To Keep Trying

I've photographed this scene on Polaroid film, Fujifilm Instax Wide, 35mm film, 120 film and 4×5.

And none of them have quite been right.

Or, at least, none of them have looked quite how I wanted them to look.

I've changed the film. I've changed the format. I've changed the camera. I've tried different ways of approaching the same scene, but I'm still not quite there.

Perhaps that's the point of photography.

Perhaps we're never quite satisfied with the first attempt.

There's always another film to try, another camera, another way of seeing it. Another opportunity to make the photograph that's in your head.

And maybe that's what keeps us coming back.

To keep trying.

I just want to make photographs

I watched a YouTube video recently in which the presenter set out to give us the hard truth about the state of photography.

Apparently, digital is better than film. Not just a bit better, but better by pretty much any measurement you care to apply.

He also suggested that film technology had effectively reached a plateau by around 1990.

It got me thinking.

I'm not going to argue that my Nikon F75 loaded with FP4 Plus is technically superior to a modern digital camera. It plainly isn't. Give me a modern digital camera and a few minutes with a spreadsheet and I suspect digital will win most of the contests.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I've always found the digital versus film argument slightly odd. You don't hear painters arguing that another artist's work is somehow inferior because they painted on wood rather than canvas.

Nobody looks at a painting and says, "That's very nice, but imagine how much better it would have been if he'd used the latest canvas technology."

Different mediums have different characteristics. That's the whole point.

And photography should be allowed the same freedom.

There's a good example within film itself.

Kodak introduced T-Max. Ilford developed the Delta Professional range. Both represented newer film technology than the traditional emulsions that had gone before them.

But nobody points at someone shooting Tri-X or HP5 Plus and laughs.

Nobody says, "You're still using that old film? T-Max exists, you know."

Because we understand that the films are different.

Tri-X has its character. HP5 Plus has its character. Delta has its character. T-Max has its character. You choose the film because of what it gives you, not simply because it happens to contain the newest technology.

So why does the argument suddenly change when we put a digital sensor into the camera?

There is another part of the "film plateaued in 1990" argument that interests me, too.

Did film actually reach the limits of what was possible?

Or did we simply stop looking?

From the 1990s onwards, enormous amounts of money were poured into developing digital imaging. Sensors, processors, storage, noise reduction, autofocus, image processing — generation after generation of engineers were given huge budgets to make digital photography better.

Film didn't get anything like that.

The market was moving away from it. The investment followed the market.

So perhaps film really had reached its technological limits.

But perhaps it hadn't.

Perhaps if the photographic industry had spent the next forty years putting the same sort of money and research into silver-halide technology, we'd have seen films that were dramatically different from those available in 1980.

Finer grain. Faster films. Better reciprocity. Greater latitude. Better colour. Who knows?

We'll never know.

And that's the important bit.

We can't point to the lack of progress in film after 1990 and conclude that film had reached the limits of what was technologically possible.

All we can say is that the incentive to find out largely disappeared.

But even that isn't really my main argument.

I'm not particularly interested in declaring a winner.

Digital is an extraordinary technology. It is more convenient, more flexible and, by almost any technical measurement, considerably more capable than the film cameras I use.

So what?

Photography isn't a competition to see which medium can produce the highest number on a specification sheet.

I shoot film because I like what film gives me.

Someone else shoots digital because they like what digital gives them.

Someone else might shoot wet plate, Polaroid or something I've never even heard of.

They're all valid.

A painter doesn't need to use the "best" medium.

Neither does a photographer.

Perhaps photography is one of the few art forms where we're expected to choose our medium by reading the specification sheet.

I'm quite happy to ignore it.

I just want to make photographs I like..

Gimme Shelter

Recently I found myself in Bath in a rainstorm. And it wasn't the sort of rain you could work with. It was the kind of heavy downpour that required people to find shelter.

I took this frame while sheltering myself.

I found myself in an arch underneath the railway, looking towards the other end, where a group of people were waiting for the rain to stop.

I knew the picture would need to be quite graphic, with deep blacks and very little detail in the shadows.

So I metered for the light at the end of the tunnel and took the shot.

Sometimes the weather makes the picture for you.

The First Frame

This was the first frame of a 36-exposure roll of Ilford FP4 Plus, shot on a trip that eventually took me to Bath.

I always worry about getting that first frame in the bag. It’s like the photographic day hasn’t really started until I’ve taken it.

It was pouring with rain and the light was awful. I took the shot at f/4 and 1/20th, not really knowing what I was going to get.

The train arriving at the platform near my home turned out to be a pretty good way to start.

The detail is impressive, but it’s the atmosphere I like most. Rain, low light and a train appearing from the gloom.

Not a bad first frame.

Hard Times

When photographers mention frugality or a budget approach to their craft, the conversation inevitably revolves around low-cost cameras, the Lomography Sprocket Rocket springs to mind here, or budget, low-cost film stock. Even when it comes to low-cost cameras, there are those who will search out a charity shop bargain and make use of that.

All of these things are valid. Reducing the cost of photography, especially during the current cost-of-living crisis in the UK, is becoming more and more important to photographers.

I understand the mindset of buying the best camera you can for the little amount of money you have available and taking your photographs with that. A nice SLR, even with a so-called "kit" lens, will take some lovely photographs. Sometimes, using what you have to hand is better than not getting out at all.

One of the things that hardly ever gets discussed when talking about budget film photography is how to save money on developing chemicals. I understand that photographers want to get good results and that they believe this is an area where saving money is a false economy.

However, I have a different point of view.

I have mentioned before that I am a user of Ilford PQ Universal developer. I think the clue is in the name. It's a universal developer.

The chemistry behind PQ Universal has a history that goes back to a company called May & Baker, who sold a related developer under the trade name of Suprol.

Suprol was marketed by May & Baker primarily as a paper developer, but the story doesn't end there. May & Baker were a major photographic-chemical manufacturer, and their technical literature covered considerably more than simply developing prints. Suprol was used in technical photography and, according to recollections from photographers who worked with the product, in commercial black-and-white film processing as well.

There is an interesting historical point here. Suprol wasn't simply something that photographers experimented with in their darkrooms. May & Baker supplied photographic chemistry to the professional processing industry, where developers needed to be capable of dealing with a range of films and processing conditions. There was no practical option of saying, 'Sorry, we only develop sheet film in this.'

Ilford's modern documentation takes a much more cautious position with PQ Universal, specifically recommending it for technical and sheet films while saying not to use it for general-purpose 35mm and roll film. That's their recommendation and it's perfectly legitimate. But 'not recommended' isn't the same thing as 'doesn't work'. So the absence of the 1+29 and 1+39 dilutions from Ilford's current recommendations simply suggests, to me at least, that Ilford's documentation is not incorrect as much as incomplete.

My own experience would suggest that the distinction matters. At 1+29, PQ Universal produces perfectly good negatives from 35mm film, and I've got the negatives to prove it.

If May & Baker's own technical literature was prepared for different forms of photographic processing, and Suprol could be used at different dilutions for different applications, then the modern idea that using a paper developer for film is somehow photographic sacrilege starts to look rather silly.

There is the further dilution of 1+39. This dilution wasn't simply an internet-era experiment. There are recollections from photographers familiar with the original May & Baker documentation that Suprol was used at 1+39 for fine-grain film processing.

I use PQ Universal at a dilution of 1+29. My negatives are lovely, fine grain examples.

At a dilution of 1+29, one litre of PQ Universal makes 30 litres of working solution. I use 350ml for a 35mm film, which means I can get around 85 films from a litre of concentrate. That works out at about 18p per film at £15 a litre. And because I use it as a one-shot developer, every film gets fresh developer and is processed in exactly the same way.

And here is the real cost saving: I don't buy Ilford PQ Universal. There is a company called Fotospeed who produce a product called PD 5. I phoned them and asked if I could use PD 5 in the same way as PQ Universal, and they confirmed that it was a suitable alternative to Ilford PQ Universal.

It's a fiver cheaper than Ilford's product, hence my £15 a litre cost. The Ilford product costs nearer £20 per litre. In fairness to Ilford, that still only makes the cost per film around 23p when developing at 1+29.

To contrast with the standard developer from Ilford, their ID-11 product will develop 10 films per litre when the stock solution is reused. At a tenner a pack, that's a quid a roll! And to get the full 10 rolls you have to increase the development time after each successive film.

I don't keep the PD 5 as one large litre bottle once I've opened it, either. I decant each litre into four 250ml bottles. Before capping them, I give each bottle a small puff of butane into the top. Butane is heavier than air, so it sits above the developer and helps prevent oxygen getting to the concentrate and oxidising it. That way, I'm only exposing 250ml of developer to the air each time I open a bottle.

Fotospeed are worth checking out because their FX30 fixer is cheaper than premium-badged alternatives and lasts well. I make up a fresh litre of diluted FX30 at 1+4 and check the time it takes to clear the film. This is usually around 30 seconds. When this changes to 2.5 minutes, I change the fixer, given that the typical MDC fixer time is 5 minutes, and my rule is that fixing time should be double the clearing time.

Reusing fixer like this also saves money and, in my experience, doesn't compromise quality.

Frugal photography doesn't have to mean cutting corners. Sometimes it simply means understanding your materials well enough not to throw perfectly usable chemistry down the sink.

*Note, the photographs shown in this blog post were taken by me and developed in PD 5 at 1+29.

2 Person Icon and some fruit

When you venture out with your Holga, set to 645, you definitely have to accept a lack of control and lean into the unpredictable nature of the camera and lens.

However, every now and again, the universe aligns just so and the unpredictable and inconsistent Holga produces a decent negative amongst the rest.

I like this photograph because the light is hitting the fruit and veg on the stand outside the greengrocer's shop just right. The shadows surrounding the produce have some detail, but also serve as a frame for the subject.

The focus is spot on and was set using the two-person icon.

A decent photo from a walk roll.

Four More Chances

When I got my first Holga all those years ago, the camera was a Holga 120S. It was supplied with a 645 mask, and the door on the back that lets you choose between using 12 exposures for 6x6 and 16 exposures for 645 had been glued to 645.

The rumour goes that the designer wasn't happy with the performance at 6x6, due to the heavy vignette, and so demanded that the factory leave out the 6x6 mask and glue the number door at 645. I don't know if this is true, but if it is, it was a sensible move for general photography.

Today, most people will want the Holga look: the heavy vignette, the weird out-of-focus areas of the photograph and the less-than-sharp focus. So they all use the 6x6 format, and there aren't many people who use 645.

Recently, I've given it a go.

Aside from the fact that the 645 mode makes the normal photograph portrait orientation, and for landscape you have to turn the camera through 90 degrees, the 645 mode works really well.

I rather like it.

You get four more exposures per roll, which allows for a better choice of negatives when the film is finally developed. And with a Holga, those extra frames can really make a difference.

The photograph below was taken in 645 mode, and I think it has worked brilliantly.

It also occurred to me that the 645 format actually suits some subjects rather well. The portrait orientation gives a photograph somewhere to lead the eye, and that seems to work naturally with this sort of close-up subject.

I set the camera's zone focus to the one-person icon, which is 3 feet or 1 metre, and didn't bother framing too carefully because, at such a short distance, it's not that critical.

The A on the sign is out of focus, while the S and E are correctly focused — or at least as correctly focused as anything ever is with a Holga.

But isn't that the idea?

To embrace uncertainty, lean into the unpredictable and maybe, just maybe, have a photograph that works despite its humble origins?