherry Blossom Festival began.  The light that day was ok - flat with scattered clouds - but flat light can be good since film has less dynamic range than digital (and with film, if the colors aren't popping, you can always make great B&W's instead).  So the conditions were favorable, and the cherry blossoms themselves were at peak bloom, and after two hours and two rolls of film, I was pretty sure that I'd bagged some great shots.  Much to my chagrin, when I got my photos back from the lab, I'd only gotten the focus dead-on with a few of the pictures.  Most of the shots are still sharp enough, but it kills me knowing that they're not quite as good as they could be.  With split-prism manual focus, I've always found it much easier to be accurate when the subject has straight lines or high-contrast areas to use as focus points.  It was tough to match the two half-circles when focusing on the cherry trees and blossoms, but it just means that I need more practice.  And that's ok - I've got a whole year to work on it :)

Saving the best for first - this one is far and away my favorite of the afternoon.  The colors, the detail, the texture... this is why I shoot a Hasselblad.

This last one was my worst goof.  I was hoping to get a sliver of the grass in sharp focus by using the depth-of-focus scale on the lens, but I must have mis-read it, because I got nothing in focus.  In a way, it still makes for a nice pic...

For the rest of the photos, the light was too flat for good colors, so I converted to B&W instead.

This is a weird one.  I remember taking this shot and I'm 100% certain that I focused on the pagoda statue.  What I think might have happened here is something called focus shift.  If the camera is focused while set at one aperture, and then a different aperture is selected, the plane of focus can shift (some lenses do this, some don't).  In my case, the plane of focus appears to have shifted from the statue to the tree, more or less.  Next time I'll be sure to focus the camera after I've selected my aperture, and hopefully that'll keep this from happening again.  What a pity though, it could have been such a nice shot!

Another of my favorite pics from the afternoon.  There were tons of other photographers there, but I only saw one painter.  Looked like a nice painting too :)

That's it for the cherry blossoms.  Look for my next cherry blossom post in ~359 days, by which time I should be a little better at manual focus!

Thank You Global Warming: Spring Comes Early to Wash DC

I'm a huge fan of macro photography, so I was especially stoked when, a few months ago, I was able to find a good deal on a set of close-up diopters for the Hasselblad.  These diopters attach to the front of whatever lens is on the camera, and act to change the minimum focus distance of that lens.  In other words, they convert an ordinary lens into a macro lens.  Close-up diopters are cheap, easy to use, and don't affect the f-stop, but because they alter the optical path in a way that the lens was not originally designed for, some loss of image quality is inevitable.  An extension tube is also a great option for shooting macro on a Hasselblad.  Tubes don't alter the optical path at all, so the image quality is (theoretically) better than with diopters, but most extension tubes do cut ~2 stops of light, and since the majority of macro shots are taken around ~f/11 or stopped down even further, there often won't be enough light to use an extension tube, especially if you're like me and prefer to shoot macro using only ambient light.
I was curious to see how these close-up filters would work with the Zeiss 80mm f/2.8 lens on my 500C/M, and so with an early spring just beginning, I decided to give it a go.  I also decided to use a faster film.  Until now, I've been using Kodak Portra 160, but for macro I figured that Portra 400 would be the way to go since the extra speed (ISO 400 vs. 160) would allow me to stop down the lens by an extra stop or two, which is the only way to get a usable depth of field in macro.

This was essentially a test roll to see how well the close-up diopters worked, and to challenge myself to make some interesting shots around where I live here in Rockville MD.  I have, in fact, done most of my macro shooting around my neighborhood.  That's one of the best things about macro photography - it's easy to make interesting photos almost anywhere (even Rockville!).

Let me preface this next part by saying that these are really small flowers, about as big as a quarter, so the picture may not look as "macro" as it really is.  That being said, close-up filters don't actually allow for 1:1 shooting (1:1 is the reproduction ratio, and it means that the image on the film is the same size as the object in real-life), so technically speaking, this isn't a "macro" shot.  If I had to guess, I'd say that my +3 diopter, which is the most aggressive one I have, allows for shooting at 1:3, maybe 1:4, but that's just a guess. 

The nice part about shooting a Hasselblad is that the image can be cropped significantly and still have more than enough resolution for an 8x10 print.  Here's a tight crop from the picture above...

As you can see, the picture is still quite sharp.  Even with half the frame cropped out, the grain is barely visible, and this is an ISO 400 film! 

I should mention that these images were scanned at my local camera place, which, after a change of ownership, seems to be doing much better work, and a heck of a lot better than I can get scanning the negatives at home.  One of these days, I'll pay for some "premium" scans to see what the Hasselblad can really do, but until then, these scans are pretty good.

Here's another one at close focus with the +3 diopter, and a tighter crop below...

As you can probably tell from these pictures, I saw almost no loss in image quality when using the close-up diopters.  They're a heck of lot easier than using extension tubes too, although I'm sure I'll try that at some point as well.  It's also possible to use diopters and extension tubes at the same time, and that will make the Hassie into a true macro camera (i.e. 1:1 reproduction ratio).

To give an idea of how sharply the depth of field drops off when focusing this close, I shot this at f/11.  For subjects at ordinary distances (~6-50 ft), f/11 gives nearly infinite depth of field with an 80mm lens, but here you can see that only a single flower is in focus at f/11.  The subject was ~20 inches from the film plane.

One more shot to illustrate how shallow the depth of field is when shooting macro.  My focus point was the letter "M", and I also shot this at ~f/11.

And here are just a couple shots to see if I could make something interesting from the (admittedly) boring scenery around my apt. complex.  I doubt I've got any pullitzers here, but as always, the rendition on film is gorgeous, and the level of detail captured by the Hasselblad is pretty amazing too.

Seriously, look at all that detail!

And of course, a B&W shot of my favorite chess table to cap this post.  Thanks for reading. 

With any luck, my next post will be all about the Cherry Blossoms here in DC.  Should be a lot of fun...