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The Lost Art of the Negative
- brudgers 2y agohttps://archive.ph/M4uDe https://archive.ph/M4uDe
- luqtas 2y agooh! the art of dealing with toxic chemicals for the enviroment, having no privacy if you don't have time &/or a laboratory (specially if you want to process color) & super tidy manipulation that don't have C-z if you screw stuff is so: T.T /s
- xattt 2y agoNostalgia follows fading mediums. I couldn’t wait until I could use digital formats for music and photography, because of the promise of perfect copies and streamlined editing workflows. However, I also see the flip side. My ham radio instructor (VE3XT, RIP) talked about how tube amps for audio were on the upswing at the time (2000s) because of the “warm” sounds. He was an RF transmission engineer, and it was bizarre for him that people were shelling out money for what was just distortion. A lot of aspects of his life’s work was seeking ways of replicating signal distortion-free, and he saw it going out the window. I’ve come to terms with the fact that every generation will try to connect with a fading medium. This must be human nature. I’ve also realized that my life doesn’t improve when I pass judgement.
- FredPret 2y agoIt must be that we see the tech from our teen years through rose-tinted glasses. I fondly recall the computers and games from then but all of that objectively sucks today
- 082349872349872 2y agoI saw the model railroads of my youth and wondered if someday people would set up recreational computer layouts in their garages. I've lived long enough to see the "homelab" become a thing.
- npteljes 2y agoThat was a good guess. Whatever there is, there's a hobby version of it, especially in this age of capitalism.
- jfengel 2y agoAs the saying goes... Everything from before our teens is antiquated; everything from our teens and 20s is normal and right; everything invented after we turn 30 is suspect and unnecessary.
- portaouflop 2y agoWhile I feel this quote now applies to me, I also think it’s bias mostly. There were tons of stupid things invented in my childhood, but we only kept the „good“ ones around. Similarly old stuff seems antiquated because we found better new solutions in many cases. And the majority of new inventions is unnecessary, we'll see in a decade or so which ones are gonna stick
- npteljes 2y ago>While I feel this quote now applies to me, I also think it’s bias mostly. Yes, that's mostly what it is. It's basically how people grow up and react to change. And there are many biases at play, like the recency bias, where the current events seem more impactful than the past events, or the survivorship bias of the old refrigerator of grandma, chugging along all these years, they don't make stuff like this anymore. And the funny thing is that despite bias, there is good information in the experiences as well, because things really do change over time, and certain things really do have certain upsides, which were lost when the thing changed.
- luqtas 2y agoyeah & specially film photograph, there's something heck of magical! from being extra mindful on taking shoots, to a slow process at the lab, which is also a trance like experience... tho i think it's totally doable to replicate that in the digital world! i had a friend that used to carry a tiny rectangle, framed the photo & kept walking. i'm also used to just frame shots in my smartphone and let it go without actually shooting it... but the whole part of ruining a possible special moment of your life or just a good photo because messing with contrast in the darkroom can screw your shot forever or mechanical problems in the camera (like light leaking), wrong film etc., is just old tech that should go away
- portaouflop 2y agoIf you can’t connect to your past you can’t live in the future
- armadsen 2y agoOr you know, if you care about all this stuff, just don’t shoot film! I shoot, process, and scan my own film, both color and B&W, and I don’t have any special facilities. Just a sink and a table… As for environnemental concerns, B&W film is pretty straightforward chemically, and the developer I use is just ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and phenidone. It’s non-toxic. The fixer gets full of silver, but I take that to a lab periodically and they put it through a silver recovery system. I think the environmental impact of the film I shoot is dwarfed by all the other things I do in life (burning fossil fuels, using water in a desert, taking and excreting prescription medicines, etc., etc.)
- majormajor 2y agoThe article is about people shooting film but only taking digital copies or prints from the shops that develop the film, so if you were hoping those things weren't happening, well, oops.
- throw46365 2y agoDigital cameras use more (and much worse) toxic chemicals. It’s just that you don’t get involved with them personally. I doubt most digital camera owners ever shoot enough to get to the point where there’s an environmental net benefit compared with film. This is one of the reasons why I only shoot with secondhand digital kit now. ETA to whoever downvoted me: I accept you think I might be talking made-up nonsense! But to get an idea of what I mean, I would urge you to look at why there are so many Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.
- lambdaone 2y agoCan you quantify your claim, or provide sources to back it up, or are you just guessing? I'm not saying your claim is necessarily wrong -- it would actually be very interesting if true -- but I think the burden of proof lies on you to provide evidence for this.
- wolfendin 2y agoThey’re not guessing: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/~anorman/long.extra/Projects.F97/DAVID/paper.html#:~:text=Through%20the%20process%20of%20heat,in%20to%20the%20silicon%20crystal https://www.laits.utexas.edu/~anorman/long.extra/Projects.F9.... https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Overview-Of-The-Semi-Industry-And-Its-Approach-To-Chem-Mgmt-and-EHS.pdf https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ov...
- throw46365 2y agoTBH I cannot, which is why I talked of doubt in the quantity comparison, and it’s a fair point to pull me up on. My broader point was that people associate film with chemicals often because they have been within sniffing distance of a darkroom or developed film at school. They do not associate consumer electronics with chemicals, when silicon chip manufacturing involves some true nasties that you would not be able to safely go near to with gloves and tongs like a fixer. It’s just my instinct based on what I know of the processes involved in manufacturing the main bits that are different between even a late era film SLR and a contemporary mirrorless camera —- displays, high density batteries, sensors, additional microcontrollers and usually two powerful CPUs. The nastiest bit is the sensors, which are very large chips. But given the sheer amount of electronics in it and what we know of the impacts of toxic waste pollution in Taiwan and other silicon manufacturing centres, and even just CO2 emissions, it seems likely to me that the contents of a digital camera are likely worth hundreds of rolls of film and their prints in terms of pollution impact once you consider all the processes that are involved in controlling that pollution. The average secondhand consumer digital camera in my experience has shot in the low thousands, where that data is easily found still; it’s getting harder to find shutter activation data and it may not really be a useful guide anymore. But in the DSLR era it was normal to find secondhand kit with use equivalent to 50 to 80 rolls of film at the very most. This is why secondhand camera companies and hire shops are so important, because they extend the useful life of what is otherwise e-waste. And I think there's a lot of delayed e-waste out there; people who own DSLRs but haven't chucked them because they are occasionally still better than their phones.
- Chiba-City 2y agoI enjoy making photographs on black and white films. Different films are something like different musical instruments. A C# played on a guitar and a C# played on an oboe sound different. The lens, the exposure, the developer and the processing ritual also all make a difference.
- inamberclad 2y agoI keep all my negatives because they're the physical artifacts of the experience, but they're really blown out of the water by slide film positives. Instead of the color inverse, the slide film holds the honest-to-god image of whatever you photographed perfectly. No color tricks or prints needed to display it. It will never be as perfect as digital, but it's surprising how close it can get, especially with slides. There's something visceral about holding a piece of film to the light and seeing an exact image projected right back.
- esafak 2y agoThat's not an accurate belief. Every film has an engineered characteristic curve; a different look. Which wouldn't happen if they were faithful. The same thing is true of "raw" digital files; manipulation by the engineers is involved, even if the photographer does nothing.
- armadsen 2y agoYou’re right of course, which is why Fuji sells both Provia and Velvia. However the slide is still the image. It’s not a perfect reproduction of the scene in front of the lens, but there’s no subjective choices to be made during printing and/or scanning to invert it. Stick it in front of a light and you can see the image with the naked eye just as it exists on the film. I think that’s what OP was getting at.
- npteljes 2y ago>there’s no subjective choices to be made during printing and/or scanning Same could be said about a simple smartphone photo, but they hardly hold the same respect. I personally get the same feeling, but as hard as I try to define where the "honest analog" ends and the "manipulated uninteresting lies" begins, the more blurry it becomes. At the end of the day, there is no honest representation at all, as many people manipulated the analogue photos as well.
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- Animats 2y ago[flagged]
- jp57 2y agoDarn. From the title, I was hoping this article would be about what is lost when you lean too far into “Yes, and…” culture and can never actually say anything negative about anything.
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- CharlesW 2y agoThat’s "yes-man" culture or "yes culture". "Yes and" is about collectively building on a premise, but you can immediately follow with a challenging or conflicting contribution.
- keyle 2y agoIt's been over 10 years that film photography is said to making a comeback... just see the price of development!
- throw46365 2y agoWell, it will never achieve the economy of scale it had. So it will always be more expensive. But the same is true for art inks, I imagine.
- cjk2 2y agoI've been doing it at home with cheap chemicals for a few years (instant coffee!). The film is the expensive bit but you can usually find expired rolls floating around for not much money that work absolutely fine. B&W only of course. Colour developing at home is a pain in the ass.
- bambax 2y ago> “They don’t pick up their negatives,” Cohen said of his customers, guessing that maybe 10 percent of them return for the rolls. "Return"? How does this work? You can't make a print without the negative, so why not give them to the customer in the same envelope? Why would the customer need to come back to get the negatives? What am I missing? ... Aaah, that's what I was missing: > In the digital age, most shops where people get their film developed will scan the negatives into a computer and just email the photographs to their customers. Ok. So the question that remains is why? Why shoot on film today if you're not interested in keeping the negatives and printing yourself? Digital photography is incredibly convenient and incredibly powerful; you can simulate any film in post if you shoot raw. It's completely understandable that some people would still prefer to own the whole process and shoot on film, but doing it like this, halfway, and keeping just the scans seems very strange.
- glayciar 2y agoThey're after the "look" of film in general, and in some cases the look of the individual film stock. It can be hard to emulate digitally, although you can get similar results. Film can also be a lot more forgiving, gracefully rolling off highlights that you can usually still get something out of, unlike digital which is a straight up clipping of the values. It can also be about the process. I know when I shoot film I'm fully conscious that I've got only 36 exposures, I've got a set sensitivity, and my film stock reacts a certain way in certain situations. Limitations can be fun to work with. All that said, I always take my negatives, but it's understandable why a lot of people don't. I don't think it's a big deal.
- macintux 2y agoAnother advantage to film is the wide variety of formats. Sure, you can always crop or stitch, but I like to take 3 different medium format cameras with different aspect ratios when I go out shooting. And waist-level shooting is very nice. I don’t have a digital camera with an articulating screen that would let me compare experiences, but my TLR is a great way to get different angles and shoot street photography without being as obnoxious about it.
- bluenose69 2y agoHere's how I know I'm old: that first photograph, of the reflex cameras on a shelf, sent a chill up my spine. All that beautiful hardware. Think of holding one in your hand. Think of the images they have taken, or may one day take. A shelf of digital cameras is not something my eyes would linger upon, any more than a shelf of mason jars. Sure, they can take great pictures. Heck, mobile phones can take great pictures, too. But if someone says "Let me show you a few of the photos I took on vacation", it offers a chance to sit on the couch with someone and share a moment. As for "Let me scroll my phone through the 500 photos I took on vacation" ... not so much. For context, I've taken quite a few photographs, developing most of them myself. The whole process was intriguing, from choosing a lense and a filter, to framing the photos and choosing exposure settings, to developing the film, to printing a contact sheet, to deciding on the 2 or 3 images on the roll that I wanted to print on paper. The limitations at every stage and the labour involved were part of the appeal. And when, every once in a while, a great photograph came from the experience, it was a little bit of magic. But, again, I'm old. I guess those in the digital age would list reasons why that is fun and rewarding.
- cjk2 2y agoI think this is a silent constraining factor of photography. You used to have to do most of the work before you hit the shutter because every shot was expensive both in cash and time. Now you can fire it like a machine gun and dredge through the crap later. This added to the mental investment in the process and the mental investment in the device itself as you felt more connected and decisive. You can and I do run my digital camera within these rails artificially. It's more fun! (Edit: just checked my mirrorless - it's at 1875 shutter activations and it has been around the world at least once)
- eszed 2y agoIt is and it isn't. I have a friend who was a professional (wildlife, among other things) photographer in the days of manual cameras. He carried multiple camera bodies, and _very_ expensive glass, but his real secret to getting the National Geographic Shot (which he had done, for real; as in printed in the magazine, back when that mattered) was to shoot a lot of film. And by a lot, I mean a lot. Like, routinely more than 1k frames a day. Which is to say, whilst those constraints were / are real, they are mostly to do with money, and those who weren't constrained by that got the best results.