Purple River

Tags

chance, chemical processing, color, developing, film, image processing, scanning

I develop my color film in batches. It’s more economical that way as the developing chemicals have a limited life when reconstituted from powder into water. I don’t like to leave them more than a couple of weeks or so, so I need to have a collection of exposed color rolls ready to go when I begin.

This means that some rolls are really quite old by the time I get around to them. This image, of the Chain Of Rocks Canal and bridge in Illinois, was taken in February. It was taken with Fuji Superia 400 film, a roll that actually expires this month, so I did want to get it developed. This film is slowly disappearing from the retail pipeline, so I suspect it may not be around for that much longer.

Which is a shame, because it’s a cheap yet characterful color film, with good grain qualities for a fast film.

This shot is from my Optic Film scanner this morning. The color balance as processed by the Silverfast scanning software was biased towards purple. I could have corrected this with the Adobe RAW tint slider in Photoshop or Lightroom (or indeed in Silverfast itself)  – funny how that control persists even though it is really only useful for balancing color film – but I decided to leave it as it came out.

I like the look. It gives the scene more of a twilight feel than was actually apparent at the time and adds extra interest that way. That’s the thing with color film; you’re never quite sure just how the balance will turn out. Subtle variations in the developing process itself, the age of the film, and then how a scanner interprets the negative will all play a part. I like this element of chance. Digital images are so well corrected and balanced that they all tend to look perfectly the same. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself by any means, but it removes some of the fun and exploration from the photographic process. Film introduces that in spades.

 

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Going Retro

Tags

Adox Color Implosion, aesthetics, art, color, concept, consumerism, fashion, film, popularity, retro

This photograph was taken on Christmas Day 2015. It looks older. This is deliberate, a consequence of using a specialist film, Adox Color Implosion, that is formulated to produce muted colors and heavy film grain.

You can do the same thing – or similar at least – with a bevy of ‘nostalgia’ type filters for Lightroom or Photoshop, or indeed with Instagram.

In truth, the ubiquity of Instagram has led to an over-proliferation of artistic-algorithm altered images, all of which are starting to look much the same but let’s let that pass. I don’t use Instagram myself and the effect you see here is about as old fashioned as you can get, short of taking a conventional color film today, magically going back in time thirty years or so, and letting the negative sit in a shoebox in a humid house until today.

It’s not a look I luxuriate in. I like it as an alternative to more polished images but not necessarily as an artistic end in itself. It’s a more a comment, a criticism in truth, of a current trend towards ever more the highly resolved, ultra-sharp and vibrant photography that passes as one form of photographic achievement.

An achievement that is very much predicated by technological advances in both cameras and lenses and as such is woven into the fabric of the camera industry as a means of encouraging sales. For a long while, I went along with this logos, rather unthinkingly following these technological trends as I accumulated ever more advanced digital cameras and lenses.

What stopped me?

I could say it was the realization that I was spending a great deal of money for really only mildly incremental improvements in my equipment, and perhaps that played a part. But really is was art. Not the sort of art you see on most photography websites, but the art you see in a museum. A few years ago my local museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, set up an exhibition of works by the Düsseldorf school of photographers as part of the opening of a new wing. These were revelatory to me. Photographs of industrial objects and deliberately ordinary settings, many with a distinctly lo-fi or retro look – these images were 180° away from the prevailing (and still prevailing) look that fills popular photography websites, magazines and many sales galleries.

I loved them. I loved them for their ordinariness, their emphasis on gritty reality versus colorful sheen, their deliberate anti-pretty concept.

I still do. That way of looking at things allowed me to step away from the consumer product rat race and go looking for increasingly esoteric and obsolete means of taking a photograph. Hence my return to film and a deliberate move away from taking the picture postcard type of images that dominated my photography in earlier years, some good, more bad.

It got me thinking too. I’ve written dozens of posts here over the past years that have helped me hash out what is meaningful to me and what isn’t. I’ve got the point now that I have a personal aesthetic that drives what I do, what I appreciate and what I dislike. I feel pleased with my own work, not all the time and not consistently over time, but enough to give me a continuing sense of achievement that is independent of what anyone else thinks of my work. It’s not fashionable and it’s not popular but it’s true to me.

That’s the peak. I need go no higher. But perhaps I will anyway. We’ll see.

 

 

 

Metropolis

Tags

anti-sharp, color, film, fuzziness, Holga, lo-fi, lomo, metropolis, Mike Westbrook, music, nostalgia, plastic lens, St. Louis, University City

 

Taco Bell by Richard Keeling on 500px

Mike Westbrook made an album in the early 1970’s called “Metropolis”.

It’s not that well known outside of fans of English progressive jazz of the period, but it featured many of the finest jazz musicians of the day, many of whom graced contemporary rock albums such as Nick Drake’s ‘Bryter Layter’ (Ray Warleigh) or mid-period Soft Machine (Jon Marshall).

It’s a suite, influenced by Mingus and Miles and good amounts of free jazz but the final part settles into a nocturne featuring a hypnotic piano pattern by Westbrook and a lovely meandering flugelhorn solo from Harry Beckett. As of the moment you can hear it here.

When I listen to it, it never fails to put me in the mood of a metropolis at dusk, surely as good a testament to the effectiveness of the work as any other, but it also acts to lay a slightly blurry filter on my vision of any town or city. Again, part of this harks back to the cover of the ‘Metropolis’ LP, a moody, low resolution film photograph of a highway leading into a downtown area, but it’s more than that. Musically, it encapsulates precisely that sense of loneliness and dislocation that I have always felt upon entering a large city. A feeling that sometimes morphs into a kind of fuzzy nostalgia and a feeling that I can reestablish with astonishing ease in any place and at any time.

I wanted to try to express that feeling through photography. I considered taking some digital photographs and applying the ‘vintage’ or ‘nostalgia’ filters that you find in Lightroom and elsewhere, but that seemed like a cop-out approach. Not real enough.

No, I needed to use film and use film in a way that came close to the moodiness of the cover of ‘Metropolis’. A fortuitous event helped me. I found an old roll of unexposed Walgreen’s Studio35 color film. Long expired and kept in far from ideal conditions. One that was likely to produce color shifts and artifacts galore.

But I needed more than that. I needed a lens that was anti-sharpness. I have one – it’s the Holga HL-C plastic lens that designed for use with Canon cameras. It’s supposed to mimic the look and vignetting you see when using a Holga film camera. And for APS-C sensor size Canon digital cameras it does exactly that. But the vignetting effect is far too extreme for a full frame or 35mm film camera, so I took the lens apart and pulled the vignetting plate. Took the aperture plate out too. This converted it to an f/8 lens but greatly decreased the already-poor overall sharpness by limiting the depth of field. Normally a disadvantage, but not in my case.

So it plus an Elan 7E went to work with me on my bicycle and these pictures were the result. They are exactly what I had in mind. Ironically, the film held up way better than I anticipated and the color is not too shabby at all, but the fuzziness came out spot on.



Lee’s by Richard Keeling on 500px




Playground by Richard Keeling on 500px

Perfect mood shots. Photographs that illustrate my mental impression of the places shown far more effectively than any pretty high-res digital rendition.

Why have I spent so much time failing to see this? Hard to answer and perhaps ultimately due to an increase in self-confidence and the ability to finally let go of trying to be like everybody else.

But I have arrived at last.

 

Red on Green

Tags

aesthetics, color, film, individuality, lens, obsolescence, personality

 

Red on Green by Richard Keeling on 500px

I am slowly tiptoeing into the world of color film photography. Slowly because it has taken a while to gather the courage necessary to start home developing color, a necessary prerequisite to keeping costs down. Commercial developing is both rarer and a lot more expensive than it used to be, an unavoidable consequence of the relegation of film photography to a fringe operation.

No matter. Paradoxically, provided you use fresh reagents and keep a tight control on temperature, in some ways color developing is easier than black and white.

The results can show some variation in color balance depending partly on developing conditions and partly on the type of film used. The above photograph is another shot using the very cheap (comparatively) Agfa Vista 200 film and one that upon developing showed a slight magenta tint that I corrected for with Photoshop. The look is quite different from that obtained with a digital camera. It has a much more organic feel and a warmth that undoubtedly results from the particular color balance characteristic of this film, even with slight color corrections. Not as sharp though and discernably film grainy. Completely free though of both the color and luminence noise characteristic of digital images.

It’s a look that I like and one that will keep me persisting with color film photography.

Sometimes I wonder why and how my own personal photographic aesthetic has changed so much over the past year.  I used to be a sharpness-fixed pixel peeper, chasing the highest resolving digital sensors and lenses. No longer. I’m currently shooting with an old and relatively cheap consumer zoom lens, the Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM, that is marginally inferior to my standard go-to lens of old, the 24-105mm f/4L in terms both of sharpness and distortion. No image stabilization either. It’s a lens I stopped using way back in 2006 when I bought the L lens. Yet here it is today in almost constant use on my outmoded and obsolete Canon camera film bodies. Giving me images such as the one above. Images that I currently prize.

It hard to adequately articulate the relief that this turn backwards has brought me. I have stepped off the photographic consumer treadmill. I’ll never step back on. My pictures, good, bad or ugly, have a different feel that is tangible and that rescues even the most cock-eyed effort from the indifference that plagued the hundreds of digital images that I used to collect daily. In doing so, my art has reclaimed a personality, my personality. I don’t need anything else from it.

A Different Look

Tags

color, fashion, feel, film, forest, Forest Park, individuality, look, trees

 

Fallen Tree by Richard Keeling on 500px

One of the many reasons why I have turned back to unfashionable and obsolete forms of photography is to get a different look.

What do I mean by that?

A look that is very much at odds with the hyper-sharp, color-saturated, Photoshop-manipulated type of image that makes up the majority of today’s popular photography.

This photograph serves as well as any to make my point. It’s a film shot of a fallen tree in Forest Park. One I pass by frequently on my way home. I’ve photographed it many times and in many different ways.

This particular image was shot part way into the sun using a cheap film, Agfa Vista 200. It’s cheap because it’s not known for its color vibrancy but I find this works to my advantage in this particular case.

The look I was aiming for, and got, was a pastel, pale image. Anti-vibrant. The blues and greens look washed out. It’s not particularly sharp. There is clear chromatic aberration where the branches are set against the sky, again working to soften the photograph.

The entire effect is that of a hot summer’s afternoon with little shade, thick hazy air heavy with the buzz of insects.

Emotionally, just as it was when I was there.

So this is a perfect photograph as far as I’m concerned. It represents the scene, not only pictorially, but in atmosphere and feel. These are the sort of photographs I strive for these days.

When I get one, I feel truly satisfied.

Chemical Color

Tags

color, color developing, developing, dinosaur, film, film development, Forest Park, home developing, Jobo, Science Center, statue, Tetenal Press Kit

 

Dinosaur by Richard Keeling on 500px

I developed my first rolls of color film on Sunday.

Eight rolls, seven 35mm, one 120.

It’s something I had been thinking about for a long time, but putting off because it seemed a little bit too difficult.

The difficult part relates to temperature. Successful color developing needs both strictly controlled and higher temperatures than are used for black and white developing. So a requirement is a water bath with reliable temperature control.

I got one, a cast-off from my work. Designed for some long obsolete piece of complicated twisted chemistry glass – the type featured in countless horror movies – it was just large enough to hold to two one-liter dark brown glass bottles and enough water to keep them at 39° C.

With that, I was ready to go. The chemicals required are easily obtained from B&H or Freestyle Photo, and I started out with the Tetenal (Jobo) Press Kit for C-41. It’s a powder kit, and I made up the requisite quantities with distilled water and warmed the two temperature sensitive components, the developer and the ‘blix’ (bleach + fix), to the required temperature. I also warmed some plain distilled water for the presoak, needed to wet the undeveloped negatives and bring them up to the working temperature.

After that it was really extremely easy. No harder than black and white developing. Quicker, too, than some, since the developing time is only 3 minutes and 15 seconds, followed by 6 minute and 30 second blix treatment.

A brief wash under warm tap water followed by a one minute wash in stabilizer solution, and the film was ready to dry. According to the instructions at least, I gave the film a final wash in distilled plus detergent to aid drying.

It worked.

A few of the frames showed signs of chemical salt deposition suggesting to me that a longer wash after developing would be beneficial – I’ve seen the same problem with black and white and a lengthy rinse invariably cures the problem. As it is, all it takes is a further rinse to remove the crud.

The results looked just as good as any I’ve got back from a commercial developer. And my 8 rolls worked out at about $3 a roll in terms of cost – and I am going to experiment with going beyond the recommended eight 35mm or 120 films per kit, and maybe bring the cost down even more. Considering my local camera shop, Creve Coeur Photography, is currently charging $7.50 per roll for film developing only – no scan or print – this is quite a money saving exercise.

More than black and white

Tags

C-41, color, cost, developing, economy, expense, film, home developing, kit

 

Behind the Loop by Richard Keeling on 500px

My local camera shop, Creve Coeur Camera, raised the price for developing C-41 film by 50% this month.

Now a roll of 35mm costs $7.50 to develop only. Prints and scans are more, naturally enough.

I suppose the economics of what is an increasingly niche process compelled them to raise prices, but the net effect as far as I am concerned is to finally push me into home developing my color film.

I’ve been developing my own black and white for almost a year now. After some trial and error – but surprisingly less than I anticipated when I began – I can confidently develop a roll and get good results. I view developing as no more tricky than dealing with digital images, with an equivalent sense of relief from successful downloading a memory card as with storing a freshly developed film. In truth, having the film in hand is rather more reassuring feeling than having the digital image on my computer, even with backing up multiple times as is my habit. Arguments that digital formats are perhaps less apt for archiving than a strip of cellulose acetate resonate with me.

So an order for a Tetenal C-41 developing kit went into B&H this evening and no longer will I be trekking out to Ladue to drop off my color rolls.  I’m sure I will need a little practice to get color right, but I’ll get there, and will have the pleasure of doing it myself. Isn’t photography fun?

Learning About Color

Tags

absorbance, black and white, color, colour, contrast, film, filters, light, photography, transmittance

 

Black cat by Richard Keeling on 500px

You might think, after a lifetime of photography including at least ten years increasingly seriously devoted to digital, that I might know something about color.

I don’t.

Let’s qualify that. I don’t know nearly enough.

Parodoxically, it has taken my return to film photography, mostly black and white, to expand my knowledge.

Black and white pictures render color as a shade of gray. Obvious enough. But as that shade is now depend wholly on intensity of light, colors that reflect the same amount lead to similar amounts of shading on film. Whether they be blue, green, yellow or red – or any other color.

This makes it for difficulties in trying to distinguish different colors in black and white images. So how does one overcome this limitation?

By the use of color filters to alter the relative intensity of light striking the film emulsion. A color filter typically allows maximum transmission – brightness – of its native color, the one you see with your eye when you look at the glass. And they block or inhibit transmission of light of other wavelengths or colors. This usually occurs one one of two ways.

The first is an absolute gate, in the sense that light below a certain wavelength is blocked while light above that wavelength is transmitted. A yellow K2 filter, for example, blocks all light below a wavelength of about 470 nm while allowing longer wavelengths through. 470nm corresponds to blue, so using a yellow K2 filter darkens anything reflecting blue, such as the sky, while allowing greens, yellows, oranges and red through. This has a net effect of lightening these colors, with the greatest lightening apparent for yellows.

The Orange K, and Red 25A filter work in similar ways, only at differing wavelengths. As orange is longer than yellow and red longer than orange, the filtering effect on the visible spectrum becomes more pronounced, progressively removing not only blues, but preventing greens and yellows too from adding light intensity to your image. Thus blues darken further, as do greens and yellows. The effect is to boost contrast and add drama as the effective color palette range is trimmed.

Other color filters work in slightly different ways. The Hoya K0 yellow-green and K1 green filters are peak transmitting filters. They allow yellow-green or green to pass but inhibit light of both shorter and longer wavelengths, with the blockage absolute before yellow into blue and partial for orange-red and beyond into red. Thus yellow-greens and greens become intensified while all other colors are reduced.

The photograph above was taken using a K0 yellow-green filter. The cat is black, refecting little light of any color, but the vegetation is a blend of yellows and greens. Using this filter allows maximal transmission of those yellows and greens, producing a uniformingly consistent intensity and resulting in a bright but low contrast foreground and background.

It’s an unnatural look, but it does serve to cast the cat in sharp relief. Apart, that is, from the green pollen collecting on its coat.

So this black and white image has taught me a lot about color. Even though none is actually reproduced.

It’s discoveries and insights such as these that propel my continuing interest in photography. To be sure, I can read about it in books, but there is no substitute, as far as I am concerned, to actually doing it.

Photographing the Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge

Tags

35mm film, black and white, bridge, Chain of Rocks Canal, Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge, color, digital photography, film, film photography, full frame, medium format, Mississippi River, Rolleiflex

 Three views. 

Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

Chain Of Rocks Canal Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

 

Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

The central span of the old bridge was demolished a couple of weeks ago. What remains are the two peripheral spans, each isolated, each looking somewhat like a skeletal Trojan horse.

The three images are all from the same day and the same time, but taken on different cameras. The top is a medium format film image from a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camara, the second from a Canon Elan 7E single lens reflex film camera, and the third from a Canon 5D Mark III, a single lens reflex digital camera.

Regardless of the change in compositional angle and viewpoint, each image has a feel that is characteristic of the medium of capture. The large negative from the Rolleiflex conveys a drama that is in part due to the square format and in part due to the uniquely fine resolution that medium format film conveys. The grain of this film is no different from that used for 35mm photography, but the much larger size of the captured image effectively shrinks it into a much smoother, sharper and silkier appearance.

Whereas the second image, captured on 35mm film, reveals a more strongly apparent grain. This is not necessarily a bad thing; grain in itself conveys a feel that moves the photographic image closer to that created by a pointillistic painter and it takes on an attractiveness that is in itself most satisfying. But if you are looking for the clearest detail and sharpest image, you won’t find it here.

But you will find in the third image, the digital product of a 22 megapixel sensor, and, in this day and age, the most commonly found  type of photograph.

And you cannot deny the digital image looks very good. Clean, crisp and naturally colorful.

So why do I find my eye gravitating towards the scanned film images you see here? Maybe it’s something to do with the black and whiteness of them, emphasizing the contrast and angularity of the structure. But the color contrast in the digital image is just as stark – grey-browns and pale greens and blues.

It has to be more than simply the content of the image. There’s a psychology at work here. Partly historic, partly aesthetic. I grew up with film photographs and prints. In the text books of my schooldays, bridges such as this would inevitably be portrayed in black and white. What’s more, the bridges found in those books would closely resemble this aging truss bridge structure. The cleaner lines of today’s girder bridges were less commonly found, or, at the very least, less commonly photographed. Is that any surprise? The symmetry, angularity and complexity of the truss bridge is a far more involving subject.

Here the top two photographs far more closely resemble those images from my past, settled via memory into my mental image of what a bridge should look like. Color seems extraneous. Too much unnecessary information.

I found myself drawn repeatedly to this, and to other old bridges, over the past years. I relish the beauty of the structure. I’ve photographed this bridge many times. But it’s only recently, via black and white film, that I’ve captured the emotional feel of this structure. This is perhaps the main reason why film photography continues to fascinate me since I took it up again and confounds any and all technical reasons – and there are many – arguing for the superiority of digital photography.

 

 

Color test

Tags

color, fun, test