basic film vs digital stuff

But I TOTALLY get what you're saying, schlump, because I already feel like the ease/cheapness of re-shooting things has sort of ruined me as a photographer; I'm not painstaking in the way I think I used to be, it's easy to just shoot a bunch and hope one of them is the right exposure and maybe also by luck also the exact right framing etc. Some of this is also having working autofocus lenses for the first time, too, like I used to be able to focus a goddamn camera and now I'm sort of lost without the gizmo. (Might also be getting glasses too - - has thrown off my sense of my eye pressed up to the viewfinder and what things are supposed to look like.)

yeah. I felt kinda stupid having posted here the other day, saying who needs convenience?, that you could just develop stuff whenever. but I'm forgetting so much of the other convenience of digital - being able to effectively change film stocks, rather than be stuck with the 100 speed film you still have 30 shots left of when you're indoors at someone's house in the evening, &c. my i'll just carry two cameras solution is as unwieldy and unsuitable as my i'll wait a year to get film developed solution to the economic benefits.

but all of that said: yes, I think it is totally a thing. I was out with some people a few days ago & ended up taking like a few shots of my friend, who was all nicely lit for five minutes, stretched out. & I changed up a bit between but even so it still felt like a huge indulgence to burn through three frames, so I was thinking hard & watching & figuring it out.

I think the thing about drowning in negatives is definitely a thing though. I guess it's like the convenience/context thing - ie at one end being epitomised by weddings, where you want reliability & portability of phots. I'm okay with getting around to stuff way later, & being psyched to have some kind of really old photo scanned to send to someone, but that's sort of the other end of the spectrum to having a bunch of yesterday's photos to upload. stuff like this dovetails with how to look at photos, too, I think. thumbnailed galleries of a whole bunch of photos at once, for an audience, serve a really different purpose from single photos you're 'framing' or putting in a certain place.

liked hearing you talk about stuff like lens correction; when I was saying that I couldn't really get an objective handle on what it is I'm even sceptical of wrt digital, it's because I know I'm pretty much talking about using a handheld or DSLR on auto & looking at the files you get, which is obviously a different thing from so much nice, measured digital photography I like. & about look & feel, there are things I like a lot about film, but maybe some of the hallmarks of digital - like I guess hyper detail, or, as a sorta digital analogue of the appealing-deficit of film grain, maybe the ghostly blur of some digital motion shots - will become to look as appealing in time.

any way to get legit looking B&W shots out of a digital camera?

w/ your X100, I up the shadows and highlights to medium-hard and use the B&W Yellow setting, for JPGs
for working with RAW files, Silver Efex Pro 2 is the best - some of the film profiles are too contrasty (either stick to APX100 or Neopan 100, or lower global contrast if you use Tri-X, etc.), and I always get rid of the grain because I don't understand the point of using it

okay, here's a thing i definitely LIKE about digital with regards to my own attempts to become a better photographer - - having a million shots of the same thing, while insane and probably not good in terms of shooting habits, DOES let me start paying attention to minutia, the whole comparing two seemingly identical negatives and going "nope nope - - - this one's slightly soft, this one's highlights are a little more blown" etc - - I mean, elementary photo class stuff but it's getting me back in the habit of paying attention to it.

^ i can imagine this being v true. i think part of what you get with film, that's (maybe usefully!) eroded by digital, is a detachment from what you've made, having surrendered some control to a specific setting or an in-situ framing decision or to the developing process. having additional photos from a scene is like having a record of a thought process.

followup to my last post, a pitfall that i'm really having to wean myself off of - - - HAVING lightroom's excellent exposure fiddling tools, it's easy to get into habits of automatic adjustment ("push the lights a bit, recover the highlights, add a brush of vibrance...") without really looking at the photos and thinking what you want them to be. Or things like - today I'm working on some stuff shot just after sunrise, and it's all very soft and muted, and I had to stop myself and control-Z a few steps when I realized I was unconsciously making it punchy and contrasty. Shit didn't look like that! I took the photo because I liked the way it looked!

Again, some of this is just photo 101 "breaking bad habits" type stuff...everybody who's ever played with a self portrait for MySpace knows that high-contrast, high-saturation can be seductive. It's just amazing to catch MYSELF doing it after years of railing against too-contrasty, too-vivid, HDRed-to-death pics on Flickr.

Some of this may also just be me shaking stuff I did learn in Photo 101, like every print has to have a true black and a true white or else it's flat. Sometimes that's just not what the image wants to be, although I'm glad I did learn that habit, generally speaking.

I've had to try and dial back on the Lightroom adjustments, when I first got it I adjusted things because I could as much as because I needed to.

I will say tho, that having switched to RAW early this year, going back and working through all these images shot in JPEG feels like working without caffeine, or thumbs. Amazing how quickly I come to take that fuller control for granted, on white balance especially.

Yeah, having good retrospective control on WB is one of the pros of RAW/Lightroom for me. I know I could take more care in camera but that involves fiddling about!

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8434/7749246514_2c113bf7e4_z.jpg

straight out the camera - - - feel like I couldn't do much besides fuck this up, even though histogram-wise it's well clear of 'true black' and 'true white.'

^ i have no idea what this is but it's rad

Frozen lake, lotus plants. Thanks!

wrt holding off on getting too into tweaking your prints, i guess i opt out of that kinda thing by just scanning & not playing with the colours, because then i have the plausible deniability of the thing i'm looking at having some arbitrary claim of authorial 'realness', in representing the photo i framed & lit & took. the problem with this is that a lot of 'tweaking' is an actual redress of how the photo should look, should have been printed or come out - how it would have looked if it had been printed in better quality, or more attentively, or w/e, so less qualifies as 'automatic adjustment'.

in terms of making alterations to purposefully work up & improve the look of a photograph, it almost just feels easier to just not, for me, to save yourself the decisions, save yourself the weird diffusion of considering what it is you're eventually looking at, albeit at the expense of your image having slightly more pop or contrast or w/e.

xp
i thought it was some smashed up pipes/a showerhead on the sidewalk, so

Yeah, I think that's a legit position to take, totally just "whatever I got through the lens." I think this is more difficult with digital because the process is more obviously mediated, vis-a-vis the camera having white-balance settings or automatic saturation things it does or whatever. I could still adopt a WYSIWYG position, but I don't think it'd have as much of a philosophical foundation, and meanwhile I'd be looking at the images being able to see the better image waiting to emerge from the chrysalis.

oh sure. but tbh i think my philosophical foundation/vague correlation w/the "truthiness" of the photo i took is just as flawed - i don't print my own stuff, so outsource a bunch of decisions affecting how things come out, & if i did print i'd be making all of those authorial decisions -- so why feel awkward about doing it on screen?

i have no idea whether that camera that allowed you to retroactively shift focus, change DoF, &c, are going to become standard, but i guess that would be the ultimate (or an ultimate) of this sorta thing - in which shooting & refining are two p distinct stages of a process. i almost feel like there's something extra, philosophically, with digital that makes further 'negotiation' of an image different - that working with pixels means you have a different relationship w/the verisimilitude of a "source", ie with hold-it-up-to-the-light-emulsion-film that exists physically and outside of the camera.

When I'm scanning film I tend to make minimal adjustments to the settings, mostly concentrate on cloning out dust spots etc. The temptation to adjust things comes with the digital stuff, but the amount of adjustment I do has been tempered somewhat by having worked with film a lot more over the last 9mths or so. I tend to be less happy with my straight from camera images than the film ones, though maybe shooting RAW isn't helping too much there.