Which film camera?

[Saracen]

As for colour film choice, I'm not sure where to start.. there seems to be a lot of choice :s

Well, I'd start with two factors :-

- what will you use it for?
- slide or print?

If you're learning, and experimenting, try both approaches.


Firstly, be aware that slide can give fantastic results but tends to be less forgiving, exposure-wise. You can correct a lot with print, but slide is much less forgiving. You don't have anything like the latitude for incorrect exposure.

That's the downside. The upside is that there are some great films, but it helps to get the choice right, I love Velvia (mainly the original ISO 50) for scenic shots, but wouldn't use it for portraits or weddings. For that, personally, I prefer NPH400. It's good good tone balance especially for skin, is fast enough to give a lot of latitude for low-light use, such as wedding receptions, and as a print film, has wider latitude on the exposure than slide.

Another thing to think about is workflow. Are you staying non-digital for the whole process, up to an including final output, or are you going to scan, and Photoshop, and inkjet print? Because, there's any number of variants and none are right or wrong - simply whether they work for you and get the results you want.

For instance, a friend of mine shoots print film, has the film hand-processed and printed, scans the prints, tweaks in Photoshop and prints on wide-format Epson inkjets. And when I asked "why print photographically, scan and reprint on inkjets, because it seems a long way round" the answer, paraphrasing a bit, was "I get the results I want that way".

If logic was ... what works. works.

A bit more discussion revealed that my friend felt flatbed scanning a print was easier, more reliable and less fraught, and more cost-effective than scanning film provided you keep control over the print process. And the friend that does this is a successful enough photographer to not only have an international reputation, but to employ the lab techs to run their own lab. Funding a fully equipped darkroom and employing staff might go a bit beyond most of us, but doing your own colour developing isn't that hard, and mainly requires accurate temperature control and timings. You don't need that much in the way of equipment. Financially, it's probably worthwhile if you'll be doing it a lot, but chemicals have a limited longevity and you need to be doing enough to not waste chemicals.

So one option is .... develop your own film, use a cheap scanner to get a feel for which images are woreth extra investment, and get them hand printed to, say, 10x8. Then, scan them on a decent flatbed, Photoshop to tweak and then print for sale (or display, whatever).

Or, you can do what I've done in the past if l you can find the right local companies. A local print shop has a nice arrangement with a local pro. They do his hand-printing for him, as he does mainly slide, but he does the relatively small amount of slide processing they get for them. So I can get either slide or print film processed and, (if necessary) printed professionally, and locally. No mucking about with mail order.

Anyway, summing up, choose film and even film type based on the use you'll put it to, but consider different workflows if you do go digital. Providing the prints are done well, which generally means not mail-order, don't assume you necessarily need to scan the film itself. Scanning a good print works too. There's many ways to skin a cat.

[Blastuk]

I'm going to try both slide and print, I think I'm going to have to invest in a film scanner.. are there scanners which scan both print and slides?

I figure I could just scan them myself and save myself a bit of money and I can always get them sent off to be printed digitally.

Oh, also need to hunt for a lab, this is so much fun -.-

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Film scanners can be quite costly to buy TBH and the process tends to be very time consuming also especially with print film.

I use a Minolta Scan Elite II for occasional film scanning and do find that having digital ICE or similar technologies to be very useful.

I would also look at the following thread too:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...e-scanner.html

Scanners like the Epson V500 and V750 are superb but cost a lot of money.

I would be looking at preferably a dedicated film scanner such as a Minolta Scan Dual or Scan Elite or a Nikon Cool Scan. You may be able to get older models secondhand off Ebay for under £100 IIRC.

OTH,you could also look at flatbed scanners which can scan negatives too such as the Epson 4490,Canon 8600F and Epson V300.

[brammers]

I'm going to try both slide and print, I think I'm going to have to invest in a film scanner.. are there scanners which scan both print and slides?

I figure I could just scan them myself and save myself a bit of money and I can always get them sent off to be printed digitally.

Oh, also need to hunt for a lab, this is so much fun -.-

All scanners will scan all film in that size - the difference between print and slide film is that print produces a negative image, slide a positive one.

Scanners... You can do decent work on something like an Epson 750, but if you're serious you should look hard at a dedicated film scanner + something like Vuescan or Silverfast. This is serious money, and you're probably going to have to go 2nd hand because I don't think anyone still makes decent film scanners - Nikon might. Loads of scanning articles about, there was a great one on Luminous Landscape the other day about scanning with the V750 and Silverfast.

Once more, back to the 'why' - before you throw money and time at this you really need to be sure you want to do it. If you think digital sucks up HDD space, wait til you start scanning in RAW. WB? Filters for WB the slide film with daylight/indoors? Unless you like purple and green castes on your landscapes... What happens when you mess up the development on your shot of a lifetime? I did this once - 6 months and a couple of hundred quid later and I should get the repaired negative back any day now.

Mailers - well personally I can buy a film and get a strip of B&W negatives back for about £3 so I'd never pay £8 for that - but again I'm well set up.

From my experience of film alongside digital, I'd reccomend that you start off ignoring the digital side of things and just work with chemicals for a bit. Get yourself a stock of HP4, a membership of a local photoclub with a darkroom and a pack of 50 papers. Make a print a week, store your negatives well and after a few months you'll have some idea of what you're getting yourself into. From there you can see where you want to move onto?

It's a bit patronising, but film is maybe too big an area just to nail at one fell swoop. Adding digital to that just makes it even harder. To use my own experience as an example, I made the mistake of trying to get it perfect first time when I moved to digital printing. I got sample packs of at least 30 papers, filled my computer with profiles, got sample prints on sample papers from printers of different manufacturers... I ended up thoroughly confused - just too much to take in that needs experience. In the end I bought a printer, bought a B&W paper, a 'fine art' paper and a standard paper and just made a lot of prints. Maybe I didn't make quite the right choices the first time around, but with that experience I got a lot closer 2nd time around. When it gets to my 3rd round of printing I'm going to be pretty confident.

That's all I can do for advise really - I can name 30 B&W films off the top of my head, and a good handful of development tweaks. I can name 30 colour film manufacturers, and slide film still has a big market too... Rather than try to impart all of that, I'll just say go with one thing, stick with it and move on from there.

[Saracen]

I'm going to try both slide and print, I think I'm going to have to invest in a film scanner.. are there scanners which scan both print and slides?

I figure I could just scan them myself and save myself a bit of money and I can always get them sent off to be printed digitally.

Oh, also need to hunt for a lab, this is so much fun -.-

Yes, there are scanners that do both, but at what cost, and how good are they?

There's another thread where we're talking about, amongst other things, the Epson V750. It is NOT cheap, at about £600, but it IS very good indeed, both as a flatbed and, unusually, as a film scanner. But it's about £600.

Or, as in that other thread, consider a second-hand film scanner, but it wont do prints and probably (unless you go way upmarket) won't do larger than 35mm film.

There are plenty of flatbed scanners that will do film too, but the issue is how good they are? That Epson has a reputation for being good enough to be competition for vastly more expensive professional drum scanning services, and anything less will be a compromise. So you need to ask, how good do you need? How much of a compromise will you make?

That's partly why I pointed out the workflow alternatives. Scanning a reflective target like a print is FAR easier than scanning a transmissive target like film. So something like that V750 keeps the running costs to a minimum but at the price of buying an expensive piece of kit up-front. Therefore, a lot comes down to how much you'll be doing, and what for? If it's a business, the expenditure may be justified, If not, it may not.

It's a bit like buying a photo printer. A home user may buy an Epson 2880, and get A3 prints and small capacity cartridges. A business is more likely to buy the 3880, which costs several hundred pounds more but with cartridges about 10 times the capacity, costs a lot less per print to run, provided you do enough printing to justify the extra £400 or so it costs to buy.

[fuddam]

I used to get good results from peak imaging - check out their prices for D&P etc.

http://www.peak-imaging.co.uk/

[Blastuk]

I am well aware that I might be trying to do too much all at once, but I'll see if I can manage if I do this slowly.

I'm going to be watching the prices of some second hand dedicated film scanners and see if they are affordable, the most I'd spend realistically on a scanner would probably be around £150.

I'll look around at some labs in the mean time and see what kind of processing I want done first, I think mail order ones are preferred atm, travelling without a car to a lab would cost about the same anyway! (and I would have to spend time travelling)
Maybe I could just get some 4x6s done at the same time as processing and scan those instead for the time being.

I'm going to be trying reala first and move on from there.. I'll try not to rush and take this slowly