ananalogous

Shots of this type generally only achieve the effect intended when there's a more significant volume of liquid in the glass and as many references as possible to lines parallel or perpendicular to the real level horizon have been kept out of the frame. Inclusion of real horizontals and verticals lessens the effect until it just becomes a wonky picture.

Vaguely similarly, there's very little point going to the hassle and expense of buggering about with film photography if none of the benefits or advantages it has over digital are realised. The very small amount of space gained by leaving my old film SLR and three lenses at my parents' house was partially but not entirely re-filled with a second-hand Nikon F80 from the internet for smallpounds with which all my existing non-DX lenses will quite happily work. From my current D80-owning upgrade-restricted point of view, the benefits of film over digital are that it uses the full image area of the lenses, the level of detail and potential enlargability of the negative is theoretically greater and there's no such thing as a noise problem, either at high ISO or over a long exposure. I'm also slightly curious as to what my hit-rate with a roll of film could be compared to what it was ten years ago; after three years of immersion and the technology/capacity to take as few or as many shots as required at no additional cost (ignoring the need to occasionally buy an extra terabyte of external hard drive) with near-instant feedback am I better able than before to minimise the number of duff-exposed or mis-framed or dull shots on a roll of film, where every exposed frame has a quantifiable cost and the back of the camera displays nothing but enigmatic black plastic after exposing a frame?

I ran a couple of films through the camera over the past few weeks to assess a few different things: does the eBayed camera function correctly, what's the best film to use these days and the question of the paragraph above: with limited shots and no image review, can I get usable results?

Most of the time in the olden days I mostly used XP2, mostly because it combined the benefits of black-and-white (making even a dull photo look like a photo) with cheap C41 processing, even if it did mean getting prints toned anywhere from sepia to light green depending upon how much compensatory under- or over-exposure had been applied during enlargement and printing; generally monochromatic, anyway. Decent colour film cost too much and the cheap stuff (particularly the free things returned with sets of prints) looked universally dull (or universally dull with occasional extremely overbright greens in the case of some Fuji products). As a youth and student I didn't have the cash to experiment too much with too many variables so stuck with something which worked when it worked. There was the occasional FP4 or HP5, which looked blacker-and-whiter but which cost more to buy and process so I didn't get to compare different films' fineness of grain or contrast much, something I shall now try. Every now and then I'd test the latitude (if I thought I'd need some extra speed) but often found this exacerbated the tendency for XP2 prints to come back green and washed-out. Another thing I intend to test is the pushability of other films, particularly those which go into the realms where the D80 produces unacceptably high levels of chroma and luminance noise beyond the ability of Noise Ninja to satisfactorily mitigate, especially on a shot which is still mostly underexposed.

The work photo club is currently passing round one member's Nikon F301 loaded with HP5 as an experiment, so knowing if the results can be processed and printed commercially will be handy in a couple of month's time when it's been passed round those who expressed interest for their four shots each. Various Flickr groups over the past few years have included discussions online or at meetups on where to get things processed; mostly all of them eventually boiled down to "do it yourself if you want decent results" but (whilst the obvious film snobs said that straight away) there were a few mentions of the few local remaining facilities. For the same reason that I went for cheap film and had a Praktica BX20 I never got round to the darkroom-at-home thing, though had been interested enough to do some developing and printing during the extremely brief window after the art room at school was expanded to include a very small darkroom and before I left after sitting A-levels. Whilst the EPS charges through the arse through membership costs for the use of their darkroom places like the open-access Stills look quite reasonable for use for the occasional film, though in the longer term; to get the films developed and printed (and hopefully scanned in order to be able to use a couple as blips) without waiting a couple of months I'd need to pay someone.

Although Trumps are a lot closer to where I live and had been spoken of positively by some Flickrpeople I tried A & M Imaging of Stewartfield (for their lab) and Elm Row (where things could be dropped off). All I wanted was to get the films developed and have some prints and scans to look at and fiddle with. I went for the TIFF scan-option in order to ensure no compression artefacts were introduced and also in the hope that the image would have a higher colour depth for more resilience to curve-fiddling in Photoshop. A&M slightly beat Trumps on the scan-resolution-per-unit-cost, possibly the reason why I went for them. Unfortunately, when I went to pick up the results five working days after dropping them off they only had the XP2, the HP5 results having been left at the lab. Unfortunately I had popped along at lunchtime and had insufficient time to go via Stewartfield on the way back. Unfortunately the entity responsble for delivering things from lab to branch was now off sick and wouldn't be making any further trips that day, so I'd have to return the next day. I'd stressed that I wanted B&W prints from the XP2 to try and avoid any sepia/green tinging even if it meant losing the non-B&W-process cost-saving. A quick flick through the prints in the about-to-close shop before I paid for the one film'sworth revealed a nice thick wodge of successful exposures (in the olden days, getting back a half-filled envelope was always disappointing but was at least better than the indignity of the occasional empty envelope when the film sprocket-holes hadn't caught onto the winding-spool properly), accompanied by nicely-exposed-looking negs and the DVD of the scans.

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection during the afternoon the prints revealed several instances of what looked like clumsy differential contrast enhancement in the form of darkened haloes around very bright areas. The scans contained the same errors; at times it resulted in nothing more than a slight appearance of sharpening but (perhaps worsened by my having deliberately shot some high-contrast black-and-white-friendly scenes) several instances of horrible haloing and general unusability of the results. Another slight artefact (present only on the prints) was a slight but constant and distinct magenta-green fringing effect at the edges of bright white areas, further increasing the apparent contrast at light-dark borders. I was generally quite pleased with most of the shots (both in content and exposure) but really didn't like the addition of a digital-looking problem to an analogue image. On a couple of the tricky exposures there was also evidence of linear digital brightening, resulting in large areas of grey blotchiness where there should have been near-blackness.

I managed to get away in time to pop back to the Elm Row shopfront on the way home to see about getting the prints and scans re-printed and re-scanned but with all automated image enhancement options switched off if they were just going to bugger up the image. It took a bit more explanation than I would have thought necessary: whilst the green-magenta thing was only visible under certain lighting (under daylight the prints were reasonably neutral but it's not always practicable to view things under daylight) the over-sharpening/contrast enhancement was extremely obvious on the worst-affected areas and there's no way in the world it was present on the negative, especially when it occurred on the most sharply-focussed bits of frames shot with a lens with no perceptible chromatic aberration on a film with a reasonably level spectral sensitivity. The fringing wasn't a show-stopper but would have indicated the possibility of slight chromatic aberration on the enlarger's lens (if it was enlarged the old-fashioned way) or possibly anti-aliasing during printing from the verifiably entirely black-and-white scan. The shopkeep didn't seem to be entirely accepting my complaint but as I still had to get the other film's products I kept the XP2 output overnight to return to the Stewartfield lab the next day. Though it was quite laborious to do so I managed to get a usable digital copy of the negative in which the contrast-artefact-halo was demonstrably not present using a negative-holder made out of a cereal box and a lightbox made out of a table lamp and some tracing paper seeing as the power supply from my scanner is still hiding somewhere.

Before heading to the lab (on the way to which I bumped into G but neglected to get him to pose with outstretched arms) I printed a few blow-ups of the scans to illustrate the halo and printed off a couple of the rephotographed images to demonstrate the difference of an un-processed image with the prints. Now that I knew what to look for the same problems were immediately evident on the HP5 prints, again appearing as a general overenthusiastic and aggressive sharpening with occasional obvious darkening of otherwise uniform tones where they bordered a particularly bright area. Again, it took much more speaking than I would have though necessary to get the point across that I didn't like this effect and that it wasn't something present on the negative and that it had never happened before and that it wasn't really what I had been looking for in a printing and scanning service. Yes, the sharpening-effect added to the punchiness but it also made the print look like an oversharpened print from a digital camera, when the whole aim of the thing had been to get some pictures from film which looked like they had come from film. Expecting old-fashioned shine-a-light-through-the-negative-onto-light-sensitive-paper printing-enlargement might not be the done thing for commercial labs any more but (assuming that processing performed in the early 2000s which included a digital index print had been performed on a digitally-scanning and non-optically-printing digital minilab) I was still expecting something which looked like it came from film and which did not contain artefacts and effects not present on the negative. I know that I should expect to pay through the arse for high-quality proper-film-scanner film scans but just wanted a print of what was on the negative, and also wanted a scan as I have no scanner to scan the prints to use digitally. Eventually, I was able to leave both sets of negatives there in order to return the next day to see if they'd been able to produce prints and scans of them without letting the minilab's brain attempt to over-emphasize any differences in tone it perceived.

It's a good job that I like walking about the city and that the half-hour brisk walk to the lab from work can be viewed as relaxing. Popping back the next day it was explained that there appeared to be no way of getting the printing-and-scanning device to stop fucking things up. Although he'd not got round to scanning at least one of the source frames on a proper film scanner in order to be able to verify that the dark haloes around bright objects were artefacts not present on the negative he insisted that he believed me that they weren't there on the negative when I fished out a memory card containing the rephotographed digital enlargements, though he mildly scoffed at the fact that I was rephotographing the negatives with a digital camera. He really didn't seem to want to agree that the prints and scans weren't acceptable, despite repeated explanation of what I had been taking pictures on film for in the first place when I had a cheap and convenient digital camera already. I was starting to get a bit frustrated, mostly at the prospect of having to argue further in order to not have to pay for the prints and scans which weren't accurate renditions of the images on the films. Despite despising arguing I'd rather have argued than just paid for the printing and scanning with which I wasn't at all happy. Even though I'll only need three images for filling blip-gaps specifically left to be filled with film I'd rather take a bit of time to piss about with my cereal-box and macro-lens arrangement than post the (as it turned out, merely 8-bit) scans and have the image appear clumsily-sharpened. That's why there's a wee gap at the start of last week, though it'll be filled shortly. Eventually, I left with both sets of negatives as the cost of processing was already covered by what I'd already paid. In an attempt to demonstrate that I bear them no ill-will (despite the absence of a large disclaimer on their website's film-processing page explaining "WARNING: uncontrollable artefaction may be present on scans and prints") I asked how long they generally take for processing-only and whether they do have the facility to produce proper optical enlargements of specific frames from negatives if required. I can't fault them for the developing and fixing process performed on the film but really wouldn't recommend getting prints or scans unless you habitually over-sharpen your images or overdo the contrast enhancement to the point of halo-generation.

There's currently another film in the F80, this time being tested at ISO1600 to see how the results compare with the same film at ISO400 and the D80 at ISO1600. After that I might try a different film at ISO3200. Getting seriously into pissing about with film would be expensive, so I only intend to splish lightly around the edges so as not to affect the theoretical D700-or-equivalent upgrade justification fund any more than it is already affected. I'll go for the induction at Stills in order to be able to use their facilities for making proper prints of the odd good image (including any found on old negatives in the box under the bed) or using their frighteningly high-resolution scanner to get decent scans. In the absence of clearance to upgrade to a full-frame noise-beating camera body I'll have something to use in the meantime. It's really just something to play with but it would be no fun if the results aren't nice to look at; reducing them to beneath the level of output achievable with my cheaper-to-run DSLR would be missing several points.