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February 1, 2008

My Camera, a love story, volume 1

Y’all. I feel like crap, so I’m going to talk about something that makes me happy.

After christmas I used some of my christmas money to buy a used 35mm camera on ebay. I did this for a handful of reasons. One, it was an experiment. Two, I had and have been following the development of a handful of full frame sensor digital cameras when it dawned on me that a 35mm film camera is the original full frame camera. Three, it was affordable and inexpensive actually in comparison to what buying a full frame digital camera currently costs.

So, what is a full frame digital camera? Most of the sensors in our digital cameras today are smaller than the surface area of a piece of 35mm film. So, 35mm film being the standard for personal photography, we refer to these smaller sensor digital cameras as having a cropped sensor. In the past few years a handful of camera makers have been putting sensors that match the surface area of 35mm film in certain cameras.

Big deal, right? Well, sort of. A cropped sensor changes the way a lens works. Whereas a 50mm lens on a full frame camera shows the full viewing area of the lens, because a cropped sensor camera captures a smaller surface area than a full frame camera, a 50mm lens becomes more like (depending on the size of the sensor) an 80mm lens for example.

Again, big deal, right? Well, again, it depends. If you are interested in using telephoto lenses, sometimes the cropped sensor can be perceived as an advantage, making a 135mm lens more like a 200mm lens, providing the perception of a more powerful telephoto.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, a wide angle lens on a cropped sensor, automatically loses some of its visual impact. A 24mm lens becoming more like a 35mm lens.

So, a full frame camera allows a photographer to take advantage of the original intention of a particular lens.

Okay, enough of that.

Another advantage of a full frame camera is resolution. Setting megapixels aside, let’s think primarily about sensor (and in this case film) size. Think about a piece of 35mm film compared to a piece of film from an Ansel Adams type camera. You know those big old-fashioned cameras we think of when we think of old-time photography. The film in those suckers is huge compared to that little fleck of film in a 35mm camera. It stands to reason that the larger film will record more visual detail than the smaller piece of film.

On a much smaller scale, this is an argument for full frame digital cameras over their cropped sensor counterparts. The full frame sensor is bigger, hence, the argument goes, more detail is captured.

Which brings me to my camera. I bought a mid-80s (based on the serial number) Nikon F3. I’ll probably make another post talking about and showing how beautiful I think the camera is. It is a solid piece of mechanics weighing over a pound and a half. I love it. I physically love it. I bought a brand new Carl Zeiss 50mm lens with a wide 1.4 aperture, allowing for steady low-light shots. Based on visual evidence, and corroborated by a battery of tests, the clarity and sharpness of the lens below its widest aperture is stunning. The pictures have an almost three dimensional quality, the colors are soft and almost pastel, and the background details are soft and pleasing (or sharp and precise) depending on the chosen aperture.

I have read some reports that it is considered the best 50mm lens ever made.

Even though it is a new lens, it is based on an old design, is manual focus, and weighs quite a lot. I bet the camera with lens weighs at least two pounds.

So, once I take a picture, what do I do? I want to have access to it on my computer, right? I want to experience the convenience of the digital age.

Yep.

So, what I do is process the negatives only with a small index sheet, no prints. (Did you know that the aspect ratio of 35mm film is 2×3 but the aspect ratio of the prints you receive is 4×5 or 5×7 so what you see in the print is not what you framed with the camera?) Then I scan the negatives at a low resolution so I can get a quick feel for the images I’m interested in. Then I scan the ones I’m interested in at a high resolution and do all the adjustment and color correction and sharpening I want at the computer.

From there, I can print them on my printer, or take them to be enlarged at a photo output store.

It’s been a great experience. There are a lot of downsides compared to digital and there are a lot of advantages too I think. Having whetted my appetite for taking pictures in the digital age I was able to take a lot of pictures quickly with my digital camera and receive immediate feedback on the choices I had made. I think a photographer starting out can learn a lot from that immediate feedback. The ability to take a photograph, make choices about aperture and shutter speed, make choices about composition and subject, and get immediate results. That process teaches you a lot, and it is lost with film. The time between when the picture is taken and when the results are seen is hours at least, and in most cases days. So, the feedback element is delayed for sure.

What the film cameras does is force a sort of slower response to the world, especially with the manual focus lens. I spend more time thinking about what sort of picture I want to take, or keeping my eyes open for something, then taking one or two pictures of it. With a digital camera, sometimes I would snap and snap and snap, working my way around a subject then using the editing time on the computer to ferret out the best one. With the film camera I spend more time before I release the shutter.