Last Summer I had the pleasure of second shooting a few weddings with the very talented Emily Scannell, including t his lovely wine country wedding of Kristina and David.

On this beautiful Spring day I have my windows open wide and I am enjoying the breeze and looking forward to all the upcoming weddings this summer while sleeving film negatives for archival.

This really makes me want to take one of Tanja and Tia’s week long workshops in the future. Tanja mentioned there might even be an upcoming one in the Bay Area. For those not familiar with Tanja’s emotive and over the top direction “through showing not telling”, you should check out some of her appearances in video including on the Film show on the Framed Network, particularly episode 5 on Directing.

I am finally getting around to blogging one of my favorite shoots from last summer. You can check out the images that got published over at Green Wedding Shoes! But here are some of my favorites…

I can’t wait for more shoots on the beach this summer!

These are a few of the many images I snapped while on my brief 10 day trip to London, Portsmouth, Oxford and Paris. These were all taken with a Fuji GF670 folding rangefinder camera.

I had the pleasure of helping the talented photographer Kati Decker of LightSplash Photography to shoot an intimate wedding at a private wine vineyard in the Santa Cruz mountains. The location was absolutely perfect and it was a wonderful wedding!

Earlier this year I took the plunge and purchased a Kodak HR500+ scanner. It was one of two being sold via a 3rd party from Classic Photo, a photo lab in Brooklyn, NY which was shuttering its operation. (Sad times!) These machines cost $40,000 new just a few years ago but I go mine for less than $2,000. I have been told that only 727 of these HR500 scanners were made by Kodak, which is truly sad. Unfortunately, a simple but crucial custom cable was lost in the cross-country shuffle. This cable was necessary to power and control the film strip gates used for automated scanning of uncut rolls, both 120 and 135. (This is the major reason why I wanted a lab grade scanner.) Thanks to the wonderfully helpful folks at Halse Imaging in the UK, I have finally been able to purchase the missing parts and test out the automated scanning. Until now I have been using the manual single frame gates for cut strips.

So far the results are extremely exciting. I can scan an uncut roll of 220 film in 15 minutes and get TIFF files with a resolution larger than the lab scans I have been getting.

Here is a quick comparison… (Full resolution HERE)

Kodak HR500+ RAW tiff processed in Latitude (left) and Noritsu scan from a great lab (right).

event designer: Lovely Jubilee // floral designer: Krista Jon // reception venue: Saddlerock Ranch // paper goods: Jen Simpson Design // rentals: Archive Vintage Rentals // makeup artist: Amy Clarke Makeup Artistry

Practicing with the Pacemaker Speed Graphic and the 152mm Ektar lens…

A Summer BBQ on the Patio

The concept of film speed and how to “rate” or meter film exposures is something that can seem confusing to people used to digital photography and moving over to film like I did.

There is no absolute and obvious definition for film speed. Over the years there have been different definitions used, but today the commonly used definition is defined by an ISO (International Standards Organization) standard. In the US it used to be defined by the American Standards Organization, which is why old cameras called it ASA. DN was the European scale. Using different standards the published box speed of films has changed without any change to the emulsion:

“The ASA standard underwent a major revision in 1960 [when] previously applied safety factors against under-exposure were abandoned, effectively doubling the nominal speed of many black-and-white negative films. For example, an Ilford HP3 that has been rated at 200 ASA before 1960 was labeled 400 ASA afterwards without any change to the emulsion.” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_speed#ASA)

One of the things that people love about film is its excellent retention of highlights. This makes it very popular to shoot with backlighting to get nice soft lighting on the subject (provided by the large light source of all the back scattered light from the surroundings behind the camera). The downside is that film holds less recoverable shadow detail than digital files. This is because film clips in the shadows somewhat like digital does in the highlights. Thankfully the clipping is softer and gradual (yay analog!) as the density curves (see figure below) flatten out and reach the “base+fog” level of density measured for the completely unexposed film base (plus slight fog created from development).

The goal in setting exposure with film is to ensure that the darkest area in the image we want to preserve detail in is exposed enough to be up on the linear portion of the curve with some density. (You need density for detail!) The deeper the shadow in the scene want to have detail (contrasty lighting) the more we need to be sure we don’t underexpose. That is accomplished by adding overexposure to our meter reading. When this is done on a shot by shot basis this can be thought of as exposure compensation. When you add some overexposure throughout a whole roll of film this can be thought of as adding a “safety factor” and rating the film differently.

Overlay of Kodak Portra 400 density curves (red) and Fuji 400H density curves (black).

Two popular films, Kodak Portra 400 and Fuji 400H, are both 400 box speed films. But if you look at the density curves (above) you will see that Kodak Porta 400 (red) has more abrupt transition from the linear region to the base+fog region than Fuji 400H (black). You will also see that the density for the same exposure is higher. (NOTE: One stop of light is 0.3 on the exposure scale, since the Log10(2) = 0.301029995..) For these reasons people generally feel more comfortable rating Portra 400 at box speed and choose to rate Fuji 400H a stop slower at 200. This is building in a safety-factor of one stop. Additional overexposure adds more safety and allows you to be sure you can open up your shadows and get that luminous look that is so desired these days.

Update 9/19/2012: I added a comparison of Portra 400 vs Portra 800. It doesn’t seem to me that the Portra 400 vs. New Portra 400 curve is noticeably different in the datasheet so not sure about its accuracy. It looks to me that Portra 800 is indeed a stop faster than Portra 400 in terms of density, but the lower base+fog values for Portra 400 and sharper transition in the foot probably make Portra 400 better for push developing.

Kodak Portra 800 (black) vs. Portra 400 (red)