Zen and the Art of Photography

Getting the April issues of Southport and Leland Magazines finished and to the press last weekend kicked my butt. Deadline week always takes a lot out of me because it means wearing all the hats I wear all at the same time. Getting editorial straight, making sure all the advertising is in and correct, laying it all out in InDesign and getting that package to the printer uses all of my available brain power. Adding the time-sensitive nature to that, it all needs to be finished by a hard and fast deadline hour, puts me in mental state that is not easy to just drop out of once all the work is accomplished. 

I tried taking a break last Saturday by taking the cameras out with Lisa and shooting some photos in Leland. We had a blast, but knowing all I had to do and being really in the middle of all the deadline pressure led to me not thinking my way through what I was doing and so making mistakes. I double exposed, I forgot to change the focus, and I messed up the rinse time of the developing of that roll. Using that old folding Brownie requires close attention to do it correctly. 

This past Tuesday was my official “day off” for the month. It was the day after the magazines were sent to the press and the day before they are dropped off for me to deliver. I always try to use that day each month as a re-charge day and not do much if any magazine work. The April issues I had just finished were good ones, full of good content and lots of ads, but they took a lot of last minute work to bring off. I was pretty frazzled and my brain was still running a mile a minute. I needed to unwind. 

Lisa recommended I “go somewhere” and suggested Calabash, just to get a change of scenery. That was a great idea and I decided to go bit farther south and visit the Vereen Memorial Gardens in Little River, South Carolina. I figured the flowers would be out and there is an angel statue there that I really wanted to capture with the Brownie. 

The plan worked. I took both the Brownie and the EOS-R with a new 35mm lens I’d just bought. It was amusing to me to carry around two ends of the technology spectrum like that. The EOS-R was for fun and the Brownie was for therapy, to force me to slow down. 

Using the Brownie is different. Its limitations force you to think both differently and more. With a max of six frames, choosing a subject isn’t impulsive like it is with a digital camera. I had a couple shots I really wanted: the angel and something waterfront Calabash. I wasn’t confident of finding the beginning of the film so I took an image I wasn’t dying for as the first. Just a shot through a fallen tree looking out over a saltwater marsh. It came out ok, but also shows that I wasn’t fully invested. It’s just ok.

I put the Brownie up and took a walk with the EOS-R that was just the kind of relaxing I needed. It was warm but not hot, breezy but not windy and sunny but full of big puffy clouds. I got some cool photos but I’ll write about that later. 

Then it was off to get the shot I drove there for. The angel is part of a memorial to the Vereen family after which the gardens are named. It sits just off the road in a clearing. This day the sun was coming in and out from behind the clouds and when it was out, it shone right on the angel. I concentrated on doing everything right. I paced off the distance for focus. I checked the exposure with my app and set what I though would be right. I took my time fussing with the viewfinder to frame the angel well. Then I just stood there and waited for the sun. There were no cars driving by and no other people. It was just me and the wind and the angel and the old camera. When the sun came out and hit the angel’s face just right I tripped the shutter and repeated the process for another angle just to cover myself. I figured this was worth two of my six frames. 

My second angle. I like it, but like the one at the top of the blog better

The entire process probably took 20 minutes. It was exactly what I needed. Slow, meticulous, step-by-step and entirely without deadline. I had slowed down and found my calm, and my happy. 

Then a dude with a leaf blower rolled up so I moved on. Off to Calabash.

On the waterfront I found the shrimp boat I had planned to shoot, but then I had a change of plan. There were big pelicans on the pilings by the boat. I’m a sucker for a pelican on a piling and these were very chill pelicans who didn’t mind me being there in the least. So I was able to go back to my slow, methodical routine. I was excited by the birds and didn’t want them to fly off, but forced myself to just trust they’d stay and not rush at all. It worked out well and my pelican buddies remained perfect models. 

I’m thankful for the outlet photography gives me, and I’m particularly thankful for having discovered this old camera that forces me to slow down and fully engage in the process. I feel like it is more than just relaxing, I think it makes me a better photographer. Even using a modern DSLR, it is never a bad thing to slow down and think. And it’s good for the soul as well. 

ISO, Grain, and My Collection of New Film

When I decided to try to get the folding Brownie working, I ordered a 5-pack of Kodak Tri-X 400 B&W film. I figured five rolls would give me a good shot to see if the camera was viable or not and Tri-X is pretty much the standard in the US for black and white film. This is the film stock used by nearly all photojournalists back before the digital age, so it’s “look” is one we are all familiar with from newspapers. I thought that would be the best film to judge how the camera was working because I knew what it should look like. I believe that worked and that I now know that that old camera can, if I get everything right, produce great images. 

Now it’s time to branch out. One of the fun parts of film photography is working with different film stocks that all have different properties, some slightly different and some vastly different. The range of films in black and white isn’t nearly what it is in color, but there are still differences in tone and contrast and grain that can be fun to play around with. 

So, I went to B&H and found four different films that were all among the cheapest on the site. I don’t want to break the bank and seeing as I’m not using anything approaching state of the art, why not embrace that and go as simple as possible? I also wanted to try out different ISOs to see if I could get good exposures using my kind of guesswork light metering system and the Brownie’s limited options. 

The 400 ISO Tri-X I started with is a great all-around film speed that can handle both bright sun and even indoor artificial light. If you’re not familiar, ISO refers to the film’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO (sometimes called the ASA), the more light-sensitive the film is and the less light is needed to get a good exposure. Higher ISO is also called higher speed. The nomenclature is confusing at first, but it means the same thing, higher number equals able to shoot in lower light. 

The trade off is grain, the kind of chunky look that a print or scan of an image has, making it look like it’s made up of a ton of little dots. Grain can be big or small and rough or smooth and it is one of the huge differences in different films. Grain is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of photographers add grain to their digital images in Photoshop or Lightroom. There’s a slider right there just to do that. It makes an image look more.....artistic, maybe? More “real”? Which is kind of ironic as it actually makes the image look less like the thing the camera was actually aimed at in the real world. But we are used to seeing grain in photographs, so to us, or many of us at least, it belongs there. Anyhow, often cheaper films are grainier, and higher speed (higher ISO) films are grainier. 

The films I chose are Arista Edu Ultra 100, Arista Edu Ultra 400, Holga 400, and Foma Creative 200. These each cost about $5 versus the more than $7 for each roll of Tri-X. I thought I had three film brands and four different rolls. Turns out all the film I bought is made by Foma, the Czech company I talked about in the last blog post. It’s just different packaging. I don’t mind, except that I really have three different films as the Holga 400 and Arista Edu 400 are the same thing. But no biggie, I’ll have fun with all of these and look forward to seeing the results. 

So What Makes A 100 Year Old Camera Different?

 The process of capturing an image is mechanically very simple. A shutter opens and allows the light reflected from a scene to hit a sensor that can translate that light into an image. Today's digital cameras us an electronic sensor, the previous generation of cameras use film and before that treated glass was the sensor, but in the end it is the exact same process. 

The variables are the same today as they were in the first days of photography. The amount of light entering the camera is controlled by the size of the hole made by the shutter and by the length of time it remains open. The sensitivity to light of the sensor (be it film, glass or electronic) is the third variable. That's it, the Exposure Triangle, the interplay between time, hole size (called aperture) and sensitivity (measured in ISO today). 

All the settings you’ll need

My fancy new Canon EOS-R digital camera allows me to pick the ISO, or sensitivity of my sensor. Film cameras are limited to the sensitivity of the film selected, but there is a wide range even today when few companies are making film. That part of the triangle is no different with my Brownie than it is with the Vivitar I used in college. 

Shutter speed is pretty simple as well. The EOS-R can snap off a shot in 1/8000th of a second or keep the shutter open as long as I choose. Here is one big difference that technology has brought us. The Brownie has three entire shutter speeds- 1/25th, 1/50th and 1/100th of a second. It also has a B mode that leaves the shutter open as long as the shutter lever is held down and a T mode that opens it on one click and closes it on the next. 

On the left here are the shutter speeds: 25, B, 50, T, and 100

Aperture is a function of the lens, so the smallest and largest openings vary with which lens I use for the EOS-R. The Brownie does not have an option to switch lenses, so the aperture range is fixed, in the case of this camera between f32 (the smallest hole) and f8 (the largest hole). One fun thing I've taken advance of is that on the Brownie the aperture selector is a simple lever that doesn't necessarily need to stop at one of the stops printed on the camera. Another fun thing is that Kodak before the 1930s didn't us f-stops to measure aperture, they used the US system, which is very close and looks like the f-stop numbers I'm used to seeing, but really isn't. I easily found a translator online and have pretty much memorized which is which already, so it isn't a huge problem, just a little quirk.

The apertures in the US system. To help out, Kodak has provided descriptions of the conditions under which one might use each setting. I love that there’s a “Marine” setting. 

 

The effect of these differences is to narrow options. I've heard people smarter than me say that the slowest shutter speed one can reliably hand hold and keep things in focus is 1/250th of second. So my 1/100th is a bit iffy even if my hands are unusually steady, and the other two slower speeds definitely require a tripod. One interesting thing that has NOT changed in 100 years is the thread size of tripod heads, so my modern tripod fits this old thing perfectly. But for normal, not lugging around a tripod, circumstances, it's 1/100th or nothing.

That leaves aperture as our only option to control exposure. I've used 400 ISO film, which is pretty much middle of the road, and on sunny days it's been right about f16 or f11, depending on shade. without a light meter on the camera, I'm left to use a photo app or the Sunny 16 Rule (which deserves its own post, I think). Theoretically I should have some fairly decently exposed images on the three rolls I've shot, but we shall see when they get developed. 

Once you get the exposure correct, it's time to focus. I will admit to being spoiled by autofocus, but this lens doesn't really have a manual focus either. Focusing is accomplished by slight adjustments in the distance the bellows and lens assembly extend. There are marks for 8 feet, 25 feet and 100 feet. You just guess which one is closest to what you're looking at and pray I guess. Again, we shall see. The relatively small apertures will tend to give a larger depth of field (more of the scene will be in the same area of focus) so maybe it will work out ok. 

Here’s the super-helpful focusing system. Just always be 8, 25 or 100 feet from whatever you’re shooting! 

The last big difference with this camera doesn't so much affect the process, but requires some work to overcome. The film type used in this camera, 116, hasn't been produced since the 1980s. It's a medium format film, and is not so far off from the 120 size used in today's medium format cameras. All I needed to do is buy some little 3D printed spacers to make the smaller 120 reels fit in the space meant to hold 116. It makes loading the film an adventure, though. 

The spiffy spacers that make modern film fit in the 100 year old camera

I've frankly loved shooting with this camera. The lack of options is actually kind of liberating. My first camera had a light meter, but it required batteries and I had no idea, so I didn't even know it was there. So I've had a good grasp of the exposure triangle and figuring out settings in my head for a while. It came back like riding a bike, thankfully. So without worrying too much about that, you only have to think about what you are shooting. It's fun and a great way to understand what is happening behind the scenes of modern cameras (or phones for that matter). 

Of course all of this may become much more frustrating if the film gets developed and looks terrible. I can't wait.