Tools for fools(?)
Posted: Wed Aug 21, 2013 9:47 am
Over the course of my life I've acquired a number of digital cameras. All Olympus. All have done what I've wanted from them, and I've always been very happy with them.
Until recently.
I was trying to take photo's of a beach sunset, and the Olympus 1030SW (10 megapixels with 3.6x optical zoom) I was using just wouldn't record the sunset the way my naked eye was seeing it.
What's more, I'd like to be able someday to blow up some of these photo's to quite a large size (e.g. a few feet wide by a couple of feet tall).
Now 10 megapixels is quite a lot, and I believe ought to be sufficient for this size enlargement whilst still keeping a good resolution in the printed product, but from what I gather, a frame of film has way more "megapixels" than this (e.g. I've read that a single frame of 35mm film has a resolution of at least 175 megapixels).
Based on this, I decided to go back and give "film" a try.
Now I understand that over the last few years it's become fashionable to use old film cameras to try and replicate old-style photo's - "lo-mo photography" I believe it's called.
That's not what I'm after here - I'm not a hipster, and I'm not after some grainy 60's/70's/80's-style nostalgia shot.
What I want is a better resolution photo than my digital camera can take, and in the colours that my naked eye is seeing, without me having to frig around for half an hour with the camera's white balance, ISO, etc, etc settings, to get it to do what I want (by which time of course the light and scene will have changed, and I'll have lost the shot I was after).
So I've picked up an old rangefinder (an Olympus 35RC) off ebay and I'm trying to figure out what kind of film I should be using in it (it'll be used almost exclusively for landscape and nature photography).
I've heard that Fuji Velvia 50 is great for that kind of stuff. On the other hand I've also read that it changes the colours to something different than what your naked eye is seeing.
If so, what kind of film should I be looking at to capture what my naked eye is seeing when I take a landscape/nature photo?
I'm guessing a slow-speed film (e.g. 50-speed) is the no-brainer part to get maximum saturation.
I guess I'm also going to have to use E-6 (i.e. slide-film) to make sure that the developed shots are exactly what was recorded on the film; from what I gather if you use C-41 film (i.e. negative/print film), whoever develops the film has the chance to alter the developed results to what they think it ought to look like before it gets delivered to you - and their opinions on what looks good may be different from your own. With E-6 film, what you shoot is what you get - whoever develops it has no chance to mess with how it looks during the development process.
Mind you, not many places will develop E-6 these days (which will make using Velvia 50 hard), and the guy running my local C-41 development store is an ex-pro photographer who's still enthusiastic about film photography, so not only does he know what he's doing, better still, he actually cares about it; so I'm thinking he'd probably do a pretty good job of developing any C-41 I shot, especially if I had a chat to him about what I was after when I hand my rolls in to him.
And if I don't like how it turns out.... well, I guess I can always get it scanned to a digital image and play with it in some post-processing software (although that largely defeats the whole purpose of using film though doesn't it?).
In terms of the actual film though, I'm also wondering if it might even need to be a different film for sunset/sunrise shots versus a midday shot, or even a low-light shot (e.g. in overcast/misty conditions)? If so, that's probably getting kind of expensive (not to mention the hassles of having to rewind half-shot rolls in-camera in order to change over to a different film for different conditions, then having to wind back on to a frame or two ahead of where you last were on that film roll, the next time you want to use it again) - is there something that's a good all-rounder while not necessarily being the absolute best in each of these situations?
Or am I just being an idiot for messing around with this old equipment (hence the thread title "Tools for Fools(?)") and I should just learn how to play with the white balance controls in my current 1030SW better?
Bear in mind, I've already done a fair bit of this - I played with focusing on different "tones" in the subject area to set the exposure to what I was after and locked it (half-pressed the shutter button), then re-framed before pushing the shutter button the rest of the way. I've also played with all the settings in the "Manual" mode (e.g. the ISO, exposure compensation, various lighting filters, etc, etc, etc) as well as going through all the preset photo settings/"styles" (e.g. "Landscape", "Portrait and Landscape", "Available Light", "Sunset", "Beach and Snow", etc, etc, etc), and playing with all the settings available in those modes as well, and I just couldn't get it to capture what I was seeing. Muchos frustrating.
Advice anyone? I'm guessing Jeff and some of the other photo buffs from back when film was the only option might have an idea or two.
General laughter and heckling would also be accepted
Right now though I need to put a film through the camera to check the seals are still okay, that the lense isn't scratched, etc, etc, and make sure it all works, so I'll pick up something from the local supermarket for that - anything I should keep in mind when doing that?
Cheers all!,
Al.
Until recently.
I was trying to take photo's of a beach sunset, and the Olympus 1030SW (10 megapixels with 3.6x optical zoom) I was using just wouldn't record the sunset the way my naked eye was seeing it.
What's more, I'd like to be able someday to blow up some of these photo's to quite a large size (e.g. a few feet wide by a couple of feet tall).
Now 10 megapixels is quite a lot, and I believe ought to be sufficient for this size enlargement whilst still keeping a good resolution in the printed product, but from what I gather, a frame of film has way more "megapixels" than this (e.g. I've read that a single frame of 35mm film has a resolution of at least 175 megapixels).
Based on this, I decided to go back and give "film" a try.
Now I understand that over the last few years it's become fashionable to use old film cameras to try and replicate old-style photo's - "lo-mo photography" I believe it's called.
That's not what I'm after here - I'm not a hipster, and I'm not after some grainy 60's/70's/80's-style nostalgia shot.
What I want is a better resolution photo than my digital camera can take, and in the colours that my naked eye is seeing, without me having to frig around for half an hour with the camera's white balance, ISO, etc, etc settings, to get it to do what I want (by which time of course the light and scene will have changed, and I'll have lost the shot I was after).
So I've picked up an old rangefinder (an Olympus 35RC) off ebay and I'm trying to figure out what kind of film I should be using in it (it'll be used almost exclusively for landscape and nature photography).
I've heard that Fuji Velvia 50 is great for that kind of stuff. On the other hand I've also read that it changes the colours to something different than what your naked eye is seeing.
If so, what kind of film should I be looking at to capture what my naked eye is seeing when I take a landscape/nature photo?
I'm guessing a slow-speed film (e.g. 50-speed) is the no-brainer part to get maximum saturation.
I guess I'm also going to have to use E-6 (i.e. slide-film) to make sure that the developed shots are exactly what was recorded on the film; from what I gather if you use C-41 film (i.e. negative/print film), whoever develops the film has the chance to alter the developed results to what they think it ought to look like before it gets delivered to you - and their opinions on what looks good may be different from your own. With E-6 film, what you shoot is what you get - whoever develops it has no chance to mess with how it looks during the development process.
Mind you, not many places will develop E-6 these days (which will make using Velvia 50 hard), and the guy running my local C-41 development store is an ex-pro photographer who's still enthusiastic about film photography, so not only does he know what he's doing, better still, he actually cares about it; so I'm thinking he'd probably do a pretty good job of developing any C-41 I shot, especially if I had a chat to him about what I was after when I hand my rolls in to him.
And if I don't like how it turns out.... well, I guess I can always get it scanned to a digital image and play with it in some post-processing software (although that largely defeats the whole purpose of using film though doesn't it?).
In terms of the actual film though, I'm also wondering if it might even need to be a different film for sunset/sunrise shots versus a midday shot, or even a low-light shot (e.g. in overcast/misty conditions)? If so, that's probably getting kind of expensive (not to mention the hassles of having to rewind half-shot rolls in-camera in order to change over to a different film for different conditions, then having to wind back on to a frame or two ahead of where you last were on that film roll, the next time you want to use it again) - is there something that's a good all-rounder while not necessarily being the absolute best in each of these situations?
Or am I just being an idiot for messing around with this old equipment (hence the thread title "Tools for Fools(?)") and I should just learn how to play with the white balance controls in my current 1030SW better?
Bear in mind, I've already done a fair bit of this - I played with focusing on different "tones" in the subject area to set the exposure to what I was after and locked it (half-pressed the shutter button), then re-framed before pushing the shutter button the rest of the way. I've also played with all the settings in the "Manual" mode (e.g. the ISO, exposure compensation, various lighting filters, etc, etc, etc) as well as going through all the preset photo settings/"styles" (e.g. "Landscape", "Portrait and Landscape", "Available Light", "Sunset", "Beach and Snow", etc, etc, etc), and playing with all the settings available in those modes as well, and I just couldn't get it to capture what I was seeing. Muchos frustrating.
Advice anyone? I'm guessing Jeff and some of the other photo buffs from back when film was the only option might have an idea or two.
General laughter and heckling would also be accepted
Right now though I need to put a film through the camera to check the seals are still okay, that the lense isn't scratched, etc, etc, and make sure it all works, so I'll pick up something from the local supermarket for that - anything I should keep in mind when doing that?
Cheers all!,
Al.