what do you see like: 2012

I mean to me...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8160/7451776660_9a7a5ae37b_c.jpg

this looks pretty good for a $1.79 roll of film!

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2193030/fujifilm-discontinues-two-professional-films ;_;

it really does!, china, fwiw. but i just like the variety. there are times when it's great to be ready to shoot something & have the option to control the texture and feel of what you're gonna get back, like obviously with slide to be able to veer away from faithful depiction & into hyperreal stained glass colours, less representational photography. film has so many weird, brakhage-esque possibilities, separate from its original, documentative purpose, & i think they're an arm of the discussion about what using film means now, a tool - either in the kinda reductive way of using film to connote something based on its previous uses, like using a word in an old language we're already familiar with; or just to find a way to compellingly render what we see, like idk alex webb or robert bresson or whoever chose to figuratively, non-literally represent life as they saw it.

am really feeling the new deluxe american subsurbx credo on this, ft. szarkowski: "sometimes these new subjects are extensions of ideas that exist in latent form in the work of exceptional photographers of an earlier generation. Sometimes they are genuinely primitive ideas mothered by a new technical breakthrough or a new market demand."

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/6884/253wg.jpg

all of that said i am with you about using cheap film. (those phots are real nice). having used nicer film i have become surprised whenever i use agfa vista or colorplus* & get something good. but i'm sure a bunch of my nicest stuff is nice because it goes a little further, again usually away from the real, or in prettily rendering changes in colour.

* https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q-Qe_QSVHg8/UAgvl4K3cmI/AAAAAAAAANE/cL98MgA4Ras/s0/689.jpg

guess I just think 'nicer' expensive film is pretty overrated. good exposure + good scanning will get very nice results. but I suppose I'm really setting this up as cheapo films vs. portra/ektar/fuji pro stuff etc. since I see dudes rave about those films and then their pictures look... kinda... ok? just can't see where the money is going with that.
as for having "the option to control the texture and feel of what you're gonna get back" this is where controlling exposure and scanning comes in!*

*except that chromes do look and work 100% differently but that's all just a cost issue for me.

also slides are super hard to scan!

ha ha this is gonna be a i pay $2 more so i can fuck up the exposure thing. kinda sincere, here; i think the difference between a roll of superia & a roll of ektar for me is that i get back ten nicer photos on the ektar roll, but i can't tell the difference between those and the nice superia ones. i just had to work harder for it i guess. i'm still learning to be thoughtful about all that stuff.

most of the thing above was just In Defence Of Slide really; i think it's def sad when any of the big poles of varieties-of-film are compromised.

i usually get slide developed for prints, which have always come out fine, so this hasn't been an issue for me, but my scanning's pretty primitive, so.

I think I tend to go into auto anti-expensive film rant mode pretty easily. probably not a good look, and probably just due to a perceived cult-of-fine-films thing that likely doesn't exist.
if slide film was cheap and I could actually make a decent scan of it I'd def use it more, but I spend like $20 or something per roll!

and by the way, that color plus photo is *beautiful*

aw thank you, man.
probably just due to a perceived cult-of-fine-films thing that likely doesn't exist.

no i think it does, i feel the allure, & even if its advantage is just being easier to get something out of then i understand why i'm drawn to it. i use an om-1 w/a zuiko lens, which i always thought was pretty 'naturalistic' in its rendering, didn't have the sorta weird remove that anything with a wider lens has, so finding that new film was a big determinant of how things came out was an epiphany for me, even just in terms of 1600 speed film letting me shoot in the dark, &c. slide even moreso. i think i go to weird roundabout lengths to do things that are do-able just w/technical know-how (like pushing B&W film to get high contrast, which you can just get w/well-exposed neopan 100 or w/e), but i eventually learn something, so. i just got Langford's Basic Photography to read up a little.

more nice Extra Color colours, just while we are discussin'.

yeah that's super crisp

yeah it's unusual for me to drop a hundred bucks on exotic colour film because who gives a fuck fuji drugstore 3packs are good enough if sort of close to properly exposed and sort of close to properly scannned but i dunno, the 35mmm i guess i want to x-process and defeat the purpose of buying amazing color film in the first place, and for the 120 i wasn't that happy with the medium format color film i tried so far.

i'm trying to track down that page of the same shot out the window/different films... where'd that go?

http://varial-artworks.com/projects/view/?page=12

film has so many weird, brakhage-esque possibilities, separate from its original, documentative purpose, & i think they're an arm of the discussion about what using film means now, a tool - either in the kinda reductive way of using film to connote something based on its previous uses, like using a word in an old language we're already familiar with; or just to find a way to compellingly render what we see, like idk alex webb or robert bresson or whoever chose to figuratively, non-literally represent life as they saw it.

yeah, this is otm. I think digital has really re-centered our conception of what lifelike, verisimilitude photographs should look like. and that's happened several times in the history of photography - from daguerrotypes -> b&w film -> high resolution etc. b&w film -> color film -> digital color. and anytime a shift like that happens, it throws into relief the constructed-ness or the un-realistic components of the previous standard. I think a real good way to trace these shifts is to look at newspaper photography.

I'll confess that after shooting film for a while, the 'digital-ness' of digital photos really jumps out at me. I look at AP photos or Lens photos and, despite the subject matter, I'm just really bored by the aesthetic representation of it vs. the content of the photograph, as it were. or maybe it's the benefit of history, only seeing the best of the best of the best of old photojournalism, and being inundated with so much chaff being in the present. I guess people in the 60s weren't that excited to flip through 5000 pictures of the democratic national convention.

funny you should mention that

i have been sifting through old photos, and i found an entire roll dedicated to pictures of the 1988 democratic convention
they were insanely boring!

i dunno pull out a yearbook from 1972 at random and compare it to a random yearbook from 2012 and I'm almost positive the amateur school photos shot on film will be more intriguing than the amateur school photos shot digitally

haha I love old photos no matter how boring they are. I just love seeing what people wore, looked like, how they had their hair cut.

one day twenty years from now, they're gonna be able to pipe in visual information directly into our brain's visual processing center, and that will make the digital photos of today look really 'artificial' or 'vintage'

is there a saying like, age makes any wine better? idk.

You guys are gonna pee when I start to scan choice photos from my yearbook collection, which dates back to the '20s and has representation for every decade except for the '40s (unfortunately). I'm starting in the 90s and working backward. If anyone cares, I'll post here once I get the show on the road.

! !

oh shit do you have a legit yearbook collection????

ive really wanted to start one, but a lotta antique shops ask for crazy money for them

what people wore, looked like, how they had their hair cut

yeah i guess this is part of it, not just ~the medium~

I don't know how legit it is, but I have a yearbook collection, yeah. My favorite is Clemente '77 (I think I started a thread about this once? Can't remember) The earliest one is from 1924.

I stole a couple of them from various places I worked and my parents, the rest I got at a big regional book sale. Most people only go for the ones with famous people in em. I like the ones with no famous people, just regular people.

This is one of my favorite (cropped) images from the Clemente yb
Seniors, obvs

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7047/6927623873_92a21d8fff_z.jpg

This is most of them, not including my grandma's yearbooks from college, which are inexplicably being stored under about 1000 other things in the basement. The 77 one is somewhere on my bookshelves for easy browsing and to show students because some of them went there.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8166/7606270264_2a8c0b499a_z.jpg

Awsomwst Bestest Thing That I Bought Today That I Wish You Could All Come Over And Look At

I remember that thread. It was before I had a scanner, and I felt like I should chime in, but I never did.

i fell in love with the 1970 yearbook from my alma matter and later found a copy (with nothing written in it) on ebay for $20-- its heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and Medium is the Massage-- i should post scans-- its probably in my top 10 favorite books of all time!!

the most impressive part is probably that all the junior and sophmore photos are either candids or posed like a photo-shoot at places around campus and the FRESHMEN ARE ALL IN GROUP SHOTS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER like, holding hands human-chain style or descending a staircase

its amazing

That sounds great.

Vassar has a pretty good archive on flickr -- I like this 1982 maypole shot for some reason

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5163/5244216736_c9a123d408_z.jpg

yeah I think a lot of the film affection is pretty much nostaglia. we like stuff that looks old. the 'look' of film, even when shot now still signals 'old' and thus also kinda hints at 'important' and 'following a long traceable history and tradition'
a lot of mastery of film is I think tied up w mastery of a history-laden aesthetic. I think it also has a lot to do with a desire to send immediate signals that there is something honorable and craftsmanlike about the photographs that (film photographer) makes, compared to those made by (digital photographer).

In retrospect those of us using film will probably all look like people who were still working in pictorialism after Evans and Adams etc.

hah film doesn't necessarily signal 'old' to me - you can use a very modern film like the new portra or acros, tmax. there are hundreds of thousands of very futuristic looking scenes shot on tmax on flickr...

xp with the fracturing of all the arts brought about by ~the internet~ I'm not even sure if there will be a narrative of a tradition, a craft left 20 years looking back! or if there has been a 'the americans' or 'american photographs' moment w/ digital I'm not sure we know about it yet.

I think there's still something in the curves of film that signifies traditional/old. I don't think the kids are into it because of its great dynamic range.
I don't know what the tradition or narrative of photography might be in the future, but I doubt it would be along the lines of the americans, etc.... that seems like exactly the kind of 20th century tradition that a lot of film photography is meant to suggest currently.

I feel like a lot of really *new* feeling new photography might be more likely to come from the Art World. which totally digs digital and is not about the traditions of documentary photography etc.

or the digital snapshot world

well I meant more along the lines of a paradigm-shifting event in the same vein as the americans was, not necessarily something that mimics the americans essence

I totally shoot film because of its increased dynamic range! *shrug*

idk if people shoot film out of rockist tendencies, I tend to think it's more because it just looks different, cf. the whole lomography movement which is like analog photoshop. cf also the popularity of instagram, hipstamatic, 'filters' and sfx in post processing.

I've said it before on ILP and I think I'm probably a broken record at this point but the way that digital photography is different than film is that in every digital camera, there is a piece of silicon that was manufactured by like one of two or three companies, and everything that comes out looks the same, and film may be an easy way to do that? at least that's the story I have in my head

I lump negative/slide film, instagram, hipstamatic, lomography, polaroid revivalism etc. together. it's all "pictures like mom, dad, grandpa, eggleston, and our favorite old bands used to make" to me
I don't know how the relative similarity of digital camera sensors fits in. I think the end result isn't always that similar maybe because of in-camera processing, sensor size differences, filtering differences, lens differences, etc.?

this is all stuff I think about cuz I'm asking myself why I'm using film & old cameras in 2012. am I just being archaic? is the real avant garde work being done by artists messing around with cell phone cameras or point and shoots, or spending massive grands on digital hasselblads? am I just being quaint?

not saying I am, but these are the things that worry me

is it at all interesting that intro to photography classes at most universities are still opting to have students learn how to shoot + develop 35mm film manually in 2012?

it is... I wasn't aware that was still the case!

I don't know how the relative similarity of digital camera sensors fits in. I think the end result isn't always that similar maybe because of in-camera processing, sensor size differences, filtering differences, lens differences, etc.?

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Thursday, July 19, 2012 8:50 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

I tend to feel that all of these factors affect the last 5% - with sensor size being the biggest. in-camera processing means that nikon reds are a bit more saturated than canons, or olympus gets a better balance between blues and greens. filtering differences goes to sharpness that's probably only visible at pixel peeping levels. lens differences, they're all multi-element zooms that are designed by computers w/ high tech coatings that eliminate nearly all flare.

probably the biggest reason to shoot film or w/ old cameras is probably the restraints that come along w/ it, imo. maybe something about not letting the technology or tool overwhelm the picture-taker. there are probably cool ways to use digital that I'm sure exist on some corner of flickr, that will be discovered. idk. like, your sequence shots - seems like those would benefit from the 12-fps burst mode of most digital SLRs?

I don't need that fast! but I do want to get myself a digital camera at some point.
something that fits in the pocket.
get some of those clean smoooooth digital tones. neutral colors. use the flash, blow out some highlights.

aside from aesthetic preferences and nostalgic tendencies that are def a part of my whole deal w/ film, i just like having to wait a few hours/days/weeks before i get to see what my photos look like!?!? i like coming accross diff types of cameras and odd/expired film and seeing how intere i like having to budget money for film processing, and manage my week so i have time to get to a lab and back etc etc-- it makes it feel like a ~hobby~ in a way that coming home and plugging in a USB cable doesn't?

idk i think i just value experience over craft or quality.

should be:

i like coming accross diff types of cameras and odd/expired film and seeing how interesting they can make the same old shit i always take pictures of look

idk if people shoot film out of rockist tendencies, I tend to think it's more because it just looks different, cf. the whole lomography movement which is like analog photoshop. cf also the popularity of instagram, hipstamatic, 'filters' and sfx in post processing.

I lump negative/slide film, instagram, hipstamatic, lomography, polaroid revivalism etc. together. it's all "pictures like mom, dad, grandpa, eggleston, and our favorite old bands used to make" to me
I don't know how the relative similarity of digital camera sensors fits in. I think the end result isn't always that similar maybe because of in-camera processing, sensor size differences, filtering differences, lens differences, etc.?

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Friday, 20 July 2012 01:50 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is really interesting, & almost a glass-half-full/half-empty thing, i think. there are a lot of reasons to opt into film as a medium, things you can coopt or align yourself with, so either the venerable old time vibe or the preestablished vocabulary you can learn & successfully, formulaically discharge (flailing flags, transit patrons, photographing the poor, &c). & there's the other thing about any old medium, which is its connotative scent; it's like over the past year or two, how fascinating it has been to see an aura generate around VHS, something which carried no quantifiable aesthetic advantage or seeming distinct quality, which no-one would have elected to use but which now collaterally suggests something - the bleary aesthetic of analogue bleeding into digital, of domestic palimpsest technologies, certain models of receiving images, how we used to operate. because this is also present, in the inverse, in digital images we see - harder to detect, sure, but just the same, a specific look that we're used to, that suggests something to us - you get the other reasons to use film: because it is different from now, rather than because it's the same as then. i know i have mentioned this before so i will try not to beat it into the ground (particularly bc it's kinda a shitty movie), but a while ago i was talking about hannah takes the stairs as an exemplar of things that aren't aesthetically appealing but which totally catch how things look - this cheaply made digital film that just looks like now, in its details - cheap kitchen surfaces, the creases and colours of current clothing - & in the rendering, sorta strip-lit-bleached digital with a muted shine on everything:

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/rv_pDmIO18E/0.jpg

it is the argument for using digital, i think - thinking that it will carry the same evocative aura as film does, irrespective of its visual appeal. presumably if you're using film you're shooting for something less literal, less representational. & that's part of what images even are - whenever i shoot black & white i think it's like building a monument to something, more than it is trying to just record it - & obviously there is gonna be some disconnect between 'how something looked' & 'capturing what it looked like' in successfully representing something - you sometimes want to capture the platonic thing & that means folding a lot into an image, capturing its essence &c&c&c.

it's really interesting thinking about the americans. maybe because of how much is folded up in that moment. like i can't separate it from the immigrant story & mcluhan's wiring of the world & the social fact of it all, like it being not so much about the images but that they were this connective text that had the power to show people stuff (i know they weren't the first recorded photographs or anything, & i'm sure i'm eating some of the myth wholesale here, but i do feel like they had this kinda novel role in chronicling parts of contemporary america, for parts of contemporary america, or at least they had a power to do that & do that retroactively). & what would an equivalent be? something that persuasively connected & communicated between a lot of people, i guess, something that comprehensively understood now. i like the thing frank says about taking risks (in that americansuburbx interview), & feel like that's part of it, that if people are willing to expose enough then they end up with something revealing.

hah film doesn't necessarily signal 'old' to me - you can use a very modern film like the new portra or acros, tmax. there are hundreds of thousands of very futuristic looking scenes shot on tmax on flickr...

this is all stuff I think about cuz I'm asking myself why I'm using film & old cameras in 2012. am I just being archaic? is the real avant garde work being done by artists messing around with cell phone cameras or point and shoots, or spending massive grands on digital hasselblads? am I just being quaint?

― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Friday, 20 July 2012 01:53 (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think film is too broad for this, pretty much. like maybe i am investing too strongly in the colours are unrealistic in slide film! as a talisman of possibilities, but i still feel like film is a pretty broad field. like what dayo says about there being futuristic images being made; it has so much potential to be weirdly compatible with how we are living now, either like vhs - as a semi-anachronistic but sensual, redolent thing - or just in a million other ways, cf those guys who ate some unexposed film & then processed it, or people who play with infrared to make sci-fi movie pictures, or people who go to whatever lengths to rework other images through film, richard prince style, or whatever. digital must be the medium for having an immediate shortcut to our brain, to how we see and receive images, because it exists with them better than film does, more straightforwardly, w/o interpretation. but whatever degree of abstraction and interpretation is involved in film can be useful, involving. i was thinking about illustration & graphic art, how there was the obvious kinda sasek-y disney WPA era of it existing at its apex, this perfect practiced form. & now it's done again, in a sort of post-modern reappropriation concert-poster reconstruction of that aesthetic. i probably parade my lack of art history credentials around, here, but i feel like things fit with their eras, pretty well - that the best chamber music came from when all the chamber music was being written, that the best stooges-y-kinda records are the ones the stooges wrote. & so it so misunderstands things to try to dip back to the '40s but just picking on what things looked like. i assume all of that stuff was in step with now - with the limits of printing technology, harnessing instruments that had been invented to be able to do things that you needed the instruments to do. i think a retro, reverent idea of using film doesn't work - it's too caught up in the baggage, in just alluding to the past. but i am sure it can be a good way to look at now, just in a different way. made sharper, or bigger, or brighter on computer screens, or in contexts of other photographs.

man this is really long, sorry.
can't wait for the yearbooks!, they sound amazing.

re: your last paragraph, I definitely feel a need to make film work for really contemporary images and needs. which gets back to the folks shooting old cars on old cameras thing which just makes me insane. at the very least, if I'm apparently going to be this guy who walks around with a leica loaded with film, then I'd better photograph things that are part of the current visual landscape. the ugly things of today and not the beautifully worn things of yesterday (which were of course ugly to many people at the time). just trying to escape nostalgia, sentimentality (I fail at this), and gentle anecdotal photography as much as possible. shooting with film makes that a harder challenge, because (and I guess no one's going to change my mind on this) shooting with film really is a nostalgic act. sure it's got a lot of possibility, but I'm convinced that the initial hook is still that it has ties to *history* and the long grand tradition of father figure photographers who wore wristwatches and walked around new york before it was gentrified and documented the working poor or subway riders etc. or took the grand tour around the united states in a possibly futile attempt to capture its essence. i mean, there's just a whiff of hero worship circling around the film photography world. i'm sure it's in the rest of the photography world too, but this is what i've been exposed to. it's the same thing that drives me crazy about 'street photographers' etc.
sometimes i think film photography is just too acceptable! and well-regarded! maybe too many people are too satisfied that it truly is a more expressive medium than digital, which I don't think is even possible.
this is all insecurity talking, fyi.
and I also think it's kind of crazy that people can even have a subject of conversation be the relative virtues of two different methods of capturing a still image! like it's almost actually insane that if one were to look at two totally images, that the capture method would be even remotely towards the top of the list of things to talk about! but then I can't help but get into these kinds of conversations and kind of love them.
-
I'm not sure that if you're shooting with film you're shooting for something less literal/representational by the way. I think there is plenty of digital photography that becomes very abstracted, despite its in-focus digital crispness: http://www.gideonbarnett.com/hope/