Experimenting With Film Stock Presets

This afternoon, I've spent some time playing around with something I swore I never would: digital presets. I think using such tools undermines a large portion of the image creation process. Lately; however, I've found my mind wandering to the dark side and to see if judicious use of these tools could actually add anything to my portfolio.

The final answer: I don't know. Not from a scant hour and a half of fiddling around anyway.

The program I decided to try this out with is Alien Skin Exposure 3. The reason I chose this one is that there are a lot of presets that try to emulate old film stock rather than just do some crazy, gimmicky digital effect. From just a glance, there's dozens of different films to choose from and virtually everything you'd expect to be there from Fuji, Kodak, Agfa, Ilford and even Polaroid.

Once you've selected the "film" of choice, you then have a huge multitude of options to fine tune and adjust the desired effect. Since I'm never happy with any global adjustment, I did play with these sliders quite a bit for some interesting results.

Again, as I was just playing, I can't really make a decision on whether I can use this program in the future, but the option is definitely there should I feel that it can indeed add something to my images. I think some more experimentation is in order to see if I can achieve some subtler effects. That is if I can get over the dirthy, filthy feeling of betraying everything I feel about using presets and actions.




Polachrome - Cool/ Faded



Fuji Pro 400H



Fuji Neopan



Agfa APX 25 - with the effect brought down to desaturate rather than convert to black and white.



Polachrome


Yeah, I honestly have no idea what to think.

The First Few Frames

Well, in the last post, I related my excitement to have the opportunity to shoot on a Mamiya 645. Saturday evening, I fired off the first three frames of the first roll: Kodak Portra 160VC.

Before I enter into the details, I must say: Wow!

I always knew shooting on medium format would be a totally different experience and all I can say after the first few frames is thank God that everything I learned from was film biased. Everything I've done since 2005 is digital and I've all but completely forgotten how different the workflow is.

The first issue is that film's expensive. Even though I managed to get all of them for under £3 a roll, it's still going to total about £15+ a roll after processing and scanning. Therefore, each and every frame is precious to me. These 12 rolls might very well be the only ones I get for a long, long time and I want to do my absolute best to make it a one shot, one kill scenario. Ideally that would translate into 180 different frames of film. There's only one real way of doing this and that is to take test shots before hand to make absolute sure everything is right. In an ideal world, this can be accomplished with Polaroids (or rather Fuji Instax nowadays); however, that stuffs expensive too, so it's the dSLR that substitutes in this case.

For the shot I'm going to talk about here, I used a two light set-up to light a still-life of a Raspberry Tart procured from a continental market in Barnsley the same day.

The first step was to get a rough position of the tart on the mirror so I had a starting point to begin lighting it. Happy with what I was seeing framing wise, I  had a problem with the wooden frame of the mirror dissecting the frame. This was fixed simply by adding two sheets of A3 printer paper in a curve shape against and up from the mirror in an attempt to replicate a white seamless background. This wasn't so perfect. It took a fair while to get them positioned so there were no visible lines or edges. Once I did; however, everything was smooth sailing for more or less the first time ever!

The first step in lighting the pastry, was to set up the background/rim light. For this, I pointed a bare bulb strobe into a V-flat which was then directed at the white wall behind. Cue test shot. (In the future, I will remember to get ALL of the test shots off of the memory card before formatting :S )

I should point out here, after last week's lesson on apertures and shutter speeds, I decided to only work in full stops with the Mamiya. The reasons for this are to place myself under limitations so as to force myself to work the scene and the lighting around the camera rather than the other way around. Forcing myself to reinforce and practice technique this way can only serve to help me to operate technically and creatively in tricky situations in the future. The second reason is simply ease. The aperture ring on the fully manual lens on the Mamiya only displays full stops and it conveniently clicks into place at each one. Doing this also leaves little room for idiotic error, thus reducing the chances of wasting precious film.

Back to the test shot. A quick shot at f/4 revealed that I got it exactly how I wanted the first time. That doesn't happen very often, so I carried on rather pleased! The second light was fitted with a white umbrella high and to camera right. Test shot 2. Perfect. OMG!



Happy, it was time to bring in the Mamiya. Now, working with such a small subject, my choice of lens for the test shots was my beloved 50mm f/2.5 Macro. This immediately posed another problem. The minimum focusing distance of the macro lens is about 2 inches, whilst on the Mamiya's 80mm lens, it's just shy of 3 feet. Though I was aware this was going to happen, I didn't give it pause and carried on anyway. Lesson learned. The whole set up was for a tightly framed closeup of a tart and it's reflection. The final image on film will have to be cropped very significantly to fulfil my initial intent. This isn't exactly a problem as such, but I feel it's a waste of a lot of precious real estate on the huge negative.

My other slight issue with the 645 was with the focusing. Having only worked with 35mm SLRs and APS-C dSLR's, the split focusing screen was completely alien to me. I figured out how it worked pretty quickly, but I still found it really difficult. After having all the test shots done, it must have taken me nearly 10 minutes to get to a point where I was daring enough to actually push the shutter. I can only assume and hope this will change with practice.

All in all, I'm still very much looking forward to seeing the final result when the film gets back. So I can run a comparison, this is how I would have retouched the shot had I been shooting digitally:



and this is what it looks like run through Alien Skin's Exposure 3 set to simulate the characteristics of Portra 160VC.



If I've done everything right, hopefully this is how the print will look when it comes back to me!

Well, three frames down 177 to go!!

All I Can Do Is Drool

When I first started with my photography, I eagerly devoured every magazine on the shelf every month. There were significantly fewer magazines on the shelf at the back end of 2004, so the plethora of options now available at even a modest WH Smith's, such as the one in Barnsley, more or less sums up how much the demand for information from a keen photography enthusiast consumer base has grown in a short time.

That; however, is not the major shift that has shocked me. I, in fact, am rather unsurprised. The difference I find was the speed of the all encompassing digital takeover. In September of 2004, nearly all of the gear reviews and virtually all of the articles on technique revolved around film cameras. Usually Medium Format cameras. They always left me drooling. Beautiful, efficient and built to last 40 years. Usually, I could care less about gear, but these beasts had my attention.

At the time, the Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel) was still freshly out of the gate and heralded as the first affordable dSLR and ultimately my first dSLR as well.

Fast forward two years and film had all but disappeared from the magazines. The landscape specific titles still featured them as full frame 35mm sensors were still a way off, but as far as new information and new gear were concerned elsewhere, it was just not to be.

Four years on and we have 50+ Megapixel digital MF cameras. We have gargantuan beasts of cinemagraphic cameras that are capable of billboard resolution stills in every frame of video. We have a very well regarded  publication that always swore off digital as heresy publishing entire issues without a spool in sight. We have dozens of photography titles on the periodical shelves only referring to film in nostalgic pretences.

All I can say is thank God for lomo and JPG in that sense.

For years now, I've been searching Ebay constantly with the slightest hope that one day I might be able to somehow find a deal that would actually let me experience Medium Format Film. It hasn't happened yet.

When I found out about the prospect and ability to use it on this course, the only way I can describe what I did is "squirm". Excited was and is an understatement. So, as I sit here with a Mamiya 645 and 12 rolls of 120 film beside me, believe me when I say I can hardly contain my six years of anticipation!

However, before I go and throw myself in at the deep end: the very first thing I did with the Mamiya was, of course, take photos of it!



All I can do is drool!

Thus We Begin

 As a ­self-employed freelance fashion, beauty and portrait photographer, my intentions and motivations for taking on this FdA in commercial photography include being surrounded by repetition regarding the technical skills and knowledge of both basic and advanced camera craft, adding rigidity and formality to the chaotic methods and mannerisms involved in the ways I taught myself, discovering new techniques and skills that I may not have had the opportunity or finance to pursue and consequentially add these to my repertoire and “arsenal” of products and services, to further develop the business skills required to operate a successful commercial photography studio and to learn new ways to fuse creativity into various images in order to keep raising the bar and continually offer a product and service that remains different to anything offered by any other competitors in the industry.

Although I’m aware that my photography is of an acceptable standard at many levels, mostly due to cohorts and colleagues continuously arguing such despite my pleas to the contrary, I am consistently under whelmed by the images I produce just days after they are finished. Through years of reflection, the only reasonable or at least the main source of this is a lack of confidence, not only with photography but rather in all aspects of my life. This confidence issue is another of the many reasons I ultimately decided to undertake this Foundation Degree program, as I believe that such a social learning environment can only help to improve it as such.

Photographically, I would like to begin removing myself from a heavily technical based style and start down a path of more conceptually conceived work. Through this, what I would like to achieve is a body of work that actually conveys stories and other messages rather than the portraying the “pretty picture”. This of course, is not an all-encompassing goal, as some forms of work including one of my favourites, Beauty, require just that: a pretty picture. In the past I have struggled with efforts to do just this and although I have succeeded on a few occasions other successes came from concepts and ideas provided by other individuals involved in the creation process. Though I am forever grateful and awed by the ability to work with and continue to work with some of the extraordinarily talented people I have, I feel I need to strive to nurture my meagre abilities in order to bring more to the joint palette.

Another aspect that I look forward to throughout this course will be able to legitimise taking some time from the actual business of the photography business. When I started, I was all too aware of the estimates that dictate that the percentage of work that goes into a photography business is only about 15% actual photography, even less on some weeks, the hard truth on paper is a completely different animal to the hard truth in reality. Having the “excuse” to ease the work hours put into marketing, accounting, canvassing, retouching, market researching will hopefully help me to form a routine, even in the overwhelming times, that will remain with me long after the course has finished.  

Ideally, the ultimate results of all this work will culminate in my ultimate goal of taking my commercial fashion and beauty photography business through its first years of life and beyond into a thriving career in which I can work with the best team members the industry has to offer in order to create visually stimulating images.