A Test: HP5 vs 5D: Or, is the film look bullshit?

in , ,

Backstory:

For the last two weeks or so I have become a bit, uh, obsessed with this matter of “the film look.” It all began when I posted an Instagram story reflecting on some thoughts from my time shooting exclusively digital over the last few months. In the story I stated outright that there is no such thing as “the film look” and that any qualities that we might use to define it can be pretty well emulated by digital manipulation. This wasn’t a revelation. I have held this position for years, ever since shooting a combination of medium format film and digital and noticing that I was able to make my digital images and my film images look at least passably identical. Grain, tonality, even the latitude/highlight rendition of film can be pretty well copied via digital sensor technology and digital manipulation thanks to the juggernaut that is technological dynamism.

To be completely honest though there is always something that keeps me from standing too firmly in the “the film look is BS” camp. My eyes are always drawn across enemy lines, so to speak. Or maybe it’s my heart. I have been shooting film for a long time and that old film affinity and the lurking sense that there is a rendering that is just special or unique in my film results never fails to unravel any overly certain dismissal of the “magic” of the medium. Whenever I go through my backlog of images I can’t help but feel a certain fondness for some special something that I find my film work rather than my digital images.

The fondness for film that draws me toward affirming the reality of “the film look” and my sense that it may be bullshit created a kind of internal struggle in the wake of broaching this topic online. The number of stimulating conversations that I had from both sides didn’t help quell my desire for definitive answers either. So, growing tired of endless theoretical speculation and the tension of waffling back and forth between my perspectives I decided to conduct something of a test to try and get a better hold on this issue. The following describes the test, results, and offers some interpretations of my findings.

Putting things to the test: Principle and Process

The principles of my test were relatively simple:

1) Shoot a number of photos on both film and digital
2) Develop, scan, and process my film images per my usual procedures to provide a sound baseline for a film sample*
3) Try to match the digital images to the finished film images

With this test in mind I made my way out to a local haunt of mine equipped with my Canon 5D MkI and a Canon 50/1.8 STM as my digital setup and my Minolta XD5 and 50/1.4 loaded with HP5 for the film setup, oh and a tripod (ugh). Both the film and digital versions were shot from the tripod so as to keep compositions as close to identical as possible. Shutter speeds were set from the Minolta and then transferred to the 5D so as to keep exposures identical as well. Both lenses were set to a constant f/5.6. The HP5 was shot at box speed, and the 5D sensor was therefore set to 400ISO.

After shooting was complete the film was developed in Ilfotec HC at a dilution of 1+31 for 6.5 minutes, given a water stop bath, and fixed in Photographer’s Formulary TF5. Film was digitized with a Plustek 8100 and Silverfast SE Plus at a resolution of 3600DPI, saved as a TIFF and given final adjustments in Lightroom. The 5D files were also brought into Lightroom and the finalized film versions were used as the guiding rubric for processing the digital files, the primary aim of course being to duplicate the film results as closely as possible.

*By working from a final film image I am hoping to circumvent the murkier issue of defining what exactly “the film look” is. A film image presumably has it if it is real.

The results:

Below are five pairs of images: each contains one film image, and one digital copy doing its best to duplicate the original film image. Can you tell which is film and which is the digital copy?

How did you do? Maybe you know already but if you don’t the digital is always on the left side if you are viewing from a desktop, or on the top if you are viewing from a mobile device. Now that you know, how did you do?

Looking over the finished pairs I think it is safe to say that the digital copies routinely get 90-100% of the way to copying the film images. In other words the differences range from barely perceptible to imperceptible. I’m personally convinced that if one was presented with a random sampling of these images it would be difficult to impossible to tell whether an image was the real deal HP5 or a digital fake (I am especially convinced of this because I myself often got confused about which image I was looking at in the process of doing this whole test).

For the 1-10% difference that separates barely perceptible and imperceptible there is part of me that wanted to say, “Ah, there is the irreducible remainder of film magic!” Were it not for some image pairs that were essentially identical this might have been a plausible answer. But the more honest answer, I think, is that this is an expectable degree of variance given the number of variables in the test. And given the number of variables we cannot conclusively say that the variance is necessarily some irreducible film magic eking out an edge over the digital counterparts.

An interpretation:

So what of the results, then? Stated most conservatively the results simply show that digital is able to convincingly duplicate film images. But what does all of this actually tell us about “the film look”? More than we might think at first.

At first glance the results seem to show that there is nothing special about film or any “film look.” Film doesn’t seem to be doing anything that digital can’t do with the right processing and the digital copies seem to say to film “Anything you can do I can do just as well, or better.” So, that’s it, right? The film look is bullshit. Case closed…right?

This seems like an obvious conclusion and it’s the one that is commonly invoked to dismiss the uniqueness of film, and in some respects it is correct to do so. But this quick answer also felt wrong in a way that I have been struggling to articulate for the last couple days. After much consternation what I think the test actually shows with more careful reflection is that there are some truths from both sides of the debate and that a deeper interpretation is able to show how the film look is, somewhat paradoxically, both bullshit and a very real phenomenon.

Firstly, from the bullshit camp: it is indeed bullshit in the sense that there is no mystical property of film and film alone that bestows upon images some ineffable quality that digital technologies are unable to duplicate. The results, I think, show that this view of film magic is demonstrably ridiculous. Taken as a purely objective set of quantifiable aesthetic qualities, digital is clearly capable of convincingly replicating the look of film to the point that it is difficult or impossible to spot a fake. This much is true and is a respectable salve against some of the misguided deification of the medium among purists..

But stopping at that common conclusion felt like a shortsighted dismissal of a subtler point we could glean from this test that points favorably to some of the beauty beloved by film shooters. More specifically there is an important point lurking in the third step of the process that we outlined at the beginning of this piece. That point is the subtle fact that I need to process my digital files in order to get them to conform to the results from film.

At first this sounds like a trivial point but we would do well to note that the very fact that I must massage and manipulate digital files (somewhat extensively) into matching the results that I get from film suggests by that very fact that film is, at least at some level, rendering images in way that is different than the output from digital sensors. Sure, the skillful manipulation of data has proven capable of generating passable simulacra of film but that very process also functions to highlight the unique qualities of film. The experience of this real distinction between the aesthetic tendencies of these two mediums is the seed of this phenomenon that we call “the film look.” So it seems to me that film lovers who insist on something special in the rendering are far from delusional regardless of what digital wizardry may be able to do with 1’s and 0’s.

Conclusion:

So, is the film look bullshit? The short answer is kinda, but also not at all.

Against the "Good Image" in Favor of Personal Vision

in , , ,

The Problem with Archetypes

I want to take some time in this piece to deal with an approach to image making that I find to be alarmingly prevalent as well as what I take to be the problematic aspects of it (or at least it should feel problematic if you care about anything but copy and paste photography).

The approach that I’m talking about is the kind of formulaic approach that seems to be especially prevalent among landscape photographers. You know what I mean, or if you don’t then start paying attention for the following and you’ll start to see it: So much of the landscape photography milieu seems to approach the process of image making the way one might go about building a house. One begins with a blueprint, and then sets about constructing a house on the basis of the framework outlined by the blueprint. A good photograph just becomes that photograph which most closely approximates the “blueprint.”

The blueprint here is what I will call the archetype. More concretely there is an archetype containing the ideal set of properties which comprise the “good landscape image.” This archetype covers everything from subject matter, to lighting, to compositional elements and beyond. All the would-be landscape photographer has to do is assemble their image following the steps delineated by the archetype, and just like that one has themselves a “nice photograph.” These archetypes are largely the collective aesthetic(s) established by the “past masters” of landscape photography. This is also what I mean to imply by the specter of Ansel Adams (to be fair one could substitute Michael Kenna, David Muench, et al to make the same point).

The problematic part of this approach, at least for me personally (a lot of people seem totally happy with this copy and paste approach as far as I can tell), is that these images are more often than not entirely empty as anything other than a recapitulation of the same basic archetype. Have you ever wondered why so much landscape work looks like it could have all been made by some small handful of people? This formulaic approach/the archetype is what leads to the monstrous cliche that is most landscape work. Everyone ends up making the same image because they are all working off the same basic archetype that informs their decisions about what makes a “good image.”

Even more troublesome than this is the fact that this recreation of the archetypal landscape image too often becomes the end in itself. The point of making photographs becomes, well, to make “good photographs,” as defined by the archetypes! Photographs as the end in itself. Rather than any compelling engagement with the subject matter (which many of the greats actually did) and the subsequent creation of genuinely meaningful work that comes from that meaningful engagement with one’s subject matter, we enter a realm in which the sole aim of photography becomes the empty repetition of these archetypes. We are inundated with images which, while certainly technically proficient, say nothing. And this is the deeper problem with the tyranny of the “nice photograph.” It empties photography of its meaningful potential, obliterates the capacity to do meaningful work.

Archetypes: A Personal Story

In the interest of not coming off as completely arrogant and condescending I do want to make it clear that this issue is something that I myself have struggled with off and on over the years, even as recently as, well, currently.

The earliest instances of my own personal struggles with this issue date back to my very first forays into photography. I, like most people that are just picking up a camera and thinking about taking photography seriously, often felt overwhelmed by all the creative decisions surrounding the kind of images I was going to make. I knew that photographing nature was important to me. So I naturally began digesting all of the landscape work that I could find on sites like Flickr, 500px, Instagram, even YouTube, looking for work that I found appealing, inspiring, etc..

And indeed perusing all of this work certainly gave me a kind of aesthetic foothold and helped me have a better idea of the kind of images that I would work on making. And so I did just that. And this “aesthetic foothold” gave me a target to work toward in order to hone my skills and grow as a photographer. But as I kept working it wasn’t too terribly long before I began to feel that something was amiss. To me it began to feel that there wasn’t really anything deeper to the images that I was making outside the project of making images that fit this arbitrary archetype of what I had taken to be a “good landscape image.” They may have been nice photographs but they were essentially meaningless copies of an abstract ideal, devoid of any deeper meaning.

Upon this realization there were two options. I could stay the course or radically rethink my approach to making photographs. Staying the course felt entirely too inauthentic to me, and I chose to really step back and think about my work in a deeper way. To think about what it really was that I wanted to say and do with my images and work on saying and doing those very things in my photographs rather than just repeating the same empty archetypes. To forge and express my own personal vision rather than the visions set for me by received aesthetics. This realization and the following changes that came about because of it have been some of the biggest breakthroughs that I have had in my time making photos.

So, What of Archetypes, then?

In conclusion I do think there is a place for this archetype approach. It’s just that I personally think the reliance on archetypes should serve a pedagogical function for new photographers as they learn to perfect their technical skills and get a feel for their own personal aesthetic. The archetype gives the new photographer a target to aim at before they have begun to tackle these larger issues for themselves. But they should ultimately be left behind in time as one grows as an artist, the way one eventually stops having to consult recipes when making their favorite meal. To cling to them rather than letting them go as you explore your own personal approach is only to place a limit on your own potential growth. The point from this essay to integrate into your practice is this: Do not repeat archetypes, create your own.

Why Monochrome? On Ansel and Black and White

in ,

In a semi-recent interview with Adrian, aka @aows of Instagram fame, I was asked the following question:

You are a B&W photographer, even though you share some color on your Instagram every once in a while. Why Monochrome?

While my initial response to the question, which can be read in the original interview here, was good as a very brief overview of some of my main thoughts on the matter I would like to take some more time here to expand on some of my answers, in large part through a case study of Ansel Adams’ work followed by some brief conclusions.

Ansel Adams: A Study in (Great) Black and White Photography

As I stated in the interview, black and white imagery has always been a deeply beautiful medium to me. Some of my earliest memories of being struck by certain images relate to my encounters with some of Ansel Adams’ work as a kid (a cliche story, I am aware). But, cliches aside, images like Clearing Winter Storm, Snake River Overlook and others definitely had a lasting impact on me. And in large part my tendency toward working in black and white probably owes much to these formative experiences which instilled such a love and respect for black and white as a medium.

More to the point here, there is something about Adams’ presentation of the monochrome landscape (and the presentation of the landscape in good black and white work in general) which I think changes our modes of experience in very interesting ways. In Adams’ black and white work we are shown a view of the world which is both familiar and yet different for reasons which can be difficult to pin down. The absence of color seems at first blush to be a small difference. But the impact of this subtle difference is visceral and contains some of the deepest import of black and white as a photographic medium. .

Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite, 1949 - Ansel Adams

Over the years I have spent time dabbling in both color and black and white, and over those years of experimenting with and reflecting on both mediums I have slowly come to some more solid conclusions on those difficult to pin down qualities of black and white presentations of the world. The short answer, stated both in the interview and above, is that black and white allows us to present as artists, and experience as viewers, the world in ways which are more difficult if not impossible within the familiar medium of color. At the risk of being overly simplistic, a monochromatic presentation, by the simple removal of color, opens up a space for a different encounter with the world.

To expand on this point, Adams’ above image of Cathedral Rocks in Yosemite would most certainly be a stunningly beautiful scene in color. But in Adams’ monochrome presentations we are thrust into that interstitial realm between the familiar and the unfamiliar. We behold the landscape in a way which we have and cannot ever experience outside the medium of the black and white image. By throwing us into that realm between the familiar and unfamiliar we are called to reconsider, to re-encounter our once-familiar world. The monochrome landscape calls not simply to be experienced as a picturesque color scene might, but to be considered, contemplated, encountered in a deeper manner.

I think this aspect becomes especially clear when one views Adams’ color work, and the necessary contrast that one feels between it and his black and white work. While Adams’ color work still comprises a beautiful body of work, there is a clear experiential difference between much of his color work and his black and white work. Adams’ color work, while still strikingly beautiful imagery, does not seem to elicit the same kind of response. Perhaps, as I would postulate, this is because it does not offer us that window into the unfamiliar that black and white imagery does so well. The world “in living color,” so to speak, is too close to the world of our everyday familiarity to spark within us that encounter with the unfamiliar that motivates that deeper engagement that was spoken of above. Put another way, one does not contemplate that meaning of the landscape in a color image. But one would be hard pressed not to in a monochrome image.

An example of Adams’ color work

Conclusion

The point here in highlighting Adams’ work, as noted above, is that I think it functions well as a case study on those particular qualities of great black and white images, and consequently such a study is a helpful guide in the search for an answer to the question, “Why monochrome?” Or, in this case, serves as a helpful avenue to expand on some of the answers I have given to this question in the past.

And in reality this treatment of the question “Why monochrome?” is not markedly different from what I initially put forward in my original interview with Adrian, but it was never supposed to be. The same key point remains: through the medium of black and white we are able to present the world in ways which push our experience into the realm of the unfamiliar. And in so doing we create a space for a kind of experience which has the effect of moving us to think or see differently about subject matter being presented to us.

In my own work such a quality is deeply important. As I stated in my short piece, Why Photography?, the moving force behind much of my work stems from my attempts to “…express, as well as I can, a certain kind of spiritual, religious, or mystical experience.” While such a goal can certainly be achieved within the medium of color, the capacity of black and white to open up that space wherein people can enter into these quasi religious kinds of encounters with the landscape is one that is especially important to me. That, for me, is the answer to “Why monochrome?”