<|-- removed generator --> The Online Photographer: Film Friday: Point-Counterpoint on Color Film Palettes

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Saturday, 14 December 2024

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+one for John Gillooly’s comments…

I much prefer the randomness of film grain to the orderliness of digital pixels.

All this talk about the character of different films keeps tempting me to shoot more film. However, my worry is that my clumsy editing whilst converting from analog to digital will destroy that character.

We need those besuited and cigar-chomping 6x7ers to be characters in a Netflix show.

I have to read more of you’re post about color. But what I’m responding to are your comments about being less educated.

Okay, you know the story, young well educated 25 year old shoots a man, and destroys his life! I’m 88, and I always respected, admired, maybe even envied folks with degrees. But the last several years have shown me that many of the people ain’t so smart. The richest man in the world has plans for this country that don’t make sense, and are dangerous. So what is education without critical thinking and a moral compass?

You are an excellent writer, a good explainer of things I’m not really interested in, and, though I've never met you, I know you’re a decent and good human being!

Now back to the color palette.
Fred

I am enjoying using Fuji Film Simulations while shooting JPEG's. Same notion as film, just rolling with the colors of the film sim and being happy with it. Lately, I'm enjoying the Reala Ace film simulation. (It's also nice to not have much image editing to do, maybe some cropping and minor adjustments to lighting and sometimes no editing at all).

I think people like film because it's familiar, or at least rings a bell with them. Same with black and white -- I think black and white photos especially ring with people who grew up with a lot of it. It has certain aesthetic qualities as well (which I believe are best shown in portraits) but if you came of age when everybody worshipped Adams and Weston and Arbus and Cartier-Bresson, then the taste of B&W may simply be embedded in your psyche.

But digital, especially fairly recent work, resides on a much more slippery slope than film work, where color was mostly baked in the cake, whatever cake you happened to choose. That is no longer the case, and in my opinion, color, contrast and other aspects of photographs once accepted cake-wise, no longer are. I almost never (I can't remember the last time) write letters to the editor, but I did yesterday, about a New York Times story on the town of Vineyard in the Dec. 14 electronic edition. The story was accompanied by several large beautiful photographs that appeared to me to be heavily doctored in Lightroom or Photoshop. In my letter, I simply asked a question: what is the Times' policy toward altered photos? I'm curious: does anyone else feel a difference here?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/us/mayor-vineyard-utah.html

With film, you know it might not be quite right, but you could make adjustments, because (at the time) you were so used to seeing photos in that kind of color, you could relate it to the real world. Now, the slippery slope I eluded to earlier, is considerably slipperier. You can make a photograph of the world look like anything, and most of it doesn't look like the real world.

(Everybody who knew how to spell the world slipperier before seeing it here, raise your hands.)

Fred- I'm sure you realize formal education doesn't bequeath morals, and critical thinking is limited to its application- the betterment of mankind, or the quickest way to a fast buck...

Chris- I'm even less tempted to shoot film for the exact reasons you state!

Color palette... sometimes limitations spur creativity. Musically I think of the restrictions inherent in the 12-bar blues; yet many people have created fine music within those confines. While the anything-goes 'free jazz' of the 1960s eventually turned into a creative dead end.
On a personal note,I began to shoot color film in 4x5 in the early 1980s. There was only one color negative film that would work at all, and the two color papers available (to me anyway) were not very different. So over time I learned what worked and what didn't, and made some photographs I was quite happy with. Time passed, Kodak made improvements in film, paper and processes, and my later color prints are brighter and more saturated because of it- yet some of those earlier images are still quite beautiful (to me anyway).
Had I big digital files and today's powerful software programs in 1982, with the ability to correct color at will, would those pictures look better today? Different, almost certainly. Better? perhaps not.

"(Everybody who knew how to spell the world slipperier before seeing it here, raise your hands.)"

Not me but we should know how. It's a great word but can't think of a better orthography. :)

As for the images in the article, I don't think I noticed oddities but when you point it out they do seem a trifle cooked. Not much though.

A really good question for the Times but now that they've decided a public editor is unnecessary I doubt you'll get a response.

Dave

I stopped shooting film because I don't have a darkroom and digital B/W doesn't look right to me. I even tried a Leica Q2 Monochrome. As for color, I am not particularly fond of the few color film stocks that are left. I never shot portraits so I never cared for Portra. Idon't particularly like how it handles, reds, blues, or greens. It's too desaturated for me. The only one left that I would use would be Ektar. The various Lomo color films seem sort of like novelties to me. I'm sure somebody is taking great photos with them, but I wouldn't be able to.

The lab costs for processing the color film is very expensive these days. The few times in the past I had film developed I didn't think they did a good job. Additionally if you are going to scan the film, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of film.

I have sort of resorted to what the other commenter does. I shoot Fuji jpegs and mostly use Reala Ace, Nostalgic Negative, and Classic Chrome with some minor adjustments. I like the colors and I don't have to waste my time sitting in front of a computer playing with various sliders.

I have basically given up on B/W. If I had a darkroom and could still make prints I would love to shoot B/W film again.

We truly are in the most nostalgic of all eras. Every new movie, medium or promotion has to remind us of the “good old days”. All the “qualities” of film that are now lauded are the same ones I worked hard to eliminate when film was our only choice.

It truly depresses me that we have lost all optimism about the future.

Well, I guess this is the spot for late comments about the color of the old War Memorial Center photo, based on how they look on my work computer monitor.

I like John C.'s edit to the color of the Shorpy photo, yet there's something not right to the sky's color. A smidgeon too much cyan in my opinion. Perhaps take out some yellow to improve the grass and the sky color too.

Compare that to the next photo (by jp41) in the featured comments section. I assume that is a digital photo, but the sky looks more accurate. The greenery also looks much better. Not as yellow as the grass in the other photos of the War Memorial Center.

I don't remember having a film photo I took seem so yellow-green in grass areas. From memory, the photos nearly always looked quite close to natural. I shot both Kodachrome and print film, with some Ektachrome sprinkled in.

When I (machine) printed photos long ago, cyan was the most difficult color for me to determine. I knew the colors weren't right, but would have to ask the one salesman who had previously done the printing. He could always pick out the prints that had too much cyan.

Magenta was the easiest for me. Asphalt surfaces almost always need some correction. (Of course the auto-correction of the machine didn't work too well, so a properly-running machine might have made these corrections automatically.)

I got pretty good at dialing in extra exposure, based on how the negatives looked, and seldom had to reprint the negative.

A friend had an early 2000s digital camera and showed some photos on his TV. One photo had a hideous yellow-green grass area -- almost like a neon color in brightness. I didn't say anything, but wondered how they didn't see how terrible it looked. Early AI perhaps? :>)

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