Frame-A-Day 13: Wood and Frost

13. Wood and Frost, originally uploaded by jeffrey_knight.

One of the things about shooting film vs. digital is digital's ability to allow you to change the sensor's sensitivity to light, or it's ISO rating. Shooting in bright sunlight? Drop the ISO to 100 or 200. Shooting in a dark building? Raise it to 1600 or 3200 (or more, with the high-end cameras offering fantastic-looking images at very high ISOs).

Film is of course rated at different sensitivities as well, usually known as the film's speed. The higher the speed, the higher the ISO, the more sensitive to light. Kodak's Tri-X, which is what I'm using for my frame-a-day series currently, is normally a 400 speed film, but I'm shooting it as if it were ISO 3200, basically underexposing it by 3 stops. The long processing time in a highly-dilute developer allows me to get scannable images off the film.

But, I have to shoot everything on the roll as if it were ISO 3200. Which is fine when I'm indoors, but outdoors during the day, that's just too bright. How do you solve that problem, since I cannot change the film's ISO on the fly?

The answer is the use of filters, pieces of glass that screw onto the camera lens for a variety of effects. In this case I used a red #25 filter, a deep-red filter. Using a #25 cuts your exposure by 3 stops, effectively dropping my film back to ISO 400- perfectly manageable even on a bright day.

The downside to using it is that contrast is pushed way up, as the shadows- normally lit by the blue sky- are darkened. This isn't a bad effect, per se, but it is one you have to keep in mind when you are shooting with it. For Christmas I received a 2-stop neutral-density filter, which reduces the light entering the camera by 2 stops. Unlike the red filter, the ND doesn't have any sort of color cast, so it won't have any effect on the scene's contrast, and I will be able to use it with color film as well.

Happy new year, everybody, and here's looking forward to a great 2011!

Frame-A-Day Tech Notes

Readng to Grandpa, originally uploaded by jeffrey_knight.

I've got a Canon AE-1, loaded with Kodak Tri-X film and equipped with a 24mm lens set aside for this project.

Tri-X is normally rated at ISO 400, but after reading about how far that film can be pushed, I thought I'd give it a whirl myself. So, I'm rating it at 3200 (that's 3 stops underexposed).

I'm developing it in Rodinal, diluted to 1:100, using semi-stand development; that is, pouring the developer into the tank and letting the film sit there for 120 minutes (that's the 'stand' part). I do slowly invert the tank once every 30 minutes, otherwise I tend to get uneven development across the negative (the 'semi-' part).

The negatives come out of the soup looking rather thin, but my scanner can pull a surprising amount of detail out of them.

DAM!

One issue that has always plagued shooters, especially prolific ones, is how to organize the images that you shoot so that you can quickly find a specific photo you may be searching for. In some ways, the digital era has made this task even harder mostly due to the sheer volume of image files a photographer can produce over time.

For someone like myself, who produces both film negatives and digital files, it just gets worse. I think I've settled on a system that can work with  both formats, and allows me to continue to add to my growing archives. I don't have to scan everything I shoot on a given roll (although I usually do if only to have a 'proof print' as it's hard for me to evaluate a color negative otherwise), and importing what scans I do make into lightroom, where they can be tagged and rated accordingly allows them to sit side-by-side with my digital files in the same archive.

I've only adopted my current workflow within the past year so the big trick has been getting previous scans and files lined up to work properly within it (and I've been half-tempted just to throw out all older scans and start fresh, but as satisfying as that might be on some level, I know that's just creating a heck of a lot more work for me).

One of the best books I've read on the subject of 'Digital Assest Management' is The DAM Book, by Peter Krogh (okay, it's the only one that I've read, but I wouldn't be recommending it if I didn't like it). Well worth a read if you're a serious photographer that wants to keep a handle on his or her digital files.