Film has been pretty well dead for some years now, or at least reserved for a few very special niches. There is a movement to keep it alive, I think largely the reserve of those opposed to change on emotional grounds. Real ale I can understand, but real film? We really are better off without all its problems and defects, and with the many advantages of good digital cameras.
I last took pictures on film around 5 years ago now, but I actually gave up developing film slightly earlier, and was left with around a 100 cassettes (and a couple of rolls) that I exposed in around 2007, left on a shelf in my darkroom. I kept meaning to get out my film processor and develop them – they are all C41 though some are chromogenic black and white, but somehow it hasn’t happened. I did a couple of batches of the b/w around 18 months ago – 7 films at a time, but that still leaves quite a few.
Finally I’ve got around sending some of the colour neg to a pro lab for processing. The local lab I used to use occasionally went out of business some years ago with the switch to digital, so I decided to post these off to a company that offered a reasonably priced service at £2.99 per film, process only. I knew that they were probably all exposed in panoramic cameras – one of the few niches referred to above, so couldn’t just send them to a budget processor.
Getting the films back in the post was a little like reliving the thrill (and often disappointment) of taking the films out of the final rinse and hanging them to dry, though this time I had little idea what I was going to see. Here’s one of the images that I found.
Some of you will recognise this view, and I also photographed digitally from the same viewpoint in 2007 and on other occasions. I was actually more or less in the same place last week, though a very tall fence prevents me getting to the exact same spot. But here’s a picture from just a few yards away of how the scene looks now.
Probably the only thing that is still more or less the same is the bit of the bridge at the left of the top image – and you can just see it under the fence at centre left of the lower image.
The digital image is a detail from a wider view – the film image covers roughly 120 degrees and I’ve cropped the digital to a similar angle – I made it as roughly twice the horizontal angle and vertical angle of the film camera. They use a similar perspective but the wider vertical view of the digital makes the curvature more obvious.
What you can’t perhaps see clearly is the difference in colour quality and detail, where digital scores heavily. And at the left of the film image I’ve left on one of the little accidents we often got with film, a lighter area where I think there was a little overlap with the next frame. It was taken with one of my favourite cameras, a Horizon, which I think cost well under £200 in a brown paper package from the Ukraine.
Keeping the film for 5 years between exposure and development doesn’t seem to have greatly altered the image, taken on an ISO400 Fuji film, though of course this is not a scientific test, but it seems fairly similar in most respects to films I did develop at the time.
I’ve just sent off another batch to finish the undeveloped colour film, but am still thinking I might process the 50 or so cassettes of T400CN myself, perhaps giving them a little extra development to compensate for any loss in contrast that may have occurred.
I’m also wondering whether to take out the Horizon or my X-Pan again. They are fun to use and better for panoramas with moving things in them as the exposure is made more or less at a point. And I do have a little supply of film still in the cupboard with expiry dates around 2002 or 2004 it would be a shame to waste.
