Digital advocates:

“I can take hundreds of shots in a day on a cheap SD card. Having just 36 on a roll means I might miss something, and I’ll be reluctant to take shots because I’ll be thinking about the price. Plus, I could miss something while reloading, or when the roll comes to an end too early.”

Film advocates:

“Having limited shots on a roll means you don’t just spray them around, you take more time composing and choosing shots and you end up with better results.”

There’s truth in both of these – quite a lot in the digital one, though I wrote it to illustrate some common misconceptions too. Film really isn’t all that expensive, particularly if you develop it yourself, which I do for B&W, and if you scan it yourself, which I do for both. The process doesn’t take that long either.

It also isn’t hard to carry much more film than you will ever ever get through in a day, changing rolls on most cameras is quick, and any sensible person will have a backup pocket camera anyway if they’re that worried about losing something in the seconds changing a roll takes.

(I’m not saying there are no advantages to the digital workflow by any means but capacity is way less significant than people make out.)

On the other hand the common film defence isn’t really true either. Fine, it is good to think before taking shots, but if you get into the habit of not taking shots because of the value of the film you’re as bad as a digital user who takes hundreds of shots of everything because they can.

A lot of the classic (and thus film) street photographers took absurd amounts of pictures. Garry Winogrand took on average several rolls a day the whole of his photographic career – there are anecdotes about him shooting a whole roll while walking less than one block. He shot so much film it wore down the backplate of his Leica. He wasn’t just taking pictures of clouds and fire hydrants and the backs of people’s heads though; every picture he took had a point to it, but he didn’t ever stop himself. (He also took multiple shots if he could, though with street work this isn’t always possible. This is something I’ve heard lots of good photographers say they do.)

So I suppose the conclusions that I’ve come to are:

• Shooting more pictures doesn’t mean you get more keepers. It doesn’t work by a ratio. A roll of crap pictures on film will have no more keepers than 500 crap pictures on digital.

• You shouldn’t ever stop yourself from taking pictures though, at least not in 35mm. (Okay, if you’re shooting medium or large format you should probably pick and choose more.) Also take more than one if you’re not convinced you nailed it the first time which you probably didn’t.

• If in doubt shoot, but it needs to be a reasonable doubt.

(this post originally appeared on Google+ – I should have written it here first though)

For instance, I am currently indoors in a not terribly well lit bar, but I can easily see everything around me. If I concentrate, I can tell that I have a lower depth of field here than I would in daytime, and that my eyes have to adjust slightly to see things at different distances. But I have to concentrate to notice that. There is probably 1/1000th of the light in here now than there would be outside in full daytime, but that doesn’t matter to me in practice, except if I am taking photographs, when it suddenly matters a great deal.

There is also the issue of colour. Most of the light here is very yellowish, but I adjust for that pretty well – I instinctively know that the menu by the candle is white, not yellow, and that the plant on the other side has green leaves. When there is more light and the difference is more subtle I barely notice the ambient colours. On the other hand, here are two versions of the same shot taken on Elite Chrome 100 in downtown LA recently.

Note that this is slide film, so there aren’t any of the odd issues regarding colour correction that you get with colour negatives. But the uncorrected picture looks very blue. I googled to see whether this was a known issue with the film (several others from LA at the same time have the same) and saw some people saying “yes, shadows are blue with Elite Chrome” but then also others saying “but shadows are blue in natural light – they’re lit by ambient light from the blue sky, not from the sun”. From my memory, the second picture is closer to what I remember, but look at how the white balance correction in the second picture also removes a lot of the blue from the sky, which really have should stayed. And, you know, it was pretty monochrome in the shadows. Perhaps it did look like that and I’m misremembering?

What helps me get past this sort of rumination is remembering that the point of taking photographs is to produce a good picture. Maybe the camera and film will capture colours and light in a way that won’t correspond to what I remember seeing, but that’s okay – what matters is knowing how they will capture the scene given the settings I choose, what sort of results I want, and matching the two together.

The summary of my report is that (a) it looks fine, the results are actually surprisingly sharp (b) negatives are really dark due to the orange layer on the film which does… something… but you can compensate for this when scanning (c) it turns the developer orange as well so best not to re-use it.

This is a significant development in terms of film-wasting, because £1 a roll is a lot less than I can get even the cheapest proper B&W film for. I only really use cheap colour negative film for testing cameras because of development costs. A next day service at Snappy Snaps is £2 per roll and, well, the quality is not that great. If I want to take proper pictures in colour, I use Kodak Elitechrome (in 35mm) or Velvia (in 120), both of which I have bricks of in the freezer because I have to send them off and pay more money.

If I can develop cheap colour film as B&W for tuppence ha’penny, though, and get results which are usable to test new cameras and lenses, that’s great – I don’t have to waste proper film – and I do that quite a lot. Or I can just load the colour film into a camera I’m using for random snaps and, at the end, have the option of colour or DIY B&W.

Technical details: I used a 1+19 solution of Ilfotec LC29 for 6m30 at 72F, which is a bit longer/hotter than I’d normally use for most ISO400 B&W rolls e.g. HP5+, but I’d read that contrast could be an issue, so I thought a little longer wouldn’t hurt (also it’s that much longer). I pre-washed the film in water for a few minutes but it didn’t seem to do anything – the water poured out was the same colour as it was going in. Stop and fixer were the same as I normally use – Ilfostop for 30s or so, and Ilford Rapid Fixer for 4m.

The results seem quite reasonable. Shots in bright light have not come out that brilliantly, but that is a problem generally with Fomapan 400 in my experience (also, perhaps, how I expose it). In mixed light, they have come out well. The grain isn’t any more than I’d expect from normal development. And: it used 5ml of developer, and also gave me the time to cook dinner while it was going. I think I may do this again – mixing up more concentrated solutions is faster and allows for re-use of the mix, but I rarely want to develop that many rolls in a short time. I’m not sure how useful it would be for pushing.

The selling point of it is that, instead of the normal vertical view, it expands horizontally, which I find much more space-efficient and natural. If you are writing whole paragraphs, a standard vertically-indented layout might be better, but mostly when I use an outliner each node is at longest one sentence, and usually just a couple of words. If I use a mindmapper, I usually set it to auto-layout and put all the branches on the right of the main node, which means it looks rather a lot like Tree with more lines and bubbles. (However, with Tree one can also set individual nodes to expand vertically rather than horizontally.)

It’s also very quick to use. The window layout is just a row of icons, a row of tabs, and then your outlines – no extraneous fluff. It has intelligently designed keyboard shortcuts and behaviours that appreciate that you have probably used outliners before; commands to move nodes around are familiar from OmniOutliner, Notebook etc, and their action is context-sensitive, with, say, Enter either editing a title, ending that title and creating a new node, or finishing note text on that node and moving back to the title.

It not only reads OPML but will happily write to it as well without having to mess about with the Export option (though this won’t preserve your coloured labels I suspect – notes, it will keep, as those are part of the OPML spec). I use this in combination with Dropbox and the iOS app CarbonFin Outliner, which doesn’t do horizontal unfortunately but does sync to Dropbox as OPML. I can transparently open, edit and save outlines on my Mac and both iPhone and iPad, now, without hoop-jumping being required, and OPML being an open format I know that I won’t be unable to read these files in a few years’ time, should I ever wish to read them again which is fairly unlikely given the rubbish I write.

I mentioned OmniOutliner before, which has a very good iPad client, which I would love to use. Unfortunately it won’t save to Dropbox or in fact sync to anything (it will export, but not actually sync) and I’m afraid that desktop OmniOutliner is basically abandonware, despite Omni’s repeated assurances that version 4 is coming out any minute now. OO for iOS really is a lovely piece of software, but unless you only want to write on the iPad it’s useless for any serious workflow, and the desktop version looks, feels and is ancient.

The combination of Tree plus CarbonFin Outliner, however, lets me work on outlines on three devices in a convenient and effective way, and, while it doesn’t have all of the styling features, multiple columns etc that desktop OO does, Tree is miles faster and more comfortable for just writing outlines. Something I sort of like to do with an outliner. The pair of them together also cost far, far less, to the point where I can happily recommend them to anyone with a Mac, an iThing and a hankering after outlines without suspecting that I might have wasted somebody else’s money.

Ingredients

• Very small jeweller’s screwdriver, flat head
• One roll of film – in this case, some old HP5+ 400 that I had
• A tape measure
• Small tripod and cable release (you may not need either as long as you can keep the camera in the same place reliably)
• A newspaper or other detailed object, to focus on

Steps

1. Expose the lens adjustment part. The ring at the front which says “Olympus D. Zuiko…” has three tiny screws around the outside. Undo these, but not all the way out or they’ll be hard to put back in. You can just loosen them and then pull the ring out.

2. Find an area dim enough that the aperture opens wide when you check the light – this will make it easier to find the right focus. Or just set it to f2.8, if you’re sure it won’t completely overexpose.

3. Set up the tripod 1m away from the newspaper using the tape measure. Set the camera to the first zone (which should be 1m).

4. Load the camera with the film, and take a few shots to advance it to frame 1. Put the camera on the tripod. Turn the lens that you see underneath the ring fully clockwise, then, under the top cell on the light meter, make a pencil mark on the rim that you just turned, as a marker.

5. Take a picture. Turn the lens one cell anticlockwise, so that your pencil mark is below the next cell around. Take another picture. Repeat this as long as desired – I found my ideal spot after 12 turns, but 36 frames will take you all the way around. 24 should easily be fine. (You might be able to just ignore all of this and use my figure of 12, actually, given that this was a mass-produced camera, but I can’t guarantee that.)

6. Rewind the film and get it developed.

7. Look at the frames you shot and see which one is the sharpest. For me, frames 11-13 were the best, so I settled on 12.

8. Turn the lens around so that the pencil mark is this many cells anticlockwise from the top, and put the ring back on. Note that there is a sticky-down bit on the ring which needs to be put into a notch, at about 1 o’clock around – you can see the notch if you look closely. Tighten the screws back up on the ring.

This is the setup that I used…

and this is a timelapse video of the newspaper, from the frames that I got out of it. Horribly grainy due to the use of some old developer but I was hardly going to mix some up fresh just for this.

• Trip focus time-lapse (.MOV, 3.8M)

I took the Trip out to test it, and it seems to be working as per the range guidelines now. I’m treating it as “working”. I did notice a few things in use though:

1. It’s not really much good indoors. You can’t set the speed higher than ISO 400, and because the AE is (sort of) shutter priority, it won’t sit there and take long exposures. Any indoor environment that isn’t by a window or brightly lit will mean you get the red flag in the viewfinder – “Trip says no”. At that point you have the opportunity to set it to flash for f2.8 manually, which means 1/40s, but it won’t go any slower than that. If I was taking pictures indoors or at night with it, I expect I’d use, say, HP5 pushed to 800 or 1600, and leave it at f2.8 and 1/40, which would probably give reasonable results. But actually I’d likely just use another camera.

2. I saw reference to the depth of field on the 3m setting being “to infinity” – this is not the case in practice, at least for me. At f22 it might be, but this is London and it seems more likely to go to about f8-11 for things I take pictures of, even with 400 film. At f11, with its 40mm lens, this online depth of field calculator says that a 3m focus has DOF of 1.8m to 8m, and f8 has 2.1-5.4m, which sound about right. The upshot of this is that you can’t just leave it on the 3m setting, unless you are just taking pictures of things right in front of you. Though for street photography, it’s probably the best one to use.

I took pictures of a walkway outside my flat using the four different zones, being quite careful to hold it properly. The four settings seem in practice to correspond to:

1. Fairly close things in focus (this should be 1m)
2. Things further away in focus (this should be 1.5m)
3. Everything out of focus (should be 3m – this is the recommended zone for the Trip, I expect it has the most useful depth of field)
4. Everything even more out of focus (should be infinity). Zones 3 and 4 are actually worse for distant objects than zone 2.

This is not what the distance says, and was confirmed in other pictures, which means it looks like it needs adjustment in some way. I am quite confident in my ability to take cameras apart, but I am not very confident in my ability to put them back together again. Trips are so cheap, though, that it barely seems worth it to send it off to somebody to get it fixed – the cost would be about the same as a fully refurbished one from, say, Trip Man. Plus I really need to spend less on cameras.

Adjusting the focus seems to involve opening the front and top, jamming the shutter open and then turning the lens to focus on an object at a known distance, using a piece of tape or ground glass on the film rail. Or I’ve seen people referring to using other cameras as collimators, though that looks more confusing to me. I suppose I might as well try to do this myself, given that the alternative is a camera that looks nice but doesn’t work. Everything else about it seems to be fine.

Not too bad

Now these aren’t great at all

I am thinking that it may be camera shake. Blur does tend to correspond to pictures where I remember not taking much care. The Trip has a relatively simple program auto-exposure system that mostly alters the aperture for low light, but which also switches the exposure from 1/200 to 1/40 when it feels like it. I found a graph which indicates that it goes down to 1/40 at EV13, which in theory with 400 film should be relatively dark, but, you know, this is London. 1/40 is fine for digital cameras with image stabilisation but without that, you have to be quite careful. I rarely go below 1/125 with other cameras, and am sure to keep myself still when I do.

Of course, it might be something else. I should try another roll, being more careful to keep myself as still as possible, which is always good practice anyway. Some people can keep handheld cameras rock steady for up to half a second, and if you’re that good it means that with image stabilisation you could take huge long exposures with a digital.

I hope that I can make my peace with the Trip, because apart from this issue it’s really a lovely camera to use on the street – really comfortable and natural. Not too big, not too small, everything in the right place. Perhaps it’s too comfortable, and I’m half forgetting it’s there, as opposed to using something like a TLR which constantly reminds you that it is a camera and you should be paying attention to it.

• You can re-use developer. It may say on the bottle “always mix fresh each time” but this is for absolute best results. You can keep the mixed developer in a sealed bottle (I use squeezy ones that you can push the air out of after filling) and use it for several rolls – it doesn’t get “used up” as such.

• You can’t re-use developer indefinitely, though. After a while, even in sealed bottles with only a tiny amount of air in, it goes off and you get horrible grainy negatives. Even if you’re just snapping aimlessly with a Holga, this is not what you want. Seeing as how you can only develop your negatives once and then you’re stuck, and developer is not all that expensive, with my Ilfosol 3 and LC29 I think a week or maybe two is enough before throwing it away and mixing some fresh stuff.

  So, the rule I follow is: mix new developer if (a) you can’t remember when you mixed the old stuff or it’s a week or more, or (b) you’re developing a really important roll.

• Fixer and stop will last for ages, pretty much indefinitely. Some people don’t use stop at all, just water or citric acid or vinegar or something else acidic. I’ve not tried this.

• A final wash with a few drops of washing-up liquid stops drying marks. (I believe Americans call this “dish soap”.) I’ve messed about with wetting agents in different concentrations, but I always get drying marks with the Ilford one, at least. A few drops of washing-up liquid in about 500ml of water, four agitations, leave for a bit, then pour out and shake off, leaves me with no drying marks. However, it is important not to wipe this off between your fingers when trying to remove excess bubbles… do this very gently, if at all.

• The process is quite forgiving of times and temperatures. The fact that times are all in multiples of 30s should indicate that these are not measurements that are absolutely precise to the second. Similarly, if the temperature is slightly off, I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s not worth watching every tick of the timer so as not to leave it for a moment too long, or using hot and cold water baths to get the developer to precisely 20C. Just don’t make vast mistakes. Which leads to:

• The whole thing is generally very easy. It’s surprisingly hard to really mess it up. The only times when I have ruined negatives have been when I:

  1. Completely got the times wrong, say four minutes instead of six;
  2. Used horrible old developer;
  3. Bent the film horribly when loading it onto the reel (and this doesn’t completely ruin it, just adds some odd lines to a few pictures).

  You are much more likely to mess up taking the pictures in the first place, underexposing, opening the back by mistake, leaving the lens cap on etc etc.

• Lastly, it can be fun but not always. Sometimes I enjoy the process of developing film. I set the timers, pour out the liquids and listen to Radio 4¹ while I am standing around in the bathroom shaking things occasionally. At other times I just can’t be bothered and let half a dozen undeveloped films build up in the sealed bag in the fridge. Initially, the whole magic of taking a piece of magic plastic and making pictures appear on it entranced me, but after over a hundred rolls the novelty sometimes fades. So it is best not to assume that you will always have the energy, even if, overall, you enjoy it, which I do.

The new one is, funnily enough, the green one – I include the others for comparison. The blue there is last year’s Aquamarine, which I rather liked. I’m not entirely sure about this. For the moment it doesn’t seem a very distinctive sort of green. Perhaps it will grow on me.

Bought from The Writing Desk with a free convertor included – it came in a nicer box than usual too, not the usual card sleeve but a proper sliding one with a parallelogrammatical cross-section.