Film is enjoying quite the resurgence in popularity right now, and with the used market flooded with affordable camera bodies and lenses, it's a great time to try it out for yourself. This great video will give you some practical tips to get you up and running shooting film.
Coming to you from Pushing Film, this helpful video will show you the ins and outs of shooting film. Although the act of shooting and the fundamental parameters are the same, film is its own beast with its own quirks, and it's important to understand how it behaves differently from digital. For example, as the video outlines, film tolerates overexposure far, far better than digital (this is true for negative film; it's a different story for things like slide film). This is because digital has a hard stop: once you exceed a value of 255 in any slot of the RGB triplet, you've overexposed that respective channel at that pixel. This is why you hear people shooting film talking about "highlight rolloff." So, whereas you might err slightly on the side of underexposure with digital photography, it's often better to slightly overexpose negative film. Check out the video above for more helpful tips and get shooting!
What’s great about this video is that it goes beyond the tired, pointless “which is better” argument, and instead gives people whose personal preference/circumstances lean occasionally toward film some solid practical tips to improve their craft.
Exposing for shadows is a good tip that differs from digital. I knew this, cuz I’m so smart :) but I appreciate a video that is more nuanced than the normal simplistic, absolutist, and combative garbage sometimes seen online on this topic.
Thanks for the video, Alex.
Some really good tips here! If also recommend making short notes on the exposed rolls if you’re going to be taking more than one roll around while shooting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten which roll I was supposed to push/pull and which went with what shoot.
1. Practice:
For practicing with DSLR: Turn off image review. Turn off Auto White Balance (Daylight is my most common setting)
5. Write Notes
I used Evernote to take notes before I discovered the Android App, EXIF4Film, which can record camera make and model, lens, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, and also location. All those exposure parameters have to be entered using the app. There's a utility to embed that info into the JPEG.
As someone who never stopped shooting film, and who treats digital very much the same way I shoot film, there are two related things that constantly horrify me:
1. Light leaks are not art, they are just flawed/ruined images - unless it was entirely deliberate.
2. Poorly exposed images are not art.
There seems to be a belief that whatever crap comes off a roll of film is OK, because it's film. Wrong, flawed garbage is just flawed garbage.
I highly agree !
When shooting in analog, an underexposed negative, and overexposed slide (or generally poorly exposed image) was considered as a non usable image. As Bob pointed, it was defects that were to be avoided. The best judge of an image was the light table and the magnifying glass.
Of course, if it's part of the artistic process it can be acceptable. I remember a photographer who did a work called "my holidays with Holga", where light leaks and other defects were the unexpected and unique side of the project. But it was more than 15 years ago !
In my opinion, if I had to visit an exhibition of mixed printings coming from both analog and digital (let's say on the same inkjet paper), the differences shouldn't be the defects, but the intrinsic qualities of each world : grain, dynamic range, gradations, color rendition,...
Excellent little video. Bravo.... Just lose the music.
Good tips, nicely presented too. Practice is important. You're going to make mistakes and you'll lose all or part of a roll - for whatever reason, poor exposure, opening the camera before rewinding etc. If you develop your own film, as I prefer do, once in a while you are going to mess that up too. Losing a roll somehow seems more painful than losing digital images; I don't know why really, probably psychological as I tend to feel more invested in my film work. I also think the fact that you buy each roll of film enhances the sense of the actual cost of photography, something that gets masked with digital. The trick is not to let such setbacks dissuade you from continuing, just learn from them.