The Online Photographer

I'm an American, so with me it was Kodak. If you're British you probably shot Ilford, continental European and you might have leaned toward Agfa. (Those of you who grew up in Europe can tell me.)

I started out, in the "very very" beginning, in a tiny darkroom under the basement stairs, with Kodak Verichrome Pan film [CORRECTION: See John Shriver's comment below], Kodak D-76 developer, Kodak Medalist paper, and a little condenser enlarger with a crappy triplet. Call it sentimentality, but I loved that FDP combo (FDP means film-developer-paper, the three materials that determine the look of a handmade print more than anything else). I still have a soft spot for those materials.

It didn't take me long at all to replace that triplet.

In those days, ASA 125 film was medium-speed, not slow. Panatomic-X, at ASA 32, and Kodachrome 25 were slow. I very much wanted to "get past" technical issues and get down to work, so I worked hard and made decisions quickly. First I carefully compared the medium-speed and fast (ASA 400) films from Kodak and Ilford and settled on Kodak Plus-X. Then I made a similarly careful comparison of D-76 and several other Kodak, Ilford, and Agfa developers. It came down to a choice between Agfa Rodinal and D-76 1+1, and D-76 won. I didn't know some important things about D-76 when I was starting out, but I didn't know what I didn't know.

Based on my own ring-around tests, I shot Plus-X at E.I. 80. ASA, always pronounced "ay-ess-ay," one letter after another, was a standard that was officially determined by the American Standards Association using rigorous, highly repeatable standardized tests (the film was loaded into a tube and agitation was controlled by mechanically rocking the tube continuously back and forth). Exposure Index, abbreviated E.I., was any film speed that departed from an official ASA rating. 

I learned all this because I disliked the super-high-speed T-grain film P3200 in my first tests. Kodak explained to me that the "P" in P3200 stood for "push," meaning underexposure and overdevelopment and learned that the ASA/ISO speed for P3200 was actually 1000.  I was teaching photography and already writing for magazines when the T-Max films came out, and was asked to be a beta-tester for those then-new films. I got the first two rolls of Kodak T-Max 400 in North America outside of Kodak, or so I was told. So I had a little bit of inside contact with the company. I switched to T-Max 100 for a while, but ended up switching back. I "heard" around that time, '85 or '86, that eventually Plus-X was going to be phased out and replaced by T-Max 100. That had a chilling effect on my commitment to Plus-X. Not that I liked the film any less; I just didn't want to be orphaned, or forced back to T-Max 100.

It turned out I needn't have worried: Plus-X made it all the way to 2011, well after I had switched to digital. One thing I didn't mention above is that not only did I shoot Plus-X at E.I. 80, I also used a K2 medium yellow filter, a.k.a. Wrattan No. 8. It corrected the spectral response of Plus-X in a very pleasing way, especially with regard to skin tones.

But also also cut out two-thirds of a stop more light. So I effectively was using a slow film, and it told in everyday shooting—I really could only shoot freely in good daylight. So I worked long and hard to master T-Max P3200, shooting it at E.I. 800 with no filter. I felt liberated by P3200, freed for the first time to work in "available darkness" handheld, which had more or less been closed off to me before. There were two troubles with it: first, that P3200 prints and Plus-X prints looked very different, and didn't go together very well; and second, that I always "stretched" to afford nice cameras and lenses, and couldn't afford two identical bodies and two identical lenses such that I could shoot both films at once with bodies that were set and ready to go. I didn't mind that P3200 negs were difficult to print. That challenge, I was more than up for.

Eventually I bit the bullet and surrendered to Tri-X 400, which was what more or less everybody shot in 35mm. I shot it with and without a K2 filter for about a year and eventually decided I could dispense with the filter—it had less effect on Tri-X than it did on Plus-X. The switch wasn't all bad; my skills had gotten very good by then and I quickly mastered Tri-X 400 and got comfortable with it. I was also getting more comfortable with grain as time went on. Grain in even highlight areas was initially my biggest problem with Tri-X, but it turned out it wasn't so bad.

Of course, then they changed the formulation of Tri-X 400, and the Tri-X I had grown up with, and mastered, was gone. What I had feared with Plus-X had eventually come to pass, only with a different standard film.

But that was 2007, and by that time I had been without a darkroom since 2000 and had just purchased my first DSLR, which was my third digital camera.

The last film I had a fling with was Ilford XP2. I had tried Agfa's chromogenic film when it first came out, and loved the look, but found it tough to afford commercial processing. I did process a few rolls myself. I was working two menial jobs and living in a group house at the time. XP2 mimics the tonal properties of color negative film, with highlights, especially, replaced by dye clouds, and XP2 liberated me to shoot strong highlights fearlessly. I was reviewing medium format cameras for Darkroom Photography magazine by that time, so I mainly shot XP2 in 120. Although I shot a fair amount of it with my M6, which was my main camera at the time.

If I were shooting film today, I would probably shoot with a particular Ilford film. And there's a good reason for that. But that's a topic for another column.

Good light and good luck,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John Shriver: "Verichrome Pan was never made in 135 size, only in paper-backed roll film sizes and in film packs. Too low acutance, not sharp enough. Verichrome Pan had incredible dynamic range due to the dual emulsion layers, tolerating wild mis-exposure in box cameras. Verichrome Pan also had fantastic shelf-life, I'm using VP122 from the last 1973 production run with just a little extra exposure and development. It was absolutely optimized for the snap-shooter."

Mike replies: Wow, you're right. I can't even claim that's a memory glitch, either, because I've believed it for eons. It must have been that I started out in 35mm with Plus-X or maybe even Tri-X. I didn't own a 120 camera till I started teaching in 1985, at the earliest—more probably 1986—and I got into photography in a serious way in 1980. So that can't have been it.

However, I had been photographing since 1965, when I was eight. I think this explains it, because Verichrome Pan was indeed available in 126 cassettes for the Instamatic cameras, and an Instamatic 104 was my first and only camera which I got either when I was eight or for my ninth birthday. I think I was eight, though. My father then loaned me his Zeiss Contaflex B because he never used it, but not until I was older. Probably what happened it that I've combined two separate memories—my first experiences developing my own film and making my own prints, c. 1980, and my use of B&W film in my Instamatic 104. I still have a few B&W Instamatic prints including some that are B&W. Here are a couple of examples from 1967.

I'm going to subvert proper writing order in this post and put the conclusion first, because it demonstrates that this actually is a Film Friday post, which would otherwise not be obvious right away.

But first, a digression: TOP is written for practitioners—photographers—and takes their side, and champions their interests, and considers things from their point of view. I formulated this principle when I was a contributing editor of the old Darkroom Photography magazine, and the now-notorious Bob Shell, then of Shutterbug magazine, wrote me a scolding letter admonishing me that our job as photo magazine writers was to help manufacturers sell their products. Ever the contrarian, I decided right then and there that my principle would be to put readers first*. That's who I've served and written for and been loyal to ever since.

That was too long. Anyway: looked at from that perspective, it's important for film shooters in the mid-2020s to re-jigger the optimizing mindset, which I will describe below. The purpose and meaning of shooting film, and hence our approach to it, is radically different now since it has become an optional or even antiquarian pursuit. Many of the optimizing impulses of the old days and old ways have simply become unnecessary now. Just to name a few passions of advanced amateur photographers from the peak of the entirely pre-digital era:

• It was a mark of status to own the longest telephoto lens. But that was because long lenses were single-focal-length and had to cover 24x36mm, and were impressively large and impressively expensive. The guy with the biggest one won! But now, when sensors can be the size of a pinky fingernail, even this bridge camera of pedestrian appearance can be quite cheap and yet offer ridiculous telephoto reach equivalent to 1200mm on a 35mm camera! So there's no point now in sacrificing to own the biggest, um, protuberance for your film camera. You're not going to impress anybody. So give that a rest.
• Same thing with motor drives, in the days before they were built in and had to be bought as accessories. Gosh, guys with really big honking motor drives could shoot pictures at up to SIX FPS (frames per second). At some point the edge of the envelope was pushed even a little farther. Well, even some fairly ordinary digital cameras can shoot up to five or even ten times that. So if you're a film shooter now, you might not need an MD-4 motor drive for your old Nikon F3.
• Everybody wanted the fastest film speed (equivalent to ISO now), and would go to almost self-defeating lengths for bragging rights, using special developers and a technique called "pushing," whereby you'd underexpose the film and then overdevelop the hell out of it. It looked awful, if you want my opinion. Real Kool-Aid drinkers bragged of being able to shoot standard 400-speed films like Kodak Tri-X and Ilford HP-5 at E.I.s (E.I. stands for exposure index, and was the proper term for a shooting speed that departed from a film's official tested rating) up to E.I. 1600! Wow, impressive. I always hated pushing even then, because it made pictures look terrible, but even I could understand that sometimes people had to shoot in dimly lit gyms or dark alleys. But digital cameras now routinely offer ISOs that have to be denoted with absurd numbers like ISO 12,800 or even higher (we really should have switched back to an extended** DIN standard for sensor sensitivities, to avoid those silly huge numbers). So if you shoot film today, shoot at the ISOs that make your pictures look best. If you need to shoot the black cat in the coal mine, switch to your digital rig.

Well, I won't explain all of these at length. But a few more included the quest for the fastest lenses (pointless now, unless you like the bokeh); the finest-grain film developer for B&W (you're shooting film! It's okay for it to look like film); the sharpest film (phone snaps now are sharper than a lot of 35mm pictures); the sharpest lens (making an analog unsharp mask took up to two days in the 1990s when I published Howard Bond's how-to—now it can be done in seconds in Photoshop, and you have endless options for sharpening files); the smallest, lightest camera (that camera module on the back of your phone is a camera); the most expensive brands or marques with the best reputations; the quietest camera (electronic shutter is usually dead silent); etc.

You can of course do anything you want to, and if you've moved to buy a film Leica and hunt for the sharpest lens for it, knock yourself out. But I'd argue that very little of that optimization BS really matters much for film shooting now, and you might consider taking much of the accumulated advice from the past with a grain of salt the size of a salt lick. Go ahead and shoot with funky old cameras if you want to; use grainy films and enjoy the effect; buy a slower lens, it will be fast enough; lenses with faults and optical aberrations are characterful, not inferior; expose and develop for picture quality rather than bragging rights; you get the idea. Digital runs rings around film technically anyway, so, if you're going to shoot film, just go ahead and embrace it. That would be my advice. Celebrate its peccadilloes; enjoy its distinctive look. It's "slow photography" now, so all that anxious optimizing, all that status-seeking, all that mine-is-better-than-yours, can be left in the past.

The Optimizing Impulse

At age 58 I had a late-life fling with a woman I knew years earlier who had been my "dream girl" back in those earlier times. Getting to know her for real was not quite the picnic I had always imagined. I've told this story before so I'll be brief. Once, she was visiting me in my then-new-to-me house in Wisconsin, and there was a heavy snowfall overnight. We woke up to a gorgeous day, as often happens after snowstorms, with sunshine, exceptionally clear air, deep blue skies, and gorgeous clouds. My bedroom had a picture window that looked out over a large backyard, with rolling cornfields beyond a line of bare trees, all of which was covered with a blanket of lovely untouched fresh snow. I fixed tea for us and set up two chairs by the window, and she put on her robe and joined me. After a few sips of tea she asked to switch chairs. So we did. Then she asked to switch back. Curious, I asked what that was all about, and she looked thoughtful and said, "I have to have the best chair."

That's the optimizing impulse. When we have to make sure we have the best we can get, of whatever we can get.

I own a tube amplifier I no longer use. Tube amps as a category are obsolete as mainstream technology, but they're often favored by audiophiles who like the distinctive rich, dimensional sound they offer—I love 'em, myself. Mine isn't even a modern design (there really isn't any such thing, as most of the possible circuits have been pretty thoroughly explored), but mine doesn't even pretend to be the latest thing—it's an updated replica of a Dynaco Stereo 70, a highly popular mid-level amp introduced in 1959 that was sold mainly as a kit. The replica is all-new, made entirely with modern parts that are mostly higher-quality than were found in the original. I wrote about it quite a while ago, at this link. Scroll down for pics.

Not long ago I got an email out of the blue from a guy who had found that old post and wanted to know if I still had the amp and wanted to sell it. I did, and I did. But I told the guy I didn't want to go through the rigamarole of getting it out and setting it up and photographing it unless he was really sure he wanted it. He assured me that he absolutely was going to buy it. So I got the amp out of storage, unpacked it, and found the big box of old tubes I had for it. Made a list of all the tubes. He was enjoying the exchange and the anticipation, I'm sure, so he asked for more and more in the way of descriptions, pictures, information, and my opinion. A fair amount of time and work for me—you know how it is. It's what you have to do to make buyers happy.

Suddenly the lines of communication went dead. I sprang for most of the extras when I bought the amp, but it turned out the guy who built the amp and marketed it had started offering another little tweak as an option some time after I bought mine. My buyer had found out about this little extra (I don't even recall what it was), and had decided he had to have it. So the bargain we had already all but struck was dropped like the proverbial hot potato, with nary a word to me, and he went for the one that had the extra feature.

Had to be optimized! Never mind that it's a replica of an old amp from 1959. And was a mid-level bargain then and now. And is low power compared to similarly priced transistor amps. And doesn't take the most powerful, most accurate tubes (it uses EL34's, which I also love, although you can also "tube roll"—swap in—larger tubes). And it's already optimized, because all the cheaper parts from the original model were all upgraded in the replica—the transformers are bigger, the input board is revised, even the chassis is made from heavier and better stainless steel. So it's outdated technology that has low power that you only would buy in the first place because of its luscious, smooth, midrangey, full, rich sound—and thus already departs from technical accuracy in all kinds of ways.

But the guy had to have the best chair.

Anyway, I understand the optimizing impulse. It's common and rather natural. I do it. I'm sure a lot of us do. But it's often...sorry...really quite stupid. If you buy a modern version of an old 1950s steel-frame fat-tire cruiser bicycle, you don't need to remove the fenders to save weight. If you buy a new Ford Pinto for $2,021 in 1973, you don't need to pay $800 for a set of Pirelli racing tires that last only 10,000 miles (hi, Billy from high school). If you buy a budget Paul Reed Smith SE guitar built in Indonesia, you don't need to fret*** endlessly about whether you have the absolute best guitar strings for it, reading obsessively about strings and trying set after set in a Quixotic quest for the ultimate peace of mind. A pool cue is important to a pool player, but after about $400–$800, the more and more expensive ones just have better, more artistic decoration****.

There's not an exact, inflexible analogy to film photography here. But my recommendation is: if you're getting into film photography in 2025, choose carefully what you actually need to, and actually want to, optimize. Much of the hoary advice from the past that you will read and hear repeated all over everywhere is no longer actually relevant.

And if you want my advice as to what new film shooters might want to optimize these days, well, keep checking in here on Fridays. I'll get around to it eventually.

Mike

*Of course, one big result of that is that I am ignored by manufacturers, seldom receive embargoed announcements in advance, am almost never offered pre-production samples of upcoming new products so I can post a review on announcement day, and am never offered invitations to expenses-paid press junkets. You know what they say: Oh well. I'm okay with being independent. Make your bed, lie in it!

**Official DIN speeds only go up to DIN 39, which is ISO 6400.

***Did you like that one, Herman?  :-)

****I believe the Empyrean sold for $35,000. Could be wrong.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Hansen: "Your story about the amp sale ring very true to me and deserves a rant.

"In my experience would-be buyers of bargain or mid-level stuff can be some of the worst people to deal with, and it's one reason I don't even bother to sell inexpensive items most of the time. If hunting bargains on cheap stuff is what you do, then I don't want to hear from you. I'd rather throw things in the trash than waste my time.

"I once sold a cheap lens and the buyer cheated me out of the shipping, an inconsequential amount of money, but annoying nonetheless. Why did the guy degrade himself for pocket change?

"Putting lots of effort into providing more and more details and then being ghosted is a classic. I put a popular watch up for sale at a good price (a few hundred dollars) hoping to make a quick sale, and one person started the familiar process of requesting more info. Luckily a different buyer could recognize a bargain and snapped it up within hours.

"One man put up a 'wish to buy' ad, but then asked me to finance him. He didn't have the money ready.

"I suspect many of these 'buyers' just don't have the sufficient funds in the first place and just want to kick the tires a bit so they can tell themselves they got close to buying mid-tier item X."

James C. Chinn: "I am going in the opposite direction of optimization. I have been shooting digital for the last 20 years but recently went through my negatives and old prints and found the ones I had done with a Holga. I just can't replicate the dreamy look that camera provided with my Z7. Still have the Holga so I decided to order some rolls of HP5 and re-enter the world of film."

Jack Mac: "Optimization for film today is an enjoyable read. But did you take enough time to really optimize it?"

Mike replies: LOL. Probably not, no. Even if I take two days it's not enough time to rewrite the way I should.

Zyni: "I think this can be quite complicated. What I am going to describe has not yet happened to film photography because it is not yet 'alive' in the sense that large numbers of new film cameras are not being made, yet. But for guitars, yes, they are.

"The Fender Telecaster ('tele' below) is the most important electric guitar. It is important because it is (in its larval form which was not yet called a tele) the first electric guitar which did not try to look like an acoustic (or, in fact, a semi acoustic) guitar. If you look at a Gibson Les Paul, which was being developed concurrently with the tele, well, it is recognisably similar to, say, a Gibson ES-175, which is a semi. The tele is not: it is only itself. All later electric guitars which do not try to look like acoustic guitars have the tele to thank for this.

"It is a work of a genius. But the genius, Leo Fender, did not do this to invent the pure electric guitar: he did it to make it cheap. Bolted-on necks are cheap. The body is a simple, uncontoured, slab because that is cheap. The neck, originally, was a single bit of wood with no separate fingerboard made of nicer wood, because that is cheap (also it is not strong enough, so truss rods were added, but still many teles do not have a separate fingerboard). There are three bridge saddles, not six, because it's cheap. Everything is cheap.

"But all that cheapness made a fantastic noise, and is in fact a very flexible guitar.

"Well, I do not play a tele. But I know a man who does. And he had a choice: he could become a rich plutocrat and buy a real '50s tele. Or he could remain a human being and buy a replica. He bought a replica. And it is 'cheap' in all the ways the original instrument was cheap. But it was not cheap: it was not cheap because it is not enough, for instance, for the pickups to be cheap: they had to be 'cheap' in just exactly the ways that those original 1954 pickups were. Not cheap like the 1952 or 1961 pickups, which also were cheap but were not the same. And that kind of 'cheap' is expensive, because it requires taking to bits an old pickup and perhaps making the right wire and insulation and so on.

"Well it is not that expensive because it is a European guitar, not an American one (this is as well: today I look at my beautiful American semiacoustic and, knowing what so many Americans and American companies have made it so clear they think of women and minorities, of which I am both, I think perhaps I should sell it and buy a vintage Höfner). But it was not a cheap guitar.

"The world of guitar players is perhaps a more mature culture than the world of film photography: we understand as we have understood for a long time that what we want is not 'good' but 'right.' We'd like our teles not to hum like crazy, but if sounding like a tele means they must hum like crazy well, we will learn to stand far from the amp and face the right way so the hum is less. Because we want our teles to be right.

"So, yes, we optimize, but we optimize for 'right,' not 'good.' And I think film photography will become like this, if it is not already. Do people really want good lenses, or do they want a Cooke triplet which will be bad in all the right ways, and are people making very beautiful copies of those old lenses yet. I think they probably are, and if they are not they will be. Do people want good developers...or do they want Rodinal?

"So I believe that, already, film photographers are probably optimizing for 'right,' not 'good,' but they perhaps do not, yet, understand that this is what they are doing."

Richard Skoonberg: "Here is a 'best chair' story This is story from Tim Burkett when he was a student of the famous Zen master Shunyru Suzuki in San Francisco. Burkett was considering going to Japan to study Zen for a year and was trying to evaluate the most perfect Zendo (in this case, a monastery). He was doing a bit of 'comparison' shopping. When asked for advice, Suzuki pointed to a collection of Raku teacups, each handmade and unique. He said, 'If you try to pick and choose the best teacup, you will not appreciate any of them.'"

Mike replies: Thanks for that. Beautiful. Suzuki's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was a big influence on my life.

Analogue Lamb: "Very interesting article. Nice start to the weekend. The way you describe it makes me think that digital has, in a sense, liberated analogue photography. Practitioners of traditional photography no longer have to chase the perfect. They can embrace the flaws. Flaws = character. Gone are the days of Leica versus Zeiss on CompuServe."

(Mouse over)

I'm a film photography legend. A "legend" in modern parlance is any person who has pigheadedly persisted in any given pursuit for a lot of years, and has gotten old. "She's a neighborhood legend, she's been running that sandwich shop for forty years." "He's a guitar legend, he's been playing coffeehouse gigs in this area and giving lessons since the late 1970s." Etc.

But at least one thing is true: I do think I've forgotten more about film photography than most people ever knew. And that's because I've forgotten a lot! So that's accurate. When I asked the camera-lens polymath Rudolf Kingslake, founder of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester and head of the Optical Design department at Eastman Kodak, age 93, if he would write articles for the magazine I edited, he said, "Oh, I don't know anything any more." I was incredulous at the time—yep, he had forgotten more than most people ever knew—but now I know what he meant: that his knowledge of current practice didn't match the depth of his knowledge at an earlier stage of his career, and at an earlier point in the parade of history. Got it now, Rudy. (Rest in peace. He died in 2003, a few months short of his 100th birthday.) 

Self-deprecation aside, I put in my 10,000 hours and then some. In my early, obsessive period, I did such a deep dive into darkroom craft that my teachers in art school used to ask me technical questions. I became the de facto lab manager for the upper class darkroom, and when I wanted to try a cold light head, I bought one, installed it in one of the school enlargers, and put a chain across the booth with a sign that said "Off limits, do not use this enlarger." The teachers were so taken aback by this that they had to have a faculty meeting to discuss it. I simply explained that if anyone wanted to use it, they could, but I would need to teach them how first. They decided to let me get away with it. As no one else was curious, it became "my" enlarger.

Every claim or "secret" I read about, I would test experimentally. I worked doggedly to continually refine my craft, technique, and methods. I not only read current technical books, I set out on a survey of historical technical treatises as well, going back to the 19th century and even to the crucible years. I tired of that soon enough, but not before learning a lot. How much does one man really need to know about Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield and their Actinograph, as historically important as that knowledge is? Later I worked as a custom fine printer, making prints for professionals, archives, galleries, and museums, and for public display at venues such as the Monterey Jazz Festival, and rose through the ranks of photography magazines until I became editor-in-chief of a technical magazine for six years in the 1990s. Regular readers knew that already. What I might not have mentioned or emphasized before, however, is that there, at the magazine, I met a whole lot of people I could learn even more from. Not only that, if I got interested in something, I could find an expert on the subject and commission an article about it—for example, I commissioned the very pleasant, erudite, and gentlemanly Dr. Harold Merklinger, Chief Scientist of the Canadian Defence Research Establishment Atlantic at the time, who retired as that agency's Director-General, to write this article. And my position, such as it was, allowed me to talk to people I wouldn't otherwise have had access to. So, for instance, when the then-new Kodak T-Max films came out, I was able to discuss them with Dick Dickerson and Sylvia Zawadski. Dick was the head of B&W products at Kodak when T-Max films were developed, and Sylvia was the emulsion scientist who led the development team. I became one of the beta-testers for those films. I believe I received the first two rolls of T-Max 400 ever sent to a member of the public. Dick and Sylvia became consultants after they retired, and I enlisted them to write articles for the magazine.

There is one good reason to use the color hybrid technique that is common now: it allows you to use the cameras.

They ended up writing most of their articles for the magazine after I departed, but you get the idea. In these ways I was able to get much better credentialed experts to research claims for me. Er, I mean, us, of course, for us. We answered such burning questions as, does fixer really sink to the bottom in archival print washers? (No.) Do pyro-based developers really have special properties unlike any other developer? (No.) Did Agfa secretly change the formula of Agfa Portriga paper? (Yes.) Who invented the common system of developing for an average contrast index and then adjusting contrast with paper grade? (C.E.K. Mees—he's a real legend—and his assistant, Loyd [sic] Jones.) We also uncovered a lot of unexpected facts: for instance (I got this from Dick and Sylvia), conventional B&W films look best when processed very promptly. It takes about two hours for the latent image to stabilize, and it then begins to subtly deteriorate at about six hours, and the image is slightly but noticeably changed within a week. You see this deterioration most plainly when looking at film developed many months or years after exposure, but if you want the absolutely optimal image quality you should develop your exposed B&W film between two and six hours after exposure, or as close to that as conditions allow. And a week at the most. (Yes, I had to test it.) That's just one example out of many.

Much of that information and expertise goes begging now. No one needs to know it any more. Or it's obsolete; or it pertains to products no longer made; or, ignorant pseudo-facts have overtaken real facts in the current conventional wisdom (entropy never sleeps!), and the issues would need to be argued and proven all over again, which I personally have neither the patience nor the energy for. (That happens a lot in photography, which we might cover later.) 

What kind of film would a film shooter shoot if a film shooter must shoot film?
So I'd like to address one little question today. It's a minor point, and it's absolutely up to any individual, but here it is:

Color or B&W?

Before I address that, let me say that this is all mainly for the benefit of young, upcoming, entry or re-entry photographers. For the record, I am on your side—you're one of us. You might not know you're joining the ranks of "us," an amorphous, disparate group of individualists, intrepid souls, and heroes of the visual imagination I refer to casually as Photo-Dawgs, but I know you are entering those woods. At least some of you are. A few of you*. All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here**! If that sounds vaguely menacing, well then it does. I'll refer to this group as the Y/N, short for "young and/or new." If you are O/O, don't feel offended, because I ain't talking to you.

Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual
Archives, Physics Today Collection

Rudolf Kingslake, 1903–2003. The
first paragraph here is interesting.

I've heard—from lab owners, who should know, but at second hand—that many Y/N film photographers shoot color film, get it processed and scanned, and throw away the negatives right at the lab counter. This in not, in my opinion, film photography. It's a form of hybrid photography, which is a related but different thing. Most such people, I'm told, shoot color film. Many of my readers have opined that shooting color when you shoot film makes no sense whatsoever; you end up with a digital file just as you do shooting digital, and yet your visual results a.) don't look as good and b.) are much less amenable to post-processing.

My own opinion, which I've voiced before, is some version of "Color came of age with digital, but B&W was already perfect" (Carl Weese said that first, or some variant of it***). My take is that if you're going to shoot film, be hardcore. Go all the way. Shoot conventional (i.e., not chromogenic) B&W film, develop it yourself at your kitchen sink, and make prints under an enlarger. Then scan those, in a flatbed scanner, to get the images online. I'll leave the arguments pro and con for another time. Most of them boil down to some version of this: why do something half-assed? Don't be gutless. Don't be faint; don't be all whiny and whimpery and weak-dishwater about it. Yeah it's hard. Some people like hard. People jump out of planes or go flying in those insane squirrel suits. People climb mountains when they don't have to. People try slick tricks 400 times so they can post it on IG the one time it works. People master difficult and arcane arts and skills and crafts all the time. Because some things that most people consider a pain are fun to the chosen few. (See * again.) If you're going to shoot film, go for it. Go the whole way there. Don't just cross the ocean: step ashore.

Accordingly, I used to agree with those who said it makes zero sense to shoot color film in old film cameras. B&W is so much more expressive, because it has so many different "looks" depending on how you expose and develop it, such that it rewards you for doing your own work, whereas color film is just a set process that a lab can do better than you can.

But I only used to agree with the argument that it's pointless to shoot color if you're going to shoot film. That point of view has a lot going for it. But then I thought about it some more. Now I think there actually is one really good reason to use the color hybrid technique that is apparently common now: it's that it allows you to use the cameras. Because you can divide the practice of photography roughly into two main streams: you can care more about the results; or, you can care more about the experience and the process. It's usually assumed that the final result is the important thing, but who says so? Who's to tell us which we have to give more weight to? Old MMM (metal, manual, mechanical) cameras are clever, pleasing devices that enjoyed the better part of a century's worth of development and refinement. They can be very satisfying to operate. They're a breath of fresh air after using insanely complexified digital compu-cameras that completely bury the basic parameters behind layer after layer of sophistication. Mazda, the car company that is devoted to being a good corporate citizen of Hiroshima, used to have (or still has? I don't know) an advertising slogan, Romanized as jinba ittai (人馬一体), that translates roughly to "horse and rider are one." Back in the film era, I used to love a very specific feeling that I would get after using a film camera for a while, and it could be called jinba ittai. I felt the camera was completely under my control, and operating it became second nature. It got so I could do it without thinking. It became natural. Smooth. Fluent. Instinctive. And it didn't make up its own mind as to what it wanted to do; it was completely responsive to what I wanted it to do. No nannying, no second-guessing, no hidden algorithms or behind-the-scenes features that help you some of the time and frustrate you at other times. There's nothing wrong with today's digital cameras if that's what you like or need, or if you're focused mostly on results and just use the cameras you need to. But there's also nothing wrong with using beautiful old film cameras because you enjoy the experience.

That's my advice to the Y/N—and they don't even need my advice. You've heard their expression "you do you"? They do them.

But they should listen to what I say anyway, because, you know, I'm a legend.  :-)

Mike

*Because devotees in any field are rare and few.
**Sign above the gates of Hell in Dante's Inferno. The top illustration is one of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Canto I.
***Of course Carl might say that if you're going to "go all the way," you should use an 8x10 view camera and make platinum/palladium prints.

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Dan Khong: "There is another good reason to shoot film (even if you do not have the time or opportunity to go all the way under the enlarger) is this: B&W films are very stable under the right storage conditions, and can be said to be archival! So for as long as I have those strips of negatives to rescan, the HD can crash or my laptop can conk out, and I will almost never lose my images (hopefully the house does not catch fire)."

Keith B.: "I was exposed early on to the concept that real, professional-level photography required the highest possible level of control of the medium. On film, starting out in the early 1970s, I shot mostly color, and some B&W. When I got my first digital camera, I was delighted to be 'in charge' of the color rendition, contrast, brightness, etc...something not available to the kid (me) shooting Kodachrome 25 in order to get that oooh-ahhh Ernst Haas-like color back in the 1970s and 1980s. Seeing today's Y/N shooters posting their color film shots on social media (Meta's Threads in this case) made me realize that, at least in my imagination, I miss the idyllic simplicity of not being able to control the color, contrast, etc. Things were simpler then."

Harry B Houchins: "I began my photo journey in 1965 using the GI Bill at the New York Institute under David Vestal. I moved on to the School of Visual Arts under Ralph Hattersley. I worked in the New York fashion industry for awhile then worked in various galleries in the city. I finally left New York City in 1975 for Oregon. In that time of experience and exposure I never truly became proficient in the darkrooms—no, not ever. In my own work I stopped making prints. I loved Portriga Rapid and Brovira but never felt I did it justice. A hell of a thing to admit, but there it is. I saved my negs until such time as the gods created a digital world and I could make the images I saw in my mind. I didn't know it was coming. But, it came. Your column today made me think of those years. Thank you. I don't miss a minute of those hours in the darkroom."

Bear.: "I’m lucky in Melbourne Oz. Big film revival going on with lots of little hand-run labs popping up. I don’t have enough time to do my own darkroom work any more. But I’m going to try a hybrid B&W model—have the negs lab developed and scanned—do my proofing digitally—then see if I can get analogue prints from the negs to match what’s in my head. I suspect it’s trying to scratch a mosquito bite with a feather duster, but best I can do."

Greg Heins: "I’m reminded of a chat with someone who teaches photo at a prep school. Lots of interest in traditional black and white. And he said that when the kids pull the print out of the fixer onto the whatever-the-name-is-for-the-heavy-leaning-piece-of-glass [viewing board —Ed.] and turn on the white light, they promptly take out their phones and make a photo of the print so that they can send it to their friends."

Gary Nylander: "Good article Mike. I once observed a young woman taking photos with a film camera from the deck of a B.C. Ferry. Every time she took a photo she would slowly and methodically advance the film using the film advance lever, she seemed to be taking her time as if she was savouring every second of using her film camera."

Christopher Perez: "Thank you for this trip down Memory Lane. Yes, we worked so hard for such esoteric knowledge, only for it to become obsolete. 'Did Agfa secretly change the formula of Agfa Portriga paper? (Yes.)' I was working at Samy's Camera photolab on Sunset Blvd. at the Cross Roads to the World, where we went through a lot of Agfa Portriga. We printed many exhibitions and portfolios for LA photographers on that paper. It had such a gorgeous nutty-brown tone and beautiful blacks to it. My favorite photograph of my grandfather has stayed with me to this day and it's still a joy to look at. Around the time I quit Samy's to return to UCI to complete my computer engineering education, things changed, and the Agfa that we all loved and used so much of was no longer the same. Never could figure out why until I read your comment. Keep up the great work."

Luke: "Damn. You should break a rib more often. I was afraid your 'early-onset rigor mortis' would take a lot longer to overcome. You know I agree with the anti-film rant, but there's something else here. You speak of 'insanely complexified digital compu-cameras that completely bury the basic parameters behind layer after layer of sophistication.' To me, a recent digital camera is so good that it lays bare all those basic parameters, and makes them easier to learn from and take advantage of. I'm a tech geek from way back, but I can ignore all the 'layers of sophistication' and just see photos in the (EVF) viewfinder, and control the focus, aperture, and speed like with any camera."

This is not likely to be useful to anyone beyond a tiny core group of eccentrics: film photographers are a tiny minority to begin with, and I understand most Y/N (young/new) film photographers have their negatives scanned and then go from there. So nobody does darkroom printing any more, for an n>zero value of "nobody." But I thought I'd mention it just in case it's suggestive of anything else that might be helpful.

As a photographic craft enthusiast > photography teacher > custom printer > darkroom expert (I was on the staff of, and then Editor of, and then a columnist for, several darkroom magazines back in the day), I observed over the years that people's personal temperament determined, as much as anything, their preferred working styles. To funnel the many types into two bottles, let's say one type liked to work loose, freewheeling, and fast, and the other liked careful control and craftmanship.

So I decided I would periodically force myself to do opposite exercises that covered each, so as not to get cornered into one set of skills at the expense of the other.

The first exercise was that every now and then I'd print some number of negatives right after picking them from the contact sheet, working fast. That is, no workprint stage. The workprint stage was to print images on anything from 4x5" to 8x10" resin-coated paper (paper didn't come in 4x5" sizes; that's an 8x10" sheet cut into four) and then using those to choose what to make a fine print of. Workprints could also be used for editing and sequencing. So for the exercise I'd just pick a few negs right off the contact sheet and give myself two pieces of good fiber-base [sic] paper to make the print. I printed enough that I could get in the ballpark without a test strip. The first whole-sheet print was my best guess; the second one had to contain any corrections as to density or contrast, and any burning or dodging—just winging it. I wouldn't stop to contemplate in between. One print, look at it for a minute or two, second print. Then that was that and I'd move on. That was the fast-and-loose exercise. I got surprisingly good at it.

And by the way, that's about how professional custom printers at labs worked, although they might use sophisticated tools, such as light meters under the enlarger, to get to the guide print stage. The lab wouldn't make money if they took half an hour and ten sheets of paper to make one print.

For the second exercise, the care and control side of the coin, I'd print more like Charlie Pratt. Here's Ralph Steiner from the foreword to the book Charles Pratt: Photographs (please note that the cover photograph is a picture of bramble!):

He [Charlie] came one evening fifteen years ago to a photographic discussion group which I sort of ran. We were looking at a couple of dozen rather ratty photographs, which had been brought in by a pleasant week-end photographer, who boasted: 'I knocked off these prints in just one evening.'

I was horrified by the prints, by the idea of two dozen in an evening, but mostly by the sacrilegious 'knocked off.' I was afraid of what might slip off my sometimes acid tongue, so I said: 'Charlie, why don't you tell us how you go about making a print.'

Rather shyly he told the group that he would take half to a full day to make from four to six rather good proof enlargements from one or at the most two negatives. He told the group that he would mount them all, and stand them up on a railing in his workroom, and would look at them for a month or so. Then he exploded into his normal, earth-shaking laugh, and said: 'I don't mean that I stand in front of them for a month, I leave them up for a month, stop to look at them some time each day to see how I feel. One day an idea will hit me how I want to print them, and I'll really go to work. Then I'll spend time on them.' That was Charlie.

For these prints, I resolved to take as much time, and "spend" as much in materials, as I needed to make the absolute best print I could make. Sometimes it would take a Pratt month and dozens of sheets of expensive paper. I might start by spending a whole evening making a great print, but then think about it for a week, perhaps deciding on a different paper or toning, and then do it all over again. Once I spent two successive days on one 8x10" print—not a total of 16 hours, but perhaps 10. I would just work until I had it exactly right.

Both methods eventually sort of collapsed into the middle. The "fast printing" style made me more decisive about getting down to the result, more businesslike; and the "slow printing" exercise encouraged me to spend more time and paper if and when a negative demanded it. Learn how to work fast and then slow down when you need to.

But the thing I liked about this, as I say, is that I didn't feel like I was merely being a slave to whatever my temperament happened to be, whether breezy, loose, and not very particular, or slow, methodical, and careful. Both methods had lessons to teach me; it was good to be familiar with both ways of working. And by the way, if temperament leads you strongly to one end or the other of this (or any?) spectrum, would that make it more valuable or less valuable to consciously practice and learn from the opposite? I suspect the former. We can always gain from learning in ways that don't come naturally to us.

For the record, I think I lean toward "slow, methodical and careful," but I know that to some extent I encompass both extremes in my own temperament. I lack patience and I want my working methods to be easy and efficient; but I'm also fastidious and contemplative and I like things to be right.

I did a parallel pair of exercises with shooting, too. But that's another "Friday."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Luke: "All of these processes apply to digital. I make a fairly quick pass through the latest dump from the camera, but I also periodically go through older photos and sets to see what I missed. I usually find a couple that make me think 'I can do better.' These, I spend some time with, and maybe try varying approaches."

Ira Sacher: "I was Arnold Newman's printer/assistant for several years. No test strips, etc. Arnold liked a full 14x17 print that we looked at wet and to which we made corrections. We moved slowly. He was a delight to print for, calm, meticulous...."

Terry Letton: "Apropos of absolutely nothing you’ve written of here but anyway. I took a roll of Kodak C-41 process black-and-white film to a local chain drugstore for processing, as I have a good scanner if there is something I actually want a good print of. The theory is that the volume guy should have the freshest chemistry. Well, I discovered the fly in the ointment. Reading the claim ticket, buried in the finest print (font borrowed from unsubscribe buttons), 'you will not get your actual negatives only a CD.' I’m actually hoping there is nothing any good on that roll."

Glenn Allenspach: "Mike, this post should be useful for anyone who prints, film or digital. In my own darkroom days, I worked like your fast and loose type, mostly because I hated pouring out the chemicals and pouring them back again. With my computer and printer, I feel much freer to run one or a few work prints and mull them over a while before getting into the weeds. It also saves me from wasting time on a weak image if I get tired of the work print, or opens one up that I didn’t feel too strongly about at first."

Mike Fewster: "An aside. From my cynical and age-influenced observation, I've also noted that the young film-camera crowd have their images scanned and then digitally post processed and digitally printed. Can anyone see any point in this? Further, in Japan I saw lots of youngies toting venerable film cameras but I saw few shots being taken with them. A fashion accessory or a film renaissance?

"I'm with Mike on the craftsmanship of the print. I can see a niche but significant future market foe analog images. Shot with film and darkroom printed. Such images will retain a craftsmanship provenance that distinguishes them from digital/manipulated/AI images. I can see, well, I hope I can see, a different market emerging for these images. In time, I think older analog printed images will have a higher value as well."

Mark B: "Hooray for Film Friday! I’m more in the slow methodical camp, though every once in a great while I make a particularly easy-to-print negative that needs only a test strip and a final print. Paying attention to making a good negative definitely pays off when I try to coax a print from that negative. I think Saint Ansel wrote something along those lines."

Steve Deutsche: "I find that these approaches apply to digital printing as well—even the 'watch the print for a month' technique."

David Brown: "I can certainly identify with this post. In the 1980s, I was employed by a security company managing their darkroom and hundreds of cameras in almost 100 locations. The cameras shot 100-foot rolls of 35mm film. Most of the work was 'test shots' made by me, and 'suspicion shots' taken by bank tellers and nervous jewelry salesmen. There was the occasional actual 'incident.' Processing tens of thousands of feet of film and making hundreds or thousands of prints, I became very efficient in the darkroom. The quick and dirty method. In my own work, I strove to be methodical and take as much time and material as needed when making prints.

"Somewhere over the years, the two merged. I work fast, but I make proof prints, test strips, evaluate changes, experiment, and often wait a bit before making a final print. In teaching, I tried to split the difference as well. Ironically, there was usually not enough time.

"Photography is not for the faint of wallet! Perhaps my being married to a painter helped me with this. I know the cost of canvas, paint, brushes, etc., and most photo materials pale in comparison."

David Aiken: "I've just started reading Stephen Shore's Modern Instances. His introduction does not address artist statements but it does address why and how some photographers have declined to talk about their intentions and work. Those statements seem more to the point to me. Since Lee Friedlander's comment about how he worked has been discussed, Shore's account of Friedlander's response to the question, 'What were you thinking when you took this picture?' at a slide presentation of his American Monuments series at Cooper Union might be interesting. Shore quotes Friedlander as saying 'As I recall, I was hungry.'"

Mike replies: That's good, albeit more Winograndesque than Friedlanderian. (The two were great friends.) I've always liked that attitude, which Elliott Erwitt has in spades as well—the "they're just snaps" attitude, as a counterbalance to artspeak, pretension, and opacity. Curiously, there's depth and profundity in it as well.