Shoot digital like film

Note: This is not a Fujifilm X100VI review.

One of the big deal things in the world of digital photography is film recipes. I sense this came as a response to impracticality in the economics of analog photography and lack of modern analog cameras meeting the needs of many. If I were to tell you I was never interested in emulating the “film look” in my digital work I’d be lying. But until now I had not found a workable solution for it and the solution was not the physical tool but the powerful image editing capabilities that it offered.

My journey begun with the objective to emulate the film look, not just the general idea of how the photographic results should look but also attempt in creating photographs to look as if they were recorded on very specific films such as Kodak Portra or Fujifilm Velvia, or Fujifilm Acros. But I found film recipes more like the templates to start developing my own “film look” presets that need not adhere to making my images look like they were taken on film.

The rest is history… I am in love with this new craft.

Pentax 17: A new film camera in 2024

When Ricoh announced they are working on a new film camera we didn’t know if it is going to be a half frame shooter. Like many of you I assumed it will be a 35mm full frame camera but all of us were surprised when they did the first reveal. I was disappointed that it was going to be a half frame camera and yet I pre-ordered one…

The order was filled surprisingly quick! Unboxing a brand new film camera is something I had not experienced in my life until this point. The new cameras that I’ve owned and shot with in the late 90’s were either my parents’ or I bought them off the black market in India and came in bubble wraps or unmarked cardboard boxes just like when you buy used cameras from eBay today.

When I put in the first roll - a roll of Portra 400, I overshot the first frame counter (because the winder is so fucking small!) but it does not matter much because I had plenty of shots left to shoot. Zone focusing took a bit to get used to, the first 10-15 shots came out blurry but once I was in the “zone” it became a second nature.

It is a beautiful camera!

Although light, the camera feels premium in hand, well most of it besides the lens that feels like straight out of a Holga system. The shooting experience was fluid and pretty satisfying but it is not for Mrinabh. The things I didn’t like outweigh the things that I loved.

Things I loved about it:

Form factor
Ease of use: From loading film to shooting to rewinding the film.

Things I didn’t like about it:

Uneven frame spacing: I expect better from a 500 dollar half frame non-tomography camera
Not very “visible” frame-lines especially in bright outdoors
The format: Half frame is definitely not for me
Lack of manual controls

This was my first half-frame camera and I hope it will not be the last one.

HP5 home-brew

When I rebooted analog photography in December of 2022, it was inevitable I would get down to developing film at home, at some point. Today. I finally got to that point…

I ordered the Ars Imago lab box and CineStill DF96 monobath that came in earlier today. The first roll to go into the daylight operable lab box was a Fujifilm Neopan ACROS 100-II. But unfortunately, it came out not that great - the developed negatives strip had purple stains. But it added an effect I loved on certain shot, like the one below.

I was unsatisfied with the result, had to shoot some more to test and give it another shot. So in the afternoon I ventured out with my trusty Pentax 6x7 loaded with a roll of HP5. Few hours later I had shot through the roll, and it was ready to go into the lab box. This time I agitated the film in the soup for 9 minutes (instead of 6 in the previous attempt), followed by vigorous rinsing under tap water for a much longer duration. The result was very satisfactory: although there are purple stains on the film edge (that I believe was due to the film edge in contact with the spool), the images came out clean.

There are “some” stains in the following images but not as bad as what I got in the first round. Once I run out of the monobath I’m going to invest in individual developer and blix/fixer to have more control on the process.

When the sun bleeds through the clouds

Every photograph has its story, but I can remember only a handful of them weeks and months later and this is one of those untold stories.

This photograph is a composite of three exposures, an HDR image that I created in Lightroom then color graded (also in LR). I am not a fan of auto-bracketing since my cameras don’t allow me to select a multi-point metering matrix for it to auto-bracket. A linear exposure stops bracketing rarely gets it right.

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The three photographs with manually bracketed exposures were shot on June 18th, 2022 around 9:00 PM Pacific at Picnic Pt. Park. The month of June in 2022 has been unnaturally cold, with clouds and rain lingering around for an extended Spring and deep into summer, creating great opportunities for shooting sunsets. We arrived at the park about an hour to sunset - we knew the area fairly well because we had been to the place many times. I started off shooting a beautiful algae bloom over the beach but the sun was too bright for photography - the kind off lighting that I was hoping to find in that cloudy day. It made sense to wait till the sun is at the horizon or below it, for it could light the clouds over the horizon.

Minutes before sunset the sun peeked out from the clouds and suddenly the clouds started to catch the light. I had very limited time to capture it. I wanted to put the pier ruins in front of the island at distance and below the sun at the horizon but also make sure the pier stumps are not over the dark island mass in the background. The tide seemed high, so I had to shoot from a distance, an unusual spot that I was not familiar with and had not explored before. Once I was at a convenient spot with the view I desired, switched from 21mm to 45mm lens because I was far from the subject and quickly started shooting.

Fast forward to today, July 3rd evening when I was culling through my Lightroom catalog came across these bracketed RAWs. I quickly put them together, searched for a BTS photo on my phone and wrote this blog post.

4:3

After years of shooting in Full Frame, started a new chapter with Medium Format. Of the twenty something photographs I shot today, here are my favorites.

And now a few obligatory photos of the new gear…

Basic editing workflow

Regardless of whether you call yourself a photographer or not, I am sure you have come across the age old question:

Did you edit this photo?

Now there are different ways to interpret this question. If I were to not take offense from the question, I’d assume it meant to be a compliment, asserting the end result is pretty regardless of whether it is far twisted and manipulated from reality, the actual scene. It could mean the person who asked is trying to critique your photograph or your skills to record imagery out of the camera in contrast or comparison to manipulations in post, or could mean the person is simply trying to understand how far from reality the end result is - assuming reality being what you got straight out of the camera.

If you are not shooting RAW, the image you are getting out of the camera is most likely a JPEG file. This is already “manipulated” by the camera. If you are shooting RAW then it is up to the photographer to export the image into a format such as JPEG that is shareable. This means whether you like it or not, the photograph is “manipulated” in one way or another therefore, the question we came across earlier in this post is vague. Educated, alternative questions could be:

Did you edit this photo or let the camera do it?
How different was the actual scene compared to this photo?

The photographs that come out of my camera are primarily RAW files, i.e. I try to capture as much data as I can while shooting, then manipulate in post processing to produce images that are visually pleasing to me. RAW images do not look anywhere close to how the real scene looked at the time of shooting and therefore, my primary goal is to “fix” attributes such as white balance, brightness and color in post to get the end result as close as possible. But this does not mean it has to be always realistic.

Now that we have established the purpose and importance of recognizing post processing in photography, let me introduce you to my basic workflow: I use Photoshop mainly for three things: perspective correction, color grading and (most important of all) selective editing. Sometimes the perspective corrected version does not look as appealing as the straight-out-of-camera original with rectilinear distortion (therefore I abandoned this edit), this actually means I am going to preserve the “distorted” original for this particular photograph, not attempt to make it look like how the eyes perceived…

Reality is merely another version created by the human brain

The dust storm

A white haze filled the gap between two mountain ranges, visible immediately after getting of the highway on our way to the desert playa. Thought it might be a good opportunity to record a timelapse sequence but the tripod fell sideways to a gust of wind about sixty frames in. We continued driving through the storm until we saw clear skies. Now protected by a series of tall hills next to the playa I wait for the sunset.

Stable mobile workflow

Let’s be honest: We live in the age where mobile photography cannot be ignored. Smart and progressive professional photographers will acknowledge anyone can take great photographs using easily accessible cameras and softwares including the ones that are found and available in a cell phone today. So what is left for professionals and artists to create, inspire and make a living out of photography today? I’ll save that debate for another day. This post is all about my basic stable and sustainable workflow for semi-serious work when using the phone cameras. Like my previous posts about workflows and peek into behind the scenes, I will use an example.

Until a few weeks ago, my primary post processing app was Snapseed. I love it’s simplicity although I used only about 5% of all its features. The new iPhone 12 Pro Max with native RAW capabilities made me quickly switch (back) to Lightroom mobile. I am going to explain in a bit why.

Snapseed worked great for quick edits especially on jpeg files (or HEIC if you’re into it) however I found RAW editing somewhat cumbersome and not as user-friendly as Lightroom, and this was even before Apple introduced native RAW formats. Selective editing to my knowledge is possible only after initial adjustments done to the RAW image, and exported into a compressed format therefore, you loose all the benefits of shooting in RAW if you are editing portions of the image. Finally, all edits in Snapseed are destructive, i.e. you cannot go back and re-adjust an edit (although you have the option to undo actions). Lightroom mobile wins in all these limitations.

Most (if not all) photographers are familiar with Adobe softwares, more specifically Lightroom. The UX is quite different from Snapseed however, it didn’t take time to get used to it, the learning curve wasn’t very high.

In addition to exiting, Lightroom brings auxiliary functions such as viewing EXIF data, watermarking and bulk export - features that aren’t available in Snapseed.

Snapseed worked great for exporting into Instagram or Facebook but would I print any of the images? I’d probably not. I have not printed many from the LR pipeline but I’ll post here once I have something shareable.

Here is the final export of the example image (exported from the LR workflow):