"All those moments...”

"All those moments…”

Remember the film. It was an advertising slogan back in the day, I think probably for Kodak or one of the other main retailers, and a pretty good one as far as catch phrases go. Probably hard to imagine these days but back then, packing for the holidays, you might remember to chuck a camera in the bag but forget to check it had a film in it, or even if it did, had any more than a couple of frames left on the roll.

Back then the camera came out for special occasions only - birthdays, weddings, Christmas etc. - and often the contents stayed inside, unprocessed until the very last shot when the results could often come as a complete surprise. In the last days of film it probably saw more use - when high street minilabs made the whole print thing more convenient. But then digital came along and within a few years all of those snappy snap outlets were gone.

Of course the film didn’t go away, it was still there - all 160 years of it. For much of its first century it was still pretty much a specialist occupation. Even later, with the introduction of consumer cameras it was never the ubiquitous recorder of everything that today’s lenses appear to be, but still, over that length of time a large slice of human life and history is still preserved in a solid format. It might be in an old shoebox in a dusty attic, but it is still there, and very real and long lasting. Celluloid is a pretty tough material, although it is susceptible to fire, it can be cleaned up of most other elements and restored from the ravages of time.

So my point is, if you don’t already, why not take a look at film? We are all looking for additional sources of revenue in an uncertain and competitive market place. You don’t have to process it, just look at scanning and printing the stuff that already exists. The hard work has been done, and if you’ve followed this column and advice on using Photoshop and Lightroom to prepare images for print or just digital transfer, there is no real difference other than how you receive the original picture.

In many ways developed film is a lot easier to edit than much of the digital output you will be faced with. It’s not confused by electronic guesswork on point of capture. If you didn’t get your exposure settings correct you didn’t get a picture. And even the most basic instant film cameras had preset settings that virtually guaranteed a result - if you could see the subject, the film could too. Similarly, while it might not be as sharp as it could be, it was likely to be more or less in focus. And film is what it is - an obvious size rather than something that looks good on a phone but turns out to be nothing more than a thumbnail.

It’s only the traditional division between photography and print that keeps the two disciplines apart, and I’ve always argued that with the advent of digital the dividing lines are blurred and barely worth noting. It’s only the additional kit that is required, and that isn’t a major investment compared to others you may have made in the past. For under a thousand pounds you can get a top of the range flatbed film scanner that can scan both film and normal reflective items to a high quality.

Years ago even Xerox thought that scanning film was a useful addition to a copier and had a little projection device that could throw a transparent image onto the standard glass. The quality wasn’t great but the idea was good. Flatbed film scanners work by having an additional light in the hood to illuminate the film. The cheaper ones tend to have a smaller aperture and are slower, the better ones have a full A4 capability.

Photographers tend to prefer dedicated film scanners, which are very good, but limited to 35mm film strips. The advantage of the flatbed is that it can take larger film formats, or anything similar that can’t be scanned by conventional means, including old parts catalogues that used to be recorded on clear acetate, blueprints and any light sensitive sheets, so it’s very flexible.

So, if you don’t know already, it’s worth checking out your nearest film processor - if one exists - and what they can offer. The bonus ball is that an old film archive, professionally scanned, is likely to contain precious memories that would look good in large prints, canvas or other items you already provide as a service. A 35mm negative or slide should be capable of enlarging to A1 if processed at sufficient resolution, and on a suitably quality scanner.

There are less capable budget scanners that people can buy for as little as £50, and these are fine for an economy job if you don’t mind a purple sky and orange skin. As with anything digital, you get the results you pay for, and no amount of magic can do anything about it despite what some people claim. 

As an old film photographer who went digital I’ve spanned both worlds and have boxes full of negatives from the last century so I've always had a film scanner to catalogue the archives. More recently I have upgraded to a more top of the range one, in this case the Epson V700, now superseded by the V800 and V850 in the range, and this has the specification worth going for because it’s just faster and can handle bigger films and more of them at the same time. Loading the film is the most time consuming bit, and if you can save that time, and just walk away and leave it to do its job for half an hour it becomes much more efficient.

The other big issue with scanning film used to be image editing. It was the same in darkroom days trying to get a decent print out of a less than perfect negative and I always cringe when people tell me about the magic of film because I can remember the hours of painstaking work under the red light just trying to rescue one perfect print from a tray full of rejects. Scanning software hasn’t developed massively but Adobe has and that’s really made the difference, and why I’m promoting this topic. The trick is to just let the scanner scan, and do the trick stuff on Photoshop or Lightroom afterwards, whichever you are comfortable with.

As usual customers always provide some perfect examples to illustrate this column. First our friends at Classic Trial magazine had an assortment of historic colour slides and even older black and white negatives which were needed for print so came to us for help. As a vintage dirt bike rider I have the additional knowledge of exactly what colour a 1970s Bultaco trials bike should be, as well as some of the branded riding gear of that era.

If you are just dealing with an average photo you can probably get away with having the grass green and the sky blue as no one will remember exactly what the day looked like. But with something more specific it’s important to have a more accurate reproduction, which is where a high resolution scan matched with the latest software does the trick. The colour shot was taken in the Highlands of Scotland in May when the weather can still be a little wintery which is why the original may look a little cold and blue. By isolating the subjects and separating them from the background I’ve been able to both the warm the scene up but give the action some direct impact. I may not have the heather exactly the right hue but bike and rider are perfect.

The monochrome is from a decade earlier and there I have been able to make exposure adjustments that wouldn’t have been possible in camera at the time. The dilemma is whether to expose for the action in the foreground or the landscape behind. It’s always a compromise that would test even a modern lens. Because the balance is in the bike, the rest of the image is underexposed - what we used to call a thin negative where the celluloid is almost transparent in places. With a little bit of magic a much more interesting view is revealed.

The final example is actually more extreme, from a customer who has shot a Brighton street scene at night in a small thoroughfare that is quite dimly lit at the best of times. The film has been pushed beyond its recommended limits so it’s quite grainy in development but despite that retains a relatively seamless quality rather than a digital file which would create a confusion of coloured pixels. Unlike a negative, remember, digital cannot see black and white, the two extremes of the spectrum. It has to put colour in or at least a shade of grey.

But perhaps the most important difference between film and digital is one we don’t yet know anything about - how long will a pixel last? At least film gives you something you can hold in your hand, and doesn’t need the help of a technology that like the floppy disc, or even a CD may become obsolete and unreadable.

In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, made in 1982 long before digital imaging was a reality, Rutger Hauer has travelled the galaxy and seen amazing things all stored in his electronic brain but he knows when it is shut down for the last time they will all be gone forever. “All those moments will be lost in time” he says, “like tears in rain.”

martin@colourfast.co.uk

www.colourfast.co.uk