Tag: analog films

Forecast, Sunny with Tropical Downpours & More Fun with DxO PhotoLab 5 & DxO FilmPack 6

Climate change is a constant surprise to our weather forecasters who seem to get it wrong all the time now.

One moment sunny with blue skies and then a sudden downpour with tropical intensity followed by a return to the usual La Niña grey days, grey skies, steamy humidity and temperatures in the upper twenties.

I made the photograph above while walking out of a café where we were the only diners inside.

To our surprise locals had begun filling up the chairs and tables outside and up the high street so I made this quick and dirty snapshot.

I was carrying the same camera and lens this morning while running an errand  to the supermarket, hoping to expand on this image, when bingo, sudden tropical intensity downpour that almost saturated my Think Tank Photo Pro Speed Belt with MindShift Gear and Think Tank Photo bags and pouches.

They are drying out at the moment, but I am looking forward to getting back into the city again in another week after our COVID-19 booster shot really kicks in.

Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia X-tra 800

Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia X-tra 800 color negative film, 35mm, 36 exposures. Image courtesy of B&H.
Fujifilm Fujicolor Superia X-tra 800 color negative film, 35mm, 36 exposures. Image courtesy of B&H.

I rarely used colour negative films during my analog magazine and newspaper editorial portrait photography days, instead relying on colour transparency films for colour and Polaroid Type 55 and most often Tri-X for monochrome in 35mm, 120 roll film and 4″x5″ sheet film formats.

According to Wikipedia, Fujifilm’s now sadly discontinued Fujicolor Superia X-tra was made in versions for press photography as well as enthusiasts and if DxO’s ‘Fuji Superia X-tra 800′ film simulation is anything to go by then Superia X-tra 800 would have been incredibly useful for photojournalism in available light.

If I had been a little better prepared before walking out of the café then I’d have zone-focused the Fujinon XF 14mm f/2.8 R lens on my Fujifilm X-Pro2 for deeper depth of focus.

Nothing that some application of Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI can’t fix, however.

The wonders of modern digital photography!

Links

  • B&H Affiliate Link – Fujifilm
  • B&H Affiliate Link – FUJIFILM Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 800 Color Negative Film (35mm Roll Film, 36 Exposures, Expired 11/18) – “Fujicolor Superia X-TRA 800 from Fujifilm is a high speed daylight-balanced color negative film offering a vivid tonal palette with accurate color reproduction in a variety of lighting conditions. It features a nominal sensitivity of ISO 800/30° along with a wide exposure latitude for use in an array of conditions, even under fluorescent lighting. The fine grain structure and high degree sharpness are well-suited to scanning and enlarging for printing purposes.”
  • B&H Affiliate Link – Think Tank Photo
  • DxO – DxO PhotoLab, DxO FilmPack, DxO ViewPoint, DxO PureRAW and Nik Collection.
  • Wikipedia – Fujifilm Superia

Casual Photofile: Looking Back at Kodachrome – Kodak’s Most Famous Film and Why It’s So Special – COMMENTARY

https://www.casualphotophile.com/2017/10/04/kodachrome-retrospective-film-profile/

“As the song says, everything looks worse in black and white, and if there’s only one color film that could make “all the world a sunny day,” it was Kodachrome. Or so it seems. Like many film shooters today, I was born into an era in which Kodachrome was nothing more than an old, expensive film, slow to process and cumbersome to display (what’s a slide projector?). So any time I hear photo geeks of a certain age wax poetic on Kodachrome, I have to wonder, was it really so good?…”

Commentary

Kodachrome was good but it certainly was not the bee’s knees or the answer to everything.

Sometimes Kodachrome almost drove me mad with its less than stellar rendition of blues and greens and its too-reddish rendering of skin.

Kodachrome was the very first colour film that I used and I used it for years until there were too many problems with buying it and having it processed in Australia.

Kodachrome intimately shaped my way of seeing and of photographing for decades and I would do well to remember the many lessons about limits and constraints that it taught me.

Limited Kodachrome was, especially due to its high contrast that threw shadows into almost pure black, but limitations can be beneficial when creating an original style and they were so for me.

When Kodachrome became impossible to use, I switched over to Fujifilm products and my vision and photographic style altered accordingly.

Nowadays I rely on some of the many excellent image editing software products like Alien Skin Exposure, Capture One Pro with third party presets and styles, DxO FilmPack with DxO OpticsPro and a number of commercial presets for Adobe Camera Raw to achieve looks not unlike Kodachrome in its many iterations and versions over time.

Doing that is not the same thing as visualizing in Kodachrome, shooting with Kodachrome, scanning Kodachrome and printing for exhibition from Kodachrome.

But then, I am glad that I no longer have to work in analog photography given that its environmentally destructive photochemicals eventually wrecked my health and ruined my photographic career.

Fujifilm X-Pro2 User Peter Dareth Evans Namechecks Six Photographic Greats with His Seven Excellent JPEG Film Simulation Settings

At the moment I don’t rely on JPEGs from any cameras as my SOOC (straight-out-of-camera) originals for online or print reproduction. Several reasons, prime of which is our lousy national broadband upload speeds and allocations. Then there is the fact that I use and love two different mirrorless camera systems for their different video capabilities and when shooting stills I prefer to edit raw files to colour match projects shot with both. Lastly, I don’t have any clients that demand fast turnaround and online transmission soon after shooting. 

I do, however, like to set custom JPEG and video profiles on each system’s cameras and my preference is looks emulating some of the great analog films of yesteryear. Using as many of them as I could lay hands on, processing and printing my own negatives and transparencies, may have wrecked my health but it exposed me to a vast range of analog tone and colour possibilities that I now apply to visualizing and processing digital images.

Although my workflow does not require film simulation presets when shooting, it is fun to have them in-camera as custom settings. The latest firmware for for Fujifilm’s X-Pro2 and X-T2 permits renaming all seven custom settings. Until Peter Dareth Evans of Pete Takes Pictures shared his custom settings, I had both of Kevin Mullins’ wedding photojournalism customs settings installed but yearned for other looks as well.

Six of the greats plus one

Mr Evans seven custom settings pay homage to some of the greats of photography – William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Mary Ellen Mark, Daido Moriyama, Garry Winogrand and John Bulmer – and one Fujifilm X-Photographer member of the KAGE Collective, Patrick LaRoque.

Those six greats, or at least the photographic schools of thought to which they belong, have been important to my own development as a photographer and moviemaker, so I quickly overwrite my custom settings with them and custom named them according to Mr Evans’ own descriptions.

I am looking forward to putting them to the test with some serious photography soon. Meantime I applied them to some quick and dirty X-Pr02 videos of domestic scenes and was impressed.

The downside of Fujifilm’s implementation of video on the X-Pro2, other than being 1080p only, is that only the film simulation part of the settings apply. Dynamic Range, Grain Effect, Highlight Tone, Shadow Tone, Colour, Noise, Grain, Sharpness settings have no effect on video though they do on JPEGs.

My quick and dirty workaround is to apply a tone recovery LUT from my ever-growing collection of free and paid-for LUTs, in this case FilmContrast_Light.cube from CoreMelt’s LUTx Feature Looks Collection or either of the two recovery LUTs from James Miller’s DeLUTS Fujifilm X-Pro2 LUT set.

Fujifilm, give us exposure zebras on all your cameras PLEASE!

Although Fujifilm continues to improve its cameras’ video capabilities, the company has several blindspots that have me wondering about its commitment to moviemakers using their cameras.

None of Fujifilm’s cameras’ firmware includes exposure zebras, the most essential tool for obtaining correct exposure of video and stills via ETTR – expose to the right. I rely on zebras when shooting video and stills on all my cameras of another mirrorless brand and zebras’ absence from the X-T2 is a major factor in not purchasing one despite its otherwise promising video support.

Crippling the application of custom settings to the X-Pro2’s video capability is deeply disappointing though it did not deter me from purchasing the X-Pro2. I have been yearning for an affordable digital interchangeable lens OVF camera for years now and the X-Pro2 has satisfied that desire for my stills photography work.

Shooting movies with OVF cameras is a passion and pleasure, perhaps peculiar to someone like me who began making short movies with old OVF film cameras. I so wish that the X-Pro2 supported zebras in its EVF, monitor and ERF, and allowed me to fine-tune my custom settings for video in the way that Messers Evans and Mullins do for stills photography.

Credits:

Thanks to Fuji Rumors for sharing This Guy Fine Tuned his Fujifilm Film Simulation Settings Inspired by the Work of Great Film Photographers. See “Chrome Eggleston” & More.

Links: