Getting Negatives Digital

Recently I have been shooting a reasonable amount of film. This is both as part of a personal project that I started two years ago as well as for the fact that shooting film is fun. I started shooting film back in the early 90’s as a teenager so there is no problem with understanding how to use it. Back then though I had access to darkrooms where I could develop and print the images. At University I had an almost unlimited supply of film and chemicals as well as unhindered access to an excellent darkroom that gave me both black and white development as well as E6 development for transparency film. At that stage the best way to get your film onto a computer - if you needed it there in the first place - was to scan the film on a neg scanner or send it off to a lab where you could get a proper drum scan. A friend and I bought a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED together which I still have and which to this day is still considered the benchmark for desktop scanning (I still sell images through Getty Images of transparencies that were scanned using this scanner).

Story-Telling in a Sea of Imagery

The rise of photography and the consumption of imagery has been utterly inexorable. Photography is now 178 years old if we take the first official announcement of the first permanent daguerrotype image as it’s birth date. In 2000, at the absolute crest of celluloid film’s realm as the photographic medium of choice,  Kodak announced that 80 billion images were produced in that year. In 2015 we apparently hit 1 trillion images created annually, making something of a mockery of the 80 billion figure reached at the turn of the century. As we progress into 2017 it is estimated that we will produce between 1,2 to 1,3 trillion images. Just to be clear on this - That’s a thirteen digit number (twelve zeros)!

Love of Film

 I check the thermometer once more before noting the time on my phone's stopwatch and inverting the Paterson tank, followed by the usual tap-tapping of its base against the kitchen counter. I'm doing this so that air bubbles don't get trapped between the loosely wound celluloid film, leaving pockets that don't get enough of the silver dissolving chemicals that are sloshing around inside the light-tight tank. Fourteen minutes is up and I pour out the now blackened (dark from dissolved silver crystals) developer before adding the hypo solution we call fixer to the tank. This will then 'fix' the light sensitive silver halide crystals that remain on the film, ensuring that when I finally remove the film from the tank, the images won't immediately fade into a splodgy darkness. Five minutes later, unable to contain my excitement, I check the wet film against the light to see the faces and places I have captured shining back at me in inverse tones (it's always been like this, that sense of excitement and trepidation after developing a roll of film). Then, being responsible, I return the film reel back to the tank for a thorough wash.

Using Guided Transform in Lightroom

A few updates ago Adobe went and added one of their more useful updates to Lightroom CC. Often I am very critical of the way they update their apps, but the addition of the 'Guided' transform in the Transform panel is a genuinely useful tool that speeds up adjustments to architectural images. Essentially what it does is add the ‘Distort’ feature from Photoshop’s Free Transform to Lightroom while simultaneously making it slightly simpler or more intuitive to use.