Something Old and Something New
November 24th, 2008
That’s a new photo…but shot the old way…on film. I’m starting a new project inspired by the availability of a new way of working with film. Call it hybrid photography, if you will. I’m shooting medium format black and white film and having it processed at a lab that does very high quality scans at time of processing for a very reasonable price. About what you’d pay for regular prints. But the scans are really excellent. From my square negatives they come in at a little over 5,000 pixels square. Each file is about 74 megapixels when opened in photoshop. That makes them roughly the same size as the photos I shot at Lois Greenfield’s studio in NYC using her Leaf digital back. And all I had to do was drag my old medium format gear out of cabinet and buy a few rolls of film. A lot cheaper than a $30,000 digital back. Oh…and I did have to go buy new batteries for the strobe meter that I hadn’t used since I switched to digital back in 1999.
Oh…and the highlights don’t block up. And there’s no anti-aliasing filter to de-sharpen the photos. On the original scan you can count the hairs if you have enough time.
I learned about this new service at Ken Rockwell’s site. Ken has declared that “digital is dead” and film in this hybrid approach is the future. I think he’s exaggerating just a bit, but that’s his way. I’m very pleased with my first results and I’m working on refining how I’m going to approach this new series of nude portraits shot on film. I’m also going to try it with some 35mm film, both in black and white and with color negative film, just to see what those scans look like. And that will give me an excuse to pull my 60-year-old Leica out of the cabinet and shoot with it again. Wonder if the rangefinder is anywhere near accurate after all these years?
You’ll be seeing more things shot on film as I play with this. If you are interested in trying it yourself the lab is North Coast Photographic Services in the San Diego area. A direct link to info about this new service is here. I’m sure other labs will soon be offering similar services, if they aren’t already. But I can certainly vouch for NCPS as far as quality price and service go.
Who wudda thunk? Dave shooting film! Can the apocalypse be far away?
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