Yeah. A person might be surprised how much we can do digitally.
This reminds me I have a pretty nice one, case and tripod I bought a couple of years before the collapse of film. Literally like new and practically unused. I’ll never use it again so I guess I’ll try and pawn it off on somebody. At least I can still use the tripod. <sigh>
I wonder how true this is anymore. I’ve never developed film so I don’t know, but dynamic range on digital sensors has improved so much in the last few years. We’re approaching 15 stops of range now.
It’s true that highlights that get blown are gone, but I’m amazed at the crazy detail I can pull out of the deep deep shadows with the sony EXMOR sensors. I deliberately underexpose tricky shots by like 3-5EV sometimes and just fish out glorious shadow data. I suspect that if it’s possible with film, it’d be a huge damn hassle.
Pretty much what I keep telling myself. I finally did go out and shoot two rolls of black-and-white 35mm film last year on an assignment, for the first time in maybe five years. It was fun getting the old Nikon F5 out and a bit humorous when I shot a few frames and tried to look at the non-existant LCD on the back to check the histogram. 
Force of habit.
Honestly, I don’t really see the point of shooting 35mm film, except maybe for black-and-white. Maybe. If I were to shoot film again, it would have to be 4x5 format and up. Maybe even 120 film on a Hasselblad. I guess there is a stylistic look to a grainy, analog neg, and there is the “surprise” you experience when you finally get your negs or chromes back from the lab. I guess I do miss that. But I find digital superior for my work for pretty much everything. And I’ve felt that way for about seven years now.
Still, part of me wants to go back and get in touch with the wet darkroom. I have all the equipment in the basement, collecting dust. But I do miss the zen feeling of getting lost in creating a perfect print.
Yep. We’re at about 14 1/2 stops dynamic range with the Nikon D800 and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX1. It is incredible what details the cameras can keep when you shoot raw and know how to expose for raw. I’m not exactly sure what the dynamic range of film is, but, in my experience, that is way more range than transparencies, and probably on par with negative film, if not slightly better. The thing with negs, though, is you could overexpose the crap out of them and still eke out detail. I’ve seen tests where highlights are overexposed by up to six stops and still able to retain detail. You can’t do that with digital. As you say, once it’s gone, it’s gone. But for a properly exposed image, it feels to me like digital is at least as good as film at the moment.
Have you tried the Digital Zone System yet?
I’ve already done HDR (both subtle and gross, prefer the subtle) and ETTR
Kodacolor II had excellent highlight forgiveness. Kind of important for those older cheap not very adjustable cameras (f/8 and 1/125th fixed exposure on some of them) that retailed in the under $40 range.
I don’t know why exactly, but digital can now do that - only in the shadows rather than the highlights. I’m always careful to preserve highlights and expose to the left. I have more extreme examples but I can’t remember where I put them, but this is a shot I took of my friend against a bright backlight. I was actually overly cautious and could’ve exposed a stop and a half brighter, but it gives you some idea of the detail you can pull out of the shadows. (And yeah I know there’s some green fringing in that, I corrected it when I noticed it but I’m too lazy to paste together another before/after image with that correction :P)
Or another example, I accidentally underexposed this because I was in manual when I thought I wasn’t. It’s particularly difficult because my subject was a raven - totally black - enveloped deeply in shadow. And yet lifting the shadows you can still see plenty of feather detail - in order to retain that much detail on a black subject in shadows like that, you need to register a gazillion shades of black. I’m not sure how good film is at that, but modern sensors are pretty impressive.
Don’t know about Digital Zone System (never was much of a Zone-y when it came to film, anyway), but ETTR (expose to the right) is basically how I expose raw for maximum dynamic range. My general rule of thumb is expose JPEG like slides and raws like negs. (In other words, you err on the side of underexposure with slides, or expose for the highlights to bring out drama and color saturation, while you err on the side of slight overexposure with negs, to capture shadow detail and then you bring down the highlights when you print.)
I always had my C41 negs developed for me and then i would print them. E-6 chromes I did myself.
Agfachrome and Kodachrome via mailers.
Why did you do your own E-6 but not C-41? C-41 is a snap to do in the darkroom. In fact, I’d say it’s easier than black-and-white as far as developing goes (although I always used the quick chemistry that had blix instead of a separate bleach and fix step.) I never dared do E-6 myself because if you screw up a little bit, well, that’s it.
That seems like the reverse of what you should do to me. I know exposure to the right was a standard film technique, but digital works so much better the other way. You might lose a bright sky’s detail at 1 stop overexposed, but you can pull the shadows of a scene up 5+ stops. Seems a lot more logical to shoot to the left to preserve the highlights.
ETTR is not really a standard film technique. At least, I had never heard of it until digital. I mean, there is the whole slightly overexpose for neg, slightly under for slides, but I never heard it referred to as ETTR. Like I said above, shoot JPEGs to the left, raws to the right.
It all has to do with how raw sensor data is recorded. The idea of ETTR is to expose as far to the right as you can WITHOUT clipping highlights if you want to record the best file in terms of signal-to-noise. The reason for this is that the highest stop of a raw file contains half the image data. In other words, a 12-bit raw file has a possible 4096 values for each channel. The brightest stop contains 2048 possible values. The next brightest stop half that. The next half that. The next half that. And so on. So you want to fit as much of your image data to the right, and then bring it down in post if you want the most detailed file possible.
The image you linked to I wouldn’t call “expose to the left.” It looks to me like your sunset is already starting to clip there. I doubt you have more than 1/2 stop of headroom before you lose color information.
I could adjust E6 for push or pull, plus minor temp changes did different things. But, mostly because I just always did my own B&W and E6. I did a little E4 when that was around, and liked the changes E6 offered me.
I tried C41 on my own, but simply wasn’t that into it. Plus, whenever I was doing color neg work, I would often blast thru multiple rolls and it was easier to drop them off at a local lab. My Chromes I tended to put more time in to. Even at that, I still preferred Kodachrome when I had the turn around time.
Aha, I think I misunderstood. We must be using different baselines. I mean, a strongly backlit scene like that and the camera isn’t sure exactly what you’re trying to meter, but by the normal evaluative metering, I think I was probably under what the camera considered to be the proper exposure by 2-3 stops. That’s what I mean by exposing to the left. It sounds like you’re talking about some other starting point to be left or right of.
For me, paying attention to the histogram is like envisioning the gamma* of the film + processing method. I get better results just by paying attention to the details of exposure it offers for review.
- esp with B&W, we could shorten or lengthen the toe or shoulder of the curve, getting results for what was important in that image (or group of images), highlights, shadows, or a wide dynamic range
meant to highlight this part
I had charts showing the curves of different films with different chemicals, temps, and methods.
Can’t remember where i got them…
The “starting point” is the brightest area you want detail in. Put that as far to the right as you can without clipping the raw channels. This is usually about 1/2-1 full stop above where the “highlight warnings” starts showing up on the LCD. The camera shows you clipping highlights from the JPEG preview it generates. This is usually a full stop or so lower than when the raw actually clips. I generally don’t push my luck beyond exposing for where my detailed highlights start blinking on the back of the camera if I have a large dynamic range in my photograph.
For flatter lighting situations, the camera is going to want to center the histogram around 18% gray. You can push this much farther to the right before you run into trouble, getting what looks like an “overexposed” image, visually, but what is actually a well-exposed image in terms of maximizing information. Read the link NoClueBoy posted on ETTR.
And, remember, this ONLY applies to raw capture.
Is that true for every brand/model?