And with fascinating journeys through books like 500 Cameras I saw the world embracing photographs. I learned that camera has not changed much - Just what's inside.
These ideas soon made it into my workshops and actually helped result in the EXposed series and then in the PHOTOGRAPHICS film. I learned vastly more about light as film trained me to slow down, see better and look deeper. Time passed and I kept talking about film along with my digital techniques and ideas.
The Manual from a Linhof Super Technika IV. I can get around 100-200MP of detail from 4x5 and a beautiful organic feel that digital somehow misses. The result was amazing resolution from this 60's era camera that has not changed much in half a century. The next step was to scan on my V700 using a wet scanning attachment and then into Lightroom and other tools for the finished image. A remarkable machine in which you load with a small batch of film and a very small amount chemicals and return about thirty minutes later to finished images, color or black and white. I needed to be able to get great images made and printed large in reasonable time for a reasonable cost. But I'm a digital kid and I have a workflow there. I have nothing against the traditional darkroom and I hope to build one when I have more space. I started talking about how I blended it with digital. Photo by Jason Eldridge.Next I started talking about film. It quickly draws a crowd and I'm happily chatting. Not just in my pictorials, but in my portrait work. People acted like I was a little crazy, but they still were a bit breathless when they saw my Linhoff Super Technika IV that came out around 1956. But I was not so into the romance, I just wanted the quality. People like John Canlas, Ian Ruther and a few others had also been sharing their passion for silver for awhile.
Many of the best Pictorialists never stopped using it. I was not the first to be out there rooting for film in this digital era. I react quickly before they move and release shutter. My daughter giggles adorably and I realize I forgot to wind the film. "It's blurry."īack in the twenty-first century we're making coffee and I grab my Olympus 35RC rangefinder to take a photo of my kids helping out on the kitchen counter. Forty-four years later my wife would stand next to me in the living room looking at a cover portrait from a 1968 magazine and say. Meanwhile The soft focus filter was in vogue. Popular Photography 1968, ad for the Contaflex 126.Ī few months earlier in '68, the world saw Charlton Heston tell his primate overlord "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" A classic was born, that would be somewhat tarnished by less impressive sequels. And it was indeed work, I picked one of the harder formats but it would turn out to be well worth it. So I bought a classic 4x5 Linhoff and went to work. At first it was for the simple reason that a well scanned large format negative could produce vastly more detail than today's digital. Loading it up for my travels to use it alongside digital. So I decided to go back and take film seriously. It was in some ways a downgrade, and yet digital does offer many advantages. Soon professionals everywhere were laying down their film for what were essentially 35mm SLR's with a bit less detail. It was fresh, exciting and before long, even practical. As I grew, digital did too and soon took over the game. That was around the time the Unibomber was captured, scientists cloned sheep and Titanic sunk into theaters with a splash. I had cut my teeth on it back in the late 90's. It was in the Spring of 2011 when I jumped back into film. And yes, publishers knew that bare breasted woman sold photo magazines. Topics ranged from the quality of drugstore printing to the latest spot meters. Pentax was telling us they made "fine photography easy." and the Polaroid swinger was happily swinging off shelves. Motor Trend had just crowned the GTO car of the year, Eddie Adams just made one of the most iconic images in history and in a few months the Detroit Tigers would win the World Series.
It's refreshing to see articles on how to make good photos, instead of how to fix ones that were made wrong.