The Digital Journey: Experience to Date
A week has passed now, and I continue to struggle with digital photography. It still seems strange and disconnected from the way I think about the process of making images. The camera is getting easier to use and I am settling down on settings to allow me to treat the process more like film and the process I am used to.
Making Digital Work for Me
I set the camera to manual exposure and focus. The focus aids are alien but they seem to work and the images I have made look sharp. This is important as I wish to use my old Mamiya 645 lenses. The manual exposure I find easier and a matter of learning the controls. Having a proper aperture ring will help when I move to my old Mamiya lenses. (The Fuji kit lens lacks an aperture ring which is a hallmark of Fuji's lenses a source of some disappointment.) The histogram is so useful as to seem like cheating and removes most of the benefit of learning to use a spot meter and to think about zones and film types and latitude. (Why does this leave me feeling empty?)
One insight I have after having been unhappy with some earlier images is that I don't want to use auto white balance; not at least if I aim to mimic film. I always use daylight balanced film so I reasoned that I should shoot daylight balanced white balance or set an equivalent color temperature (I am experimenting with 5K for instance). Automatic white balance can remove the warmth from light in certain scenes such as the ones below taken in the late evening as the sun was setting. Shot in daylight white balance these images retain the warmth of the light I would expect.
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| The River Great Ouse |
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| Dead Willow |
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| Oak and Lagoon |
(The next morning I took a few photos with this setting and found some had a bluish cast to them so I need to refine and better understand these settings.)
Film Types
Fuji digital cameras are famous for their film type mimicry. At first this seemed like clever branding to use their film reputation to extend to their digital cameras. It is however cleverer than that and there has developed an area of enthusiasts that share film 'recipes' where you start with a given film type (say Astia or Velvia or Acros) and then further modify it. Fuji provides a number of additional settings such as saturation, grain, chrome effect, curve manipulation and even adding color tint to monochrome images. I would extend that with my own (no doubt well known to enthusiasts) of using custom white balance settings to set white balance from strong colors like a blue sky. The result is strangely colored images akin to cross processing.
This is not an area I tend to explore as a creative tool, but I think it is easy to see the potential for creative expression.
In turns out that this ‘gimmick’ is not able to be bypassed. There is no plain native image mode. The intent is that one selects film type that is closest to you shooting style. This seems weird at first but the truth is every camera manufacturer makes choices about image representation when they decide about color reproduction. It is easy to find comments about the color palettes of various manufacturers and how some love or hate them, Those of us immersed in film know about this wherre different films represent colors in different ways.
For myself, I started with a Velvia film style and found it too saturated (and I am a guy who likes a little saturation). I am now working from the Provia type but still find myself toning down the contrast in post. This may move to Astia or a modification of Provia. I do keep the RAW files and Fuji has a nice tool that allows one to take the RAW file and reprocess it back through the camera so you can 'retake' the photo with different settings. I foresee a session or running images through this to hone on the settings that get me closer to what I want to see.
Some commentators seem confused by this tool, but I think they misunderstand the intent. The utility has the ability to be able to replay images with different settings. There is a film type bracket mode available but that limits you to 3 of the preconfigured versions and does not touch any of the other camera settings. I think of this utility as a camera simulator that allows one to see how the camera would treat and image in different scenarios. (You can export from this tool either a JPEG or TIFF file for further post processing. I think this workflow sounds tedious however and this may be the source of these other commentator's dislike of the tool.
Although I set the camera up to save the RAW files my process focuses on the JPEGs which is why I am homing settings to get the image right in-camera. This is part of maintaining a film-like flow but also, I really don't think I want to spend that much time deciding every one of these details. The RAW becomes a kind of backup. So far, I find my simple layer workflow stands up well with these JPEGs. I do set the highest quality in-camera.
Brutal File Pruning
Another digital trap is keeping everything. I am attempting to establish a discipline where I review images quickly and delete everything that doesn't make the grade. I am also refraining from taking a lot of photos. Most sessions outdoors so far have resulted in 5-10 images. I hope I can maintain these useful habits. Keeping the focus on quality and intent.
Lens Adapters
I am waiting for lens adapters. The most important is a Kipon M645-GFX shift adapter. This is the main one and I decided to upgrade to a shift lens to give me some flexibility mostly in making larger panoramas. I already crave my Mamiya 150mm + 2x teleconverter. An 80mm f1.9 should be a good addition too. I have a Mamiya 55-110mm zoom which as well should be a more useful range than the Fuji 35-70mm I have now. The Mamiya zoom however is very heavy.
I also bought some cheaper adapters, one for Nikon F and the other for Olympus OM lenses. I have a few of these I would like to try. (28mm, 50mm, 135mm, and a couple of zoom lenses.) They may or may not become part of my repertoire.
So that is where I stand in my new direction. I will be back with film and certainly this experience has taught me the value of the experience I have had with film and a desire to return to it. Besides, I need a way to make black and white negatives for the darkroom which I do not intend to abandon either.
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