Introduction to film photography
There are plenty of apps and filters that you can use to emulate photographic film with your digital images, but the best way of getting the ‘film look’ is simple: shoot film.
Post author: Chris Gatcum
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Film photography
There’s been something of a resurging interest in film photography in the past few years, from hip young snappers exploring the retro-cool of emulsion-based image making, to older photographers dusting off their tools from the past. However, while the processes involved in digital and film photography are fundamentally similar, there are enough differences to trip you up if you’re not careful.
Emulsion
We take it for granted that almost every aspect of a digital photograph can be changed in our favourite image-editing app, but film is far less flexible. This means there are a lot more decisions that you have to make before you take a shot, and some that need to be made as early as when you buy your film.
The ‘heart’ of any film is the emulsion, which is the light-sensitive coating of silver halide crystals in gelatin that records a latent image. This is what gives a particular film its unique characteristics in terms of its colour (or lack thereof), contrast and so on. It also determines the ‘speed’ of the film, which – just like a digital camera – is given as an ISO value. As you can’t change the ISO from shot to shot, film speed is something you have to consider from the outset: do you need a fast film to shoot in subdued lighting, for example, or would a slower film be more suitable?
Your film choice will also affect the graininess of your images. Film sensitivity (and therefore speed) is determined by the size of the light-sensitive silver halides in the emulsion, and the larger the silver halides are, the more sensitive a film is. However, the processed silver halide crystals will appear in the final image, so the faster the film you use – and the larger you print it – the grainier your photographs will be.
Film grain isn’t necessarily unattractive, though. In fact, some photographers actively look to increase its appearance, especially in black-and-white photography, where grain can add a quite literal ‘grit’ to an image. The simplest way of getting grainy images is to use a fast film, but you can also increase the amount of grain by ‘uprating’ a film and push-processing it. For example, you might load ISO 400 film, but expose it as if it had an ISO of 3200. You’d need to extend the processing time to compensate for this, but the result would be a significant increase in grain. It’s worth noting that not all films can be pushed successfully, though, or by the same amount – as a general rule, black-and-white film responds much better to this technique than colour film.
Grain is an intrinsic part of film photography, just as noise is a part of digital images. However, unlike noise, which is usually undesirable, film can make an atmospheric addition to your photographs.
Positive or negative?
If you’re shooting in colour, it’s not just the speed of the film that you need to decide on, but also whether you’re going to shoot negative or transparency film. The main difference between the two is that negative film is designed to be printed onto photographic paper, while transparencies (or slides) are meant to be viewed directly, using a projector, a slide viewer or – if you’re shooting large format – on a light box.
As the name suggests, the image on negative film is reversed, so the lightest areas of a scene appear darkest on the film and the darkest parts of a scene correspond to the lightest areas on the film. Negative film also has a very distinct orange-brown base, and this can make it quite tricky to scan: you not only need to reverse the image, but also correct the colours. However, it is a great option if you want to get conventional ‘photo album’ style prints made on photographic paper.
Negative film reverses the colours and tones, which can make it hard to ‘read’ the image; it can also make it tricky to scan.
The resurgence of film photography has seen the release of some fairly unique ‘creative’ negative films. This shot was taken using ‘redscale’ negative film, which adds a strong orange-red colour cast to your photos.
By comparison, transparency (or slide) film produces a positive image on an almost clear film base, which makes it much easier to scan. Although it’s usually more expensive than negative film, transparencies tend to have more saturated colours and finer grain, which is why this was historically the preferred film choice for landscape photographers and most commercial applications that involved traditional litho printing (books, magazines, billboards and the like).
The positive image on transparency film is designed to be viewed directly, making it easier to see (and scan) your photographs.
A slow-speed transparency film was used for this studio still life, to guarantee ultra-fine grain and rich colour saturation.
Exposure latitude
Although transparency film is a ‘superior’ option in some respects (especially if you intend to scan it yourself), it presents far greater challenges when it comes to exposure, as it has a much narrower exposure latitude than negative film. Exposure latitude indicates how far you can under- or overexpose a specific film and still get a usable image. All films are subtly different, but the general rule is that slide film has a very low latitude (a 1-stop exposure tweak can have a big impact); colour negative offers more latitude (perhaps up to 4 or 5 stops); and black-and-white negative film has the widest latitude of all (7 stops or more in some instances).
The wide exposure latitude of black-and-white film has managed to hold detail in almost every part of this ultra-high-contrast scene – it is only the very brightest areas where nothing has been recorded on the film.
A film with a wide exposure latitude offers a couple of positive benefits. For a start, there’s more leeway in your exposures, so if your exposure is ‘off’ it might not make much difference to the end result. This is partly why negative film was so popular among amateur photographers using simple point-and-shoot cameras – more often than not inaccurate exposures could be ‘saved’ by the exposure latitude of the film.
A wide exposure latitude also equates to a wider dynamic range, so there is less chance of highlight and/or shadow detail getting lose when you’re faced with a high-contrast scene. Adjusting the exposure by as little as ½ stop can have a noticeable difference with transparency film, making exposure accuracy more critical, but on negative film it doesn’t matter quite so much.
The perfect exposure
While a film’s exposure latitude can cover up any slight mistakes, it’s not an excuse to worry less about getting ‘good’ exposures to start with, as the best results are always achieved when you get the exposure right. At a glance exposing film is no different to exposing a digital sensor, in that both essentially boil down to balancing the aperture, shutter and ISO. In fact, you could argue that film exposures are slightly easier – as you can’t change the ISO on a shot-by-shot basis there’s only the aperture and shutter speed to worry about.
However, there are subtle differences when it comes to achieving the optimum exposure on transparency and negative film. Due to the low dynamic range of transparency film, it’s easy for highlights to blow out and shadows to block up. Of the two, a loss of highlight detail is usually the least desirable (as it is with digital cameras), so the mantra here is: “expose for the highlights and let the shadows take care of themselves.” A simple way of doing this is to use your camera’s spot meter – if it has one – and take the following approach:
Take an exposure reading from the brightest part of the scene that you want to retain detail in. This is not necessarily the brightest part of the image, such as the sun.
Then, reduce the exposure by 2 stops, either by setting a smaller aperture, a faster shutter speed, or a bit of both. You can either do this in Manual mode or by applying exposure compensation.
The result will be beautifully bright highlights, with a bit of detail in the area you metered from, while the darker tones fall naturally into place.
It would have been easy to overexpose the sky in this shot, which was shot on transparency film, but careful metering walked the fine line between keeping detail in the sky and the water.
When it comes to exposing negative film, you need to take the opposite approach and expose for the darkest shadow that you want detail in, allowing the highlights to fall where they will. Why? Because it’s often possible to draw some detail from the darkest areas on film, which in the case of negative film relates to the brightest parts of the scene; the shadows form the clearest parts of a negative, so those are the areas that you want to try and preserve.
Filters
Of course, sometimes you will encounter a scene that exceeds the dynamic range of your film, so no matter how hard you try you’’ lose detail in either the shadows or the highlights. A classic example is a landscape, where you find yourself with a very bright sky and a much darker foreground. This is perhaps where digital and film photography diverge the most, because while digital exposures can be manipulated and combined quite easily – perhaps even to produce an HDR (high dynamic range) image from multiple frames – film places far more emphasis on getting things ‘right’ at the moment of exposure.
In a landscape, graduated neutral density (ND) filters are the obvious choice for overcoming a bright sky, but they are not the only option. Some filter manufacturers have a huge back-catalogue of graduated filters from their film days, some of which not only correct the exposure, but also introduce a bit of colour, be it faux-sunset graduated filters or dramatic ‘storm’ filters that can give a sky an ominous deep, blue-grey colour. Admittedly, some of these filters are a little much for modern tastes (and very few of them look entirely natural), but they will definitely give you a genuine ‘shot on film’ look!
Coloured filters also have a role in combatting the colour temperature of different light sources. We’re used to setting the white balance on a digital camera to match the lighting conditions, or choosing Auto and letting the camera do its thing, but film has a single, fixed colour balance. In the main, most film is daylight balanced to 5500K (degrees Kelvin), which means you’ll get colour-neutral results in sunlight and when you use flash, but anything else can result in a colour shift. This could be a subtle ‘coolness’ if you’re photographing in shade, or a more obvious colour cast when you photograph under tungsten (strong orange) or fluorescent (green) lighting.
If you look on eBay you’ll find plenty of old filters dating back to film’s heyday, like this ‘sunset grad’, which delivers decidedly dubious results…
In each instance, a plain coloured correction (CC) filter of the opposite hue can be used to correct the colour temperature of the light passing through it. So you might use a subtle warming filter to correct the coolness of shade, for example, or a deeper blue filter to balance the orange glow of tungsten lighting. However, don’t automatically assume that full correction is always necessary – you will often find your film photographs have more atmosphere if they retain some (or all) of the ambient light’s colour.
Blue 80-series filters correct the colour temperature of warm orange tungsten lighting, so you can get neutral results on daylight-balanced film.
Shot on transparency film, just after sunset, this image has a strong blue colour cast. This could have been corrected with a ‘warming’ filter, but the cool colour is arguably truer to the scene.
Plain coloured filters are also critical to black-and-white film photography, although bold red, orange, yellow, green and blue filters are the order of the day here. The aim is not to ‘correct’ the light coming through the lens, but to modify the way it is seen by the film. A red filter, for example, will allow red, orange and yellow wavelengths of light to pass freely, while blocking blues and blue-greens. The result? Areas that are blue in an image appear much, much darker in your black-and-white shot, while areas that are red appear lighter.
Other coloured filters have the exact same effect: they darken the colours opposite them on a standard colour wheel, while colours that are the same or similar to that of the filter appear lighter.
A standard colour wheel will tell you the effect a coloured filter will have in black-and-white photography: it will lighten colours in the scene that are the same (or similar) to the filter’s colour, and darken the opposite colours.
Mindset
So far we have examined the technical issues posed by film and explored some of the solutions, but there is also a much larger – and somewhat more nebulous – difference between using an analogue camera and shooting digitally: the mindset.
When you shoot digitally you have the freedom to fire the shutter as often as you like until the memory card is full, which might mean you can take hundreds, or possibly even thousands of photographs, each of which is essentially free of charge. A roll of film, however, is finite. At most you’ll have 36 exposures before you reach the end of a roll of 35mm film, which seems truly decadent compared to the 12 shots you might get on a medium-format camera, or the single sheets of film that fuel large format photograph. In any case, every frame you expose has a measurable financial cost, both in the price of the film and the cost of its subsequent processing.
Unless you have an infinite budget, shooting film has to be a much more contemplative exercise. You have to think more about what you are photographing and how you frame it; the exposure you use; and whether you need to use filters. It’s no good adopting a ‘fix it later’ attitude or taking 20 shots in the hope one of them is OK (both of which are easily done in the digital realm), because your ability to make changes to an originated-on-film photograph is limited. Even if you scan your film and use your editing software there is a lot less room to manoeuvre.
The simple fact is shooting film is more challenging than using a digital camera, because mistakes can – quite literally – prove costly (and there’s no doubt you will make a few of them on your analogue journey). But this should only encourage you to think more carefully about what you are doing, and as you spend more time thinking about each photograph you take so your photographic skills will improve. Your exposures will become more accurate, your ability to read the dynamic range of a scene will get better and you will find that you can ‘see’ a good photograph before you even raise your camera to your eye. Ultimately, you will become a better photographer.
Shooting digitally, it is easy to rattle off dozens of frames, trying different compositions, exposures and other settings, and then deciding later which one you think works best. Film requires a more deliberate approach: this shot might be relatively ‘simple’, but a lot of thought went into precisely how it would be framed. The balance between the sky and the trees, and the position of the dinosaur were all chosen and then just a single, ‘definitive’ exposure was made.