Instagram your Smart Phone Cemetery Photographs!

I’d like to think of this as my Contractual Obligation blog. I have tried to publish four Cemetery Traveler blog posts every month since embarking upon this escapade in 2010. It’s sort of a personal contract I’ve made. Rarely have I not met this goal. However, January 2016 has been a trying month for various reasons. As of January 30^th, I had only published two. I cranked one out yesterday, “Cemetery Road Trip to North Jersey.“

So here it is January 31, 2016, and as my father used to say, “I’ve got a million things to do!” I temper such notions with something my daughter Olivia asked me when she was five years old: “Daddy, why are grownups so busy?” After thinking about that for a bit, I answered, “I guess it’s because they choose to be.” (As an example, I trudged half a mile in a blizzard last weekend to make the photo at right. Did I have to? No. Need to? No. Was it worth it? That's debatable!) So, tucked in with my millions of other things I need/want to be doing, I have written what amounts to my Contractual Obligation blog, my fourth blog of January 2016, presented here for your enjoyment.

New Photographic Tools
As I look out from my eyrie on all the cemeteries that need to be photographed, I find myself with a new tool – an Apple iPhone6. Not only that, but a friend turned me on to the “645 Pro” App ($3.99, and only available for Apple products, sorry), which gives you way more control over the image you capture than the iPhone’s own camera. Resolution is good with the iPhone 6 - you end up with 3MB images - and there are some basic in-phone editing controls. I’d actually made hundreds of photographs (if indeed these electronic images can be referred to as such) with the iPhone during the first months I owned it. However, it only recently occurred to me to use it to make photos in the cemeteries I visit.

 

#BessieSmith

Why bother, if I have real cameras at my disposal? Well, one word: “Instagram.” During the opening reception for a solo photography exhibition I had in the fall of 2015, the owner of the establishment showed me the Instagram images she blasted out to the universe to promote my show. She talked me into getting the App and setting up an account. I was told that it can be used to great advantage as a tool with which to promote your art.

#abandonedcrematorium

So I’ve been, uh, Instagramming (if that is, in fact, an actual word) new images from cemeteries I’ve recently visited. They’re all “hash tagged” (“#graveyard,” for example) so people can find them if they look for images tagged with that word. You see, Instagram, as well as the Internet in general, is text-based – it can’t tell what the content of your photo or pdf is – you have to tag the file with text. Otherwise, no one will find it with a word search. In the course of the past month since I’ve been on Instagram, I have amassed a number of “followers,” that is, people who will see my images pop up automatically on their smart phones the moment I post them.

#brownstoneangel

The photographs you see sprinkled throughout this article were made by me and my iPhone during the (current, as I write this) winter of 2015-16. You can only upload images to Instagram that you’ve made with your smart phone, by the way (you can also add a few lines of text, to describe the image, point folks to your website, etc.). It is mainly an image-centric method of communication, not text-based like Twitter. There’s no easy way to upload images from your computer to Instagram. You either have to have made the image with your smart phone (you upload it to Instagram directly from the phone), or you need some way (as with Apple’s iTunes) to transfer your image files from your computer to your smart phone.

So is all this gear and software going to make you another Edward Weston? No. These are tools. You need heart, soul, and talent to make successful photographs. Gear is fun and can open up new possibilities for you, but it won't make you a better photographer. If I sound tech-savvy, I’m really not. With anything ranging from Adobe’s Photoshop to Apple’s iPhone, I learn just enough to make the tools do what I need/want them to do! I always fall back on the basic photgraphic principles I've outlined in my book (shown below), entitled, Digital Photography for the Impatient!

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So, here it is, 9:34 pm on January 31, 2016. Will I make my deadline and post this before midnight? Well, Super Bowl is not ‘til next week and hockey is in the All-Star break, so it looks good. All I need to do is transfer some of my cemetery images from my iPhone to my computer so I can size them and drop the resolution. Then I can pop them into the text here for your ultimate enjoyment!

Review of a “Ghost” Camera

Cemetery at night, with clouds and full moon above

You might think this is an April Fool’s Day post, but I swear it’s true! Recently I had the opportunity to borrow a ghost camera. My friend Susan Ellis loaned me her Bell and Howell S7, a 12 megapixel (MP) point-and-shoot “night vision” infrared-capable camera. The subject is illuminated by six red LEDs on the front of the camera. So lo and behold, the images look just like those fuzzy black and white videos on the ghosthunters’ television shows! People and objects have sort of an aura around them.

So literally, the ghosts are in the machine - in the camera, that is! Not really sure if I actually photographed any ghosts outside the camera. In the event the camera was indeed able to pick up energy from the netherworld, I took it into some graveyards at night, as well as in the daytime. The spookier images appeared to be those of live people, however. I also shot various other things with it, examples of which you see here.

The pupils of people’s and animals’ eyes glowed white when illuminated by the S7’s LED panel, giving them the demonic look you see in this photo. (That’s not Linda Blair from The Exorcist at left, its my lovely daughter Olivia, smiling sweetly).

One interesting thing about IR is that when shooting in black and white, foliage appears white. In the daylight, the night vision mode registered simply as poor-quality black and white, save for the foliage appearing white. You can see this in the image below, where the pine needles from the evergreen are white. Here’s a color version of the same image. The camera is easily switchable from low-quality monochrome to low-quality color! (The switch manually removes the infrared blocking lens from in front of the image sensor.)

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Low-quality image? I know what you’re thinking (I have that power, you know), “If the Bell and Howell S7 has a 12 megapixel image sensor, then why are the images of such poor quality?” Mainly, that has to do with the bogus sales pitch (and ad campaigns) that would have unwary customers believing that the higher the pixel count, the better the image. Oh, if life could be that simple! Unfortunately, it is not so.

You see, image quality (resolution, color reproduction, etc.) has more to do with the overall size of the image sensor, not the pixel count. The smaller cameras get, the smaller the image sensor needs to be. A DSLR may have a 24 x 35mm image sensor with a total pixel count of 6MP (megapixels), while the average point-and-shoot may have an image sensor whose overall dimensions are only 5 x 7 mm, but with a total pixel count of 12MP.  Guess which one has better image quality? The DSLR, because it has an overall larger image sensor! (In case you’re interested, I cover this in greater detail in Chapter 4 (“Magical Devices for a High-Speed World?”) of my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient, available from Amazon.com).

"Lone Wolf"

Another reason the black and white infrared images on the Bell and Howell S7 are so grainy could be due to the poor light sensitivity at higher ISO settings, or it could simply be that the camera simulates the traditionally grainy infrared film! I rather like the effect, which is quite cool in this nighttime image of a Mummers’ street party in Philadelphia (above, New Years’ Day, 2014). In this image, there was quite a bit of ambient light, so the camera’s LEDs were not the only light source. When it is the only light source in the dark, you get this vignetting effect (below), which appears simply because the LEDs cannot illuminate the entire field of view.

In color still image mode, the Bell and Howell S7 night vision camera has most of the modes and features of a standard inexpensive digital point and shoot, and you can see them all in this YouTube video. It is also capable of video capture.

Color image made with Bell and Howell S7 camera

I didn’t make any night vision videos, because the LED light source is so weak that it doesn’t illuminate anything more than a few feet away. Even when taking still photos, the shutter speed is so slow, you really have to brace the camera against something solid (like a tombstone, for instance, or a tripod) to keep from getting blurry images. You couldn’t really carry the camera around while trying to capture video in the dark as the sensor is just not very light-sensitive (not sure how ghost-sensitive it is, either) – you just end up with blurriness. Your best bet would be to have the camera on a tripod and let it roll, hoping the ghosts will come to you. (Here’s a YouTube video of an S7 video capture.)

Lastly, and I failed to try this since I didn’t read the Thinkgeek website until after I returned the borrowed camera: “…during the daytime in night vision mode you can see through some types of clothing, paper and other various thin materials. ... Important Note: Respect the privacy of your fellow humans and don't use the … Night Vision Camera for evil." Guess I may have to borrow Susan’s camera again!

Note: To read more about the Bell and Howell S7 (which you can buy for around $100), click here to go to the Bell and Howell website.

Night Cemetery Photography - a Lunar Stroll at Laurel Hill Cemetery

Image courtesy of Emma Stern

I just spent an interesting evening as a tour guide at Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Philadelphia. Not a REAL tour guide, mind you, just an unofficial, auxiliary backup tour guide. Laurel Hill had an evening “Lunar Stroll” fête that drew twenty people out on a hot July evening. The premise of these regular outings is photography, though couples sometimes show up without cameras (hmmm…).

Emma Stern orienting photographers to the evening's events

When I said it was a hot evening, I’m talking the tail-end of a week-long 100-degree heat wave. It was around 90 degrees after dark. Diehard photographer types (half men, half women) showed up anyway, paying fifteen bucks a head to stroll the nighttime graveyard after the gates had been locked. The allure of such an opportunity may explain why some show up without cameras!

So the idea of photographing a graveyard at night is a broad-thinking approach to making your local cemetery all that it can be for all sorts of people. Here’s what it said on Laurel Hill’s website:

PHOTOGRAPHING LAUREL HILL AFTER HOURS

Photo enthusiasts: grab your cameras, tripods and flashlights, and capture the ethereal wonders of Laurel Hill Cemetery after the sun goes down. During this guided stroll through the site’s picturesque landscape, participants will visit some of its most photogenic spots and evocative statuary, while learning to paint with light using only a flashlight and ambient iridescence. You will have experiences to share from this rare and intimate exploration of the cemetery long after its gates close for the night. Photography experience is recommended. Lunar Strolls will occur on the third Friday of every month from May through August.

Image by Ed Snyder

In the passage above, three things grabbed my attention like a zombie from behind a gravestone:

1. learning to paint with light
2. photography experience is recommended
3. Lunar Strolls will occur on the third Friday of every month from May through August

So, let me explain:

1. “Painting with light” is not for the novice. It refers to the act of illuminating your subject with a light source while your camera’s shutter is open. Imagine this: darkened scene (cemetery monuments in the dark), camera on tripod, exposure on auto, shutter tripped – shutter stays open looking for light. No light, shutter stays open for a while. At this point, you illuminate the subject with a flashlight from behind the camera – you sweep the light across the subject, back and forth, up and down, until the camera completes the exposure. It will end the exposure when it has sensed that enough light has hit the image sensor to create a properly exposed image.

Statuary atop mausoleum "painted" with light, by Ed Snyder

Painting with light is much easier with a digital camera than it is with film, because you can instantly see your mistakes on the display and then adjust for them. Of course you’ll be infinitely more successful if you have a tutor on the spot. And that’s what I and a few other people were there to help with.

2.  Being familiar with your camera is key to successful night photography. Maybe I should say “low  light” photography. You don’t want to be futzing with your camera in the dark, trying to get it to work. If you don’t know how to use it properly in the daylight, night photography will just make everything more difficult.

3.  And if you don’t get it right the first time, Laurel Hill has these night time photography ‘workshops’ on the third Friday of every month from May through August! So, try and try again. After my first outing a couple years ago, I realized I needed three items without which my efforts were virtually useless (so, learn from my mistake): a small flashlight to see the controls on your camera, a large flashlight with which to illuminate subjects, and a tripod.

So, other than providing helpful hints, what would be my other responsibilities in this endeavor? I assumed one of them would involve keeping my charges from wandering off into the dark where they might break a leg in a gopher hole. Herding people did turn out to be a major task (at which I failed, since I never again saw that camera-less couple again after the made off toward the mausoleums). I actually spent more time illuminating monuments and gravestones with my LED panel video light for other people, than I did making my own photographs. (I did take the people photos in this blog, however, with my Canon DSLR.)

The Lunar Stroll

One of the reasons that Laurel Hill’s Lunar Strolls are so successful (SIXTY people showed up for the last one!) is because the coordinator, Emma Stern (Laurel Hill Cemetery’s Volunteer & Administrative Coordinator), is an accomplished photographer herself. In fact, that is her wonderful image at the very beginning of this article. She is co-owner of a photographic gallery called GRAVY in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. (TheArtblog.org refers to GRAVY as the “best kept secret in Fishtown.”) Emma is responsible for turning this photo outing into an actual photographic workshop. Not only did she coordinate experienced photographers to help those less experienced, but she provided other practical things like flashlights and colored gel filters to transform the flashlights’ color! Oh, and bug spray, snacks, and cold bottled water too.

In the gloaming (hey, Laurel Hill is an old Victorian cemetery – I can use words like that), it is easy enough to make photographs. There’s still enough ambient light to work with. (Want to make your images appear darker? Stop down your -Ev setting (see link). But then night begins to fall, as it usually does, and with it, a conundrum. How to make photos in the dark? Why does your camera have trouble auto-focusing? As I explained to one gentleman, cameras use light to create an image. No light, no image (unless you’re using one of those infrared Russian spy cameras). Challenging, yes, but at least we didn’t have grave robbers or zombies to contend with (reality often violates preconceptions of what you’ll find in a cemetery after dark).

Shooting in the Dark

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With today’s super light-sensitive digital cameras with their 3200 (and up) ISO image sensors, when does it becomes truly too dark to make a photograph? The basic principle behind photography (which I quite knowledgeably point out in my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient) is that you need light to make the process work. The less light, the more difficult it will be for your camera to record an image. I usually tell people to start by setting their cameras on auto and letting it make the exposure. See how it reacts to low light. Most current model DSLRs will keep the shutter open as long as necessary for the lens to gather enough light to create an image. What you usually end up with, then, is a PROPERLY EXPOSED image, something like this:

Evening, Laurel Hill Cemetery, by Bob Bruhin

Focusing in the Dark

Millionaire's Row, photographed by Ed Snyder

Now, the phrase “properly exposed” has nothing to do with focus. If you look at my image above, you’ll note that it is not very crisply focused. Problem is, in the dark, many digital cameras have optical auto focus mechanisms, which require the subject to be bright (contrasty) enough for the system to lock on to. No such luck in the dark! If your camera uses Sonar (like the old Polaroids used to, see link), i.e. sound waves to focus, you’d be golden. However, that (better for this purpose) technology is antiquated. Some modern digital cameras will throw out a short (“assist”) flash burst to illuminate the subject for focusing purposes before it will allow you to trip the shutter. Some cameras use infrared to focus – which is good in the dark, but only for objects within twenty feet of the lens.

Millionaire's Row, as photographed by Bob Bruhin

Above is a much sharper image of the same mausoleum scene taken by another photographer. One reason for this is that Bob Bruhin used a DSLR while I was using my G11 DPS (as I refer to ‘Digital Point-and-Shoot' cameras in my book). In addition to the better light painting and focus, notice how his camera's image sensor interpreted the night sky as orange, whereas mine recorded the same sky as magenta!

A couple techniques I use for focusing in the dark:

• Manually focus as best I can, then use a deep depth of field (say, f16 or f22) so that any minor mis-focusing is compensated for by the small aperture. This, of course, requires a very long exposure in the dark – minutes, perhaps.

• Illuminate your subject with a bright light and allow your camera to lock into focus, then turn the camera’s (or lens’) focus to “manual.” Make your exposure while you are “painting” your subject with some artificial light source.

(Here’s a link to a good explanation of how different autofocus systems work on modern digital cameras.)

“Proper” Exposure

When you make night photographs, you don’t necessarily want a properly exposed image. You may not want all the detail in the shadow areas because those will not be well-lit and will therefore appear mottled and grainy in your image. Best to let those areas fade to black and accentuate the high-contrast highlights of your subject, as in the fabulous image below.

Warner Memorial by night; image by Karen Schlechter

Even the less expensive Nikon DSLRs have image sensors that are wonderfully responsive to low light. (I own a Canon myself, and it gives me nowhere as good an image.) So the trick is to NOT use a super high ISO but rather 200 or 400. If you can make an auto exposure this way and light up your subject with artificial light, the camera will terminate the exposure when it has gotten enough light to create an image. You can also shoot in manual mode, but either way, you’re making exposures in excess of thirty seconds (tripod a necessity).

Photographers in Laurel Hill Cemetery with cameras on tripods

Before I start to jump all over the place with night photography pointers, let me just categorize of few of them as “Helpful Hints:”

Helpful Hint #1

If you’ve never done night photography, start with your camera on its auto setting. Digital is preferable to film for beginners. That way, you can instantly see how badly you messed up, so you can make some adjustments and try it again. 

Ed Snyder, self-portrait lit with LED light panel

Helpful Hint #2

Use a DSLR. Point and shoot digitals have a much smaller image sensor (generally) which causes excessive noise in the image. I used my Canon G11 DPS for this self-portrait and you can see that as far as image quality goes, it is no masterpiece! I also avoided color, as a noisy image looks worse in color.

Helpful Hint #3

The photo shoot went from 8 to 10:30 pm, but with nearby city lights and the moon, there is some ambient light – you’re not in pitch darkness. Different color temperatures (tungsten from a flashlight, mercury-vapor from a streetlight, etc.) will flavor your color composition. One person even brought a couple glo-sticks on a string so an assistant could spin it overhead and create circular light trails in the image! (Unfortunately, I have not seen the photographic masterpiece that was subsequently created.)

Helpful Hint #4

Everything looks good on the display. This is actually something a woman at the event said to me when I commented on one of her images. And it is SO true! You may indeed, mirabile visu, have a three-inch masterpiece there on your camera’s display, but when you get it onto your computer monitor or make a print, you might be somewhat dismayed. Best idea here is to shoot at a low ISO (200-400) and paint the scene with light. If you shoot at a higher ISO your camera’s image sensor is going to be out of its normal operating range. True, you may get some interesting colors, but you may find that your image noise (see link) if too great to make a satisfactory print or high-res image.

Helpful Hint #5 

Bring:

•  Patience
• Tripod and a remote shutter release
• Tiny flashlight to see the controls on your camera 
• A big, bright flashlight to illuminate the ground as you walk and your subjects (statues, headstones, people)
• An LED panel video light (not heavy, uses very little battery power)

The Wrap-Up

Sepia image of Millionaires' Row painted with light (Ed Snyder)

Our photo shoot began at dusk at the gatehouse, then progressed to three of the most photogenic spots in the cemetery – the Warner Memorial, the granite lion overlooking Kelly Drive, then the “Millionaires’ Row” of mausoleums near Hunting Park Avenue. By the time the tour wrapped up at the latter, it was 10:30 pm. 

When I’m making a photograph, I am fully concentrated on this event, no matter how long it takes. As a tour guide trying to hustle photographers from one area of interest to the next, it seemed to me that these people were slower than Darwinian selection. It was difficult to pull them away from each area, they were having so much fun and engaged in interesting conversation with each other. These were photographers with specific interests in cemeteries, and there appear to be more of them on the planet than I suspected. One fellow told me how he became interested in photographing cemeteries: at his best friend’s funeral, he brought a camera to take a picture of the grave. Afterward, he began to look around and thought, "hey, nice statues ….."

Twilight at Laurel Hill Cemetery, by Bob Bruhin

I’ll leave you with this final Homeric Moment: As I was discussing cemetery travel (and to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, I have traveled extensively in Philadelphia) with one of the photographers, he told me how he tries to drag his wife along on his photographic escapades. That ended with the last trip they made – to see the tombstones from Monument Cemetery dumped under the Betsy Ross Bridge. He went on to say how he read about it on this “cemetery travel blog" and therefore had to go see the site himself. I interjected that it was my blog, “The Cemetery Traveler” which he had read. The fellow brightened up and wide-eyed looked at me and said, “You’re Ed Snyder?! Wait ‘til I tell my wife!”

Further Reading and Viewing:

Some of the photographers who made photographs during Laurel Hill Cemetery’s July 17, 2013 Lunar Stroll posted their images on this Flickr site.

Laurel Hill Cemetery website

Emma Stern’s Flickr page

Bob Bruhin's Flickr page

Karen Schlechter's Flickr page

Film Experiment Gone Bad

Shooting long-outdated film can give you some fabulously incorrect results. At left is an example of what you could end up with. While I’ve had great luck over the years with long outdated slide film (which is the origin of the image at left) and black and white negative film, I only recently shot my first roll of outdated Kodak Vericolor III color negative film. It had been freezer-kept and was outdated as of 1984. (For the record, I’m writing this in 2013, so the film was 29 years out of date!

Back in the fall of 2012, I walked through Mount Moriah Cemetery in West Philadelphia with some friends who had never been there, so it was really a multi-purpose visit. I was experimenting with the Vericolor film on a wonderfully sunny Sunday morning. They quite enjoyed the scenery, and I liked playing tour guide. The cemetery is quite picturesque, with most of it still being wildly overgrown. (For the record, the cemetery is no longer abandoned, but it has no legal owner at this point in time. The situation is being hashed out in court as I write this.) One of my friends was shooting some outdated Kodak black and white slide film in her SLR. Her images came out blank, and mine were almost as bad.

Mount Moriah Cemetery gatehouse

My friend Bob at Mount Moriah

I was using an old Canon AE-1 SLR with a flea market-purchased 18 – 70mm lens (I paid a quarter for it!). I was expecting fabulous results with this super wide angle lens; however, the camera battery started dying about ten exposures into the 36-exposure roll. I’d compose a shot, set the exposure, trip the shutter, I said, trip the shut.... half the time the shutter wouldn’t release because the batteries were low. Of course I had no spares. Argh. I spent so much time getting through this roll, that I barely made any digital images. So after about four hours of traipsing through the thicket, we called it a day.

When I got my film back from the lab (Philadelphia Photographics, which handles all my quirky film needs with great skill and diligence), I found that I was the proud owner of no useable images. Pretty much all of the emulsion washed off the film substrate during development, resulting in a “thin” negative – so little emulsion was left that there was barely a ghost of an image to be printed. Seems appropriate for a cemetery, right? Well, such a result can lead to immense frustration, if you spent hours shooting the roll and exposing every frame carefully.

The reddish and purplish images you see here are scanned from my negatives – very grainy, not much contrast. Colors all wrong. Scanning the negatives and working with an image editing program could possibly salvage the images to a small degree, but don't expect a miracle. Desaturating the images (making them B/W) so that you're only working with shades of grey might yield something better, but there's a subtle technicality when it come to manipulating a scanned image, which prevents you from wreaking all the magic on it that you could otherwise wreak on an original digital image. An electronic scan of a negative holds far less digital information than if you had shot the scene with a digital camera in the first place. So for example, brightening the shadow areas to bring out detail is not as easily done with a scanned negative - there simply is no information there to manipulate! In fact, most of the photo editing capabilities in such a program as Adobe Photoshop become far more limited in their effectiveness when your original image is not digital.

My advice? Never experiment when your results really matter! Using outdated film is just that, an experiment. In my case, I went back to Mount Moriah a few weeks later and performed the same exercise over again, but this time with tried-and-true Ektachrome slide film, which always gives me great results – even if it is twenty years old and I cross-process it! An example from that roll is at the top of this article (mausoleum through the weeds) as well as the Mount Moriah gatehouse below.

Gatehouse shot later on outdated Ektachrome film

In my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient, (available from Amazon.com), I go nowhere near the subject of experimenting with film, alternate development processes, or experimental printing. Its a wild world out there, and not for the faint of heart. You can get wild results, but these adventurous areas can be wildly complicated - and often the results are not reproducible (which is one reason it is difficult to give step-by-step instructions in these areas of photography)! An example of that last statement relates to the age of outdated film: five year-old-film can yield drastically different results from ten-year-old film, even if it is the exact same film and both have been freezer-kept.

Ed's book, available from Amazon.com

Attempt to bring out shadow detail

Original image

 As I said, I've had much better luck with outdated slide film and black and white negative film than I had with color negative. Therefore, it can do no harm to note in passing that when I was recently offered about a hundred rolls of outdated film, I only took the half that were not color negative! So I’m well-stocked for further photographic adventures with 35mm Ektachrome and 120mm [BW] Plus-X.

Some readers out there are probably wondering, “Where can I get outdated film?” Your friends may be a good source. Some photographers still have rolls in their freezers from before they went digital. Some non-photographers might have film left from a college photography course they took years ago! Most are happy to give it away. Ebay is another source, and sometimes camera shops will sell outdated or near-dated film at half price. B and H Photo in New York usually does this. Outdated film - use it sparingly or use it daringly!

Shooting Film, by Accident

I put myself through an interesting little photographic exercise last week. I call it “Forgetting your digital cameras and being forced to use film.” I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

Last week I planned to spend an hour at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.  I threw the photo gear in the trunk of my car and drove the ten miles or so out to the cemetery on a gorgeous Spring day. Well, when I arrived, I realized all I had in the trunk of the car were my Nikon F3 and a couple of Holgas – nothing digital! Not even a camera phone! How could I have done this? Well, when you have the attention span of a gnat, it’s rather easy (so many cemeteries, so little time!). I’m actually surprised it doesn’t happen to me more often.

I had to decide whether to a make a go of it or come back another time. After a moment of reflection, I decided to accept my fate − I crossed the Rubicon. After all, prior to the digital revolution, I had lived for thirty years on the film side of the Rubicon! How difficult could it be?

If you are as skilled at shooting film as you are using digital, the only major annoyance is that you cannot immediately upload your image files to Facebook, email them to friends, or play with them in Photoshop. You need to get the film developed and scanned. This takes at least days, if not weeks! Luckily I have a wonderful photo processing lab within walking distance of where I work in center city Philadelphia – Philadelphia Photographics (and yes, they accept mail order). They do high quality work fast and cheap, so I got my scanned negatives back in a few days. The images from that day are sprinkled throughout this article (square ones are from 120mm film in the Holga, vertical images from the Nikon).

Film Can be Annoying!

There are a number of minor annoyances associated with film:

• There is no instant feedback via an LCD display to show you how badly you messed up. 
• Your ISO is limited to the film you just loaded in the camera. 
• You have a finite number of images on a roll of film.  
• It’s expensive to get film processed, printed, and/or scanned – not to mention time-consuming. 

Holga image, West River Drive

However, if you turn those annoyances around, they can easily be seen as advantages (I can rationalize just about anything). Not knowing what you’ve just shot (and whether anything will come out) can add an element of nervous excitement and surprise to your work (still, do yourself a favor and bracket your exposures!) Having to choose a film with appropriate speed for your lighting conditions makes you appreciate the flexibility of digital, where one image can be made at ISO 100 and the next at 1600. (I had to forgo some great mausoleum stained glass images as I had chosen to use 100 speed film.) Having a finite number of exposures (36 for my Nikon SLR and 12 in my Holga) forced me to pace myself and make each shot count.

I realized at the outset that I would have to concentrate on not wasting film − essentially by composing shots, focusing critically, and metering for proper exposure. These are things we tend not to bother with anymore – we just set the digital on auto and blast off a string of images.

What I Learned Using My Film Cameras

Having shot both film and digital for the past seven years, I have become quite reliant on digital for my documentary and snapshot images, using only the more expensive film gear for serious work. It is amazing that in 2012 you still need to spend thousands of dollars on digital equipment in order to replicate the image quality of a five-dollar disposable film camera with ISO 100 film! 

Film Cameras and Lenses

And speaking of image quality, my Holgas create fabulous lo-fi distortion that would cost hundreds of dollars in DSLR attachments to replicate. My Nikon F3 SLR has a lens assortment that is unparalleled in my digital world. I never purchased digital equivalents of my 28mm or 55mm Macro Nikkor lenses, as the cost would be astronomical. So it was with great pleasure that I got to use a true wide angle and a sharp macro that focuses down to an inch! The vertical image of the names on the Irish memorial was made with the 28mm lens – not something I could have done with my 28mm - 135mm digital lens (whose wide end has about a 38mm film lens equivalency). [That conversion business is rather complicated – I have a good explanation of it in my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient, available from Amazon.com.]

Focus

The Nikon F3 has a fabulously big, bright viewfinder that makes manual focusing a joy. Digital doesn’t come close. Unless you’ve shot film extensively, you wouldn’t remember that old film lenses had nearly a full-barrel focus rotation (from close-up to infinity), meaning you have very critical control over the exact focus of your image. Digital lenses typically don’t allow that – in an effort to drain less battery power as a lens auto-focuses, lens manufacturers have minimized the barrel rotation distance from close-up to infinity. So if you’ve ever tried to manually focus a “digital” lens, you quickly realize it’s next to impossible – the range of barrel rotation from close-up to infinity is usually only a quarter of the full 360-degree rotation.  

Depth of Field

Shooting with my fast “film” lenses also gives me much better control over depth of field. That is, I can shoot at f2 and have certain objects in focus while making those in the background blurry. This is usually not possible with digital cameras, since the lenses aren’t as fast. For other optical reasons, point-and-shoot digitals are notorious for having an infinite depth of field (everything from 3 feet to Mars is sharply in focus), which you really don’t want all the time. (Manufacturers have begun making faster digital lenses; however, they are very expensive. An f2.8 28mm “digital” version of my Nikkor film lens costs $500!)

More about Film

Mausoleum at 28mm

There are mysteries and dangers involved in film use. The mystery is whether or not your film will come out the way you want it to. The danger, that you have far less control over salvaging a bad film image than you do a digital one (photo editing programs can manipulate the extensive digital information of a RAW or JPEG file much more effectively than they can the relatively limited digital information acquired from a scanned negative). Also, slide film (which I use) has far less exposure latitude (has higher contrast) than digital images so it’s way more difficult to tweak a scanned Ektachrome image if you need to make minor adjustments in a photo editing program. (The images you see here were made on Kodak Ektachrome color slide and Kodak T-Max 100 black and white films).

Changing film slows you down. Another way to look at this is it forces you not to burst off ten digital images of everything you see! Multiply this by different angles, different exposures, and choosing monochrome and color, and you can easily see how people can shoot twenty digital images of the same scene. Since a roll of film holds way fewer images than a memory card, film forces you to concentrate on the final image. So as an alternative to ripping off a burst of twenty digital snapshots, why not just concentrate on making one good photograph? (I write about this in the chapter, “Possibilities Beyond the Snapshot,” in Digital Photography for the Impatient.) There really is no need to fill up all those hard drives with bad photos, now is there?

One last thing about film: unless you’re using a full-frame DSLR (in the five thousand dollar range), the resolution of your digital images is far lower than what you get with film. When I shoot a roll of 120mm film in my twenty-five-dollar Holga, I get resolution comparable to that created by a $40,000 medium format digital camera. Film has INFINITE resolution. Forget that 2300 x 3400 pixel stuff – film grain is analog and infinite!

Epilogue (Rest in Peace?):  

"Kodak stops producing slide film due to lack of demand" (March 3, 2012)

Purchase Ed's book,  “Digital Photography for the Impatient,” from Amazon.com