Cutting edge film and digital in 2020.
After a twenty year gap, I’ve been taking photographs on film again. Earlier this year I’d started toying with the idea of buying a second hand Hasselblad 500. It was the camera of my dreams when I was growing up, but totally unattainable to a teenager in a Dublin working class family. Even though they’re not manufactured any more, pre-owned Hasselblads and lenses in good condition are now cheaper than they used to retail. I picked up a Hasselblad 500cm with the ubiquitous 80mm they sold with, and I added a 50mm lens for wide-angle photography.
If you use a modern full frame SLR or APS camera, you might be surprised to see me write “50mm” and “wide-angle” in the same sentence, but the 500cm is a medium format camera. Each shot is exposed on a 61mm x 61mm square of film, or about 2.5 inches square in old money. That’s absolutely huge and it gives lenses super powers. Much more is captured in the frame, and there is a greater range of depth of field, which is the amount of space and objects that are in focus. Because the film is bigger, the photos are much higher fidelity than usual and can be cropped or blown up. For all of these reasons, medium format, and Hasselblads in particular were the choice of studio, portrait and landscape photographers for a long time. Many glossy magazines and billboard agencies would even stipulate it.
You’ve almost certainly seen a Hasselblad 500. They now show up in period TV shows and movies set anywhere between about 1960 and 2000 when the director wants to show a “real professional” photographer. It seems like every camera in “The Crown” is a Hasselblad, same on “For All Mankind”, which is appropriate enough because it was Hasselblad cameras that NASA sent to the moon.
When you see one, you might notice a few things. First they are incredibly simple. Just a square black cube, sometimes with silver trim, and a lens on the front. Unlike most cameras you see, they’re designed to be held at waist level, and the photographer looks down into the view finder from above.
In this photo through my viewfinder, you can get an idea of what that looks like, but not what it feels like. Because both of your eyes can see through the viewfinder, everything is stereo vision and has real depth to it. But since the lens is also either magnifying or demagnifying things, it is as if the real world has been made a diorama in your palm. The feeling is super real and surreal at the same time. When you move the camera, you quickly notice something else. Left is right and right is left. Everything is backwards because you’re looking directly at a mirror, and not through a view screen or prism. It takes some getting used to.
In my viewfinder above there’s a square inset. That’s to indicate how much of the image that a digital sensor will cover. I have a digital back that can be attached instead of film. but with the regular film back the entire area of the viewfinder is what ends up on film. As I said, it’s absolutely huge, and it’s square.
When you press and then release the shutter button, the shutter closes, the mirror goes up, the shutter opens to whatever aperture you have set, and then the shutter closes again, and that’s one photo taken. You then have to wind the crank to lower the mirror and open the shutter again, so that you can take another photo, and this winding also puts tension in the spring that drives this whole dance for the next photo. It’s all mechanical. There are no batteries, flash, metering, or any fancy aids. Just a well constructed light box.
To get the exposure right, I bought a Sekonic light meter. You tell it your film’s speed, point the scope at, or hold the ball near, what you want to be well exposed, and it can tell you what combinations of aperture and exposure time are going to work.
This whole process of very intentional composition, metering, and then setting is exactly why I wanted to shoot on film again. I want to go back to basics and develop more confidence with the technical details of taking photographs, so that I can focus instead on what’s in the shot. With no feedback in the moment, it takes a few days to send off and receive back developed photos. I’ve been using the Old School Photo Lab for their excellent processing and scanning (with a quick turnaround), and I’m already starting to trust myself much more. I’m also working on a documentary photography project that is going to take quite a while, and shooting it on film appeals to me for aesthetic reasons.
The results have been surprisingly great and predictably frustrating. Film chemistry has come a long way in the last 20 years. Movie directors and cinematographers have always been the biggest customers of film stock by volume, and I guess there’s been enough continued business to push innovation. I’ve been using Kodak’s Ektar 100 and Portra 400 color negative films and they’re really something.
I was delighted when one of the first photos I took on Ektar 100, of West Quoddy Head LightHouse in Eastern Maine, came back. The colors and contrast are vivid, and I actually prefer the photo to others I took that day with a digital camera (a Leica Q2).
It’s not a great photograph, because it’s not a great composition for that kind of light, but I was still stoked by how well it had come out, with no signs of over or under exposure despite a high contrast scene. But just the next day, when the skies had become overcast and grey, more challenges became clear.
With such dark light and ISO100 film in the camera I had to shoot for as long as an exposure (1/125th of a second) and as wide an aperture (f/4) as I could manage. This means the rocks in the foreground are out of focus. I’d have preferred to shoot at f/11 or higher, which would have pulled everything pin sharp, but I didn’t have suitable film in the camera.
Here’s the same scene shot on the Leica Q2 for comparison. Everything is in focus, there’s much more detail in the sky. The colors are very different too, but that’s a matter of the selected color temperatures. The film averaged for daylight. The digital camera figured out on its own that it was a cooler scene.
Lesson learned I decided to start keeping Portra 400 in the camera as my default film. At least at this time of year and in the darker skies I’ve been finding myself. On the way back from Maine to Seattle (Abby and I drove our RV, in order to stay isolated) we stoped in Grand Tetons National Park for a few days. Due to forest fires, it was smokey and hazy but on our last evening it cleared up and my choice of film finally paid off.
We went to Mormon Row to see Bison (they were awesome) and I set up a tripod to catch what is surely America’s most photographed barn, as the sun set. I bracketed my exposures across a range of times and you see the results below. Just click on a photo to bring it up in full detail.
To my eyes, these captures are amazing and full of dynamic range. I’m impressed with what film can catch, with some patience and trust. I did a little work in Lightroom on the scans, but not very much; mostly straightening and bringing up the shadows. The detail is there.
Still, let’s not kid ourselves. I don’t want to fetishize film or analog. I also took a similar shot on a digital camera. A Sony Alpha 7R IV. This was just my 46th photo ever taken with the Sony, and I used the 24-70mm kit lens.
This photo is way better. The dynamic range is so obviously greater. Look at the detail in the sky. You can see the wispy smoke that settled on the plains in the distance. I like it so much that I made it the front-page for my blog. I didn’t do much except drive to one of the most beautiful spots on earth, at the perfect time, and point the camera in the direction of the setting sun.
Take the best film camera ever mass produced, with the best film and film format available, and square it off against the best digital camera now produced, and it’s just no contest. And this is shooting landscapes, a subject without any of the challenges of movement like sports of weddings. That’s how good digital cameras are, they don’t take weeks of practice and special attention to metering and techniques like pushing and pulling exposures to get what you want.
Film has come far, but digital has come far further, and this is without getting into the better versatility that digital brings. I’ll probably write dedicated blog posts about my other cameras, including the Leica Q2 and the Sony A7R in the future. Still, I love the shots on film and I’m going to keep taking them. In general, and for my documentary project.
I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without the help of Steve Fuller, who let me check out his Hasselblad 500 and his Sony A7R before I bought my own. He also let me know about the excellent David Odess, who is presently servicing my Hasselblad 500cm. Without that I wouldn’t have had the confidence to buy something pre-owned that’s probably been unused for at least 10 years, more likely 20.