When what is outside frame influences what is inside the frame

Preamble - this is a post that was originally published back in October 2020. I am finding much value in digging back through this blog.

This little area of Hokkaido is rather special to me. There are many rolling hills with bunches of copse together. When I am here, I am always striving to isolate groups of the copse with maybe a few single trees around them, but it’s so hard because there are often more complex, less attractive aspects of the landscape trying to creep into the shot.

‘To me, what you leave out of the frame is often just as important
or more important than what you choose to leave inside the frame’

As simple as this shot may appear, it took quite some effort to do, because I was constrained by a large forest just outside the bottom area of the frame. I found I had to go higher and higher up a hill to get enough clearance, and even then, in order to completely remove the unwanted forest, I had to settle on this composition:

Hokkaido-2018-(5).jpg

Due to the large forest (just outside the bottom part of the frame) being so close to the little trees, I couldn’t give the trees enough space below them. This forced me to push the two little trees towards the edge of the frame.

At the time of capture, I remember thinking ‘this is a little unusual’, as everything in the frame of interest is really bunched down at the bottom of the frame. Can I live with it?
’

‘I think all you can do is make the shot,
and leave the pondering for another time’
(we are best being editors when at home)

I think all you can do is make the shot, and leave the pondering for another time. And indeed, as I’ve lived with this image over the past two years I’ve grown to really enjoy it. To me, those little trees are so keen to be part of the copse. But they’re almost being pushed out of the scene.

So sometimes it’s ok to put subjects at the very edge of the frame. Sometimes it’s ok to create tension. I just think that it has to look like it was intentional. Otherwise most viewers will assume it’s a bad composition.

I would also like to add that by being restricted to composing this view because I was trying to avoid what is outside of the frame, I was forced to create a composition that is / was outside my normal habits or comfort zone.

Sometimes (if not all the time) restrictions and limitations are a good thing, and encourage an attitude towards innovation.

Grads and Feathering

Preamble: this was originally posted in February 2020. I'm reposting it here, as it's still relevant today.

When you place a grad right in front of the lens, it becomes softer, and more diffused. Consider what happens when you place a hard-grad in front of a 50mm lens:

50mm-grad.jpg

Let’s think about this some more. In the illustration below, I show where the barrel of the lens is in relation to the actual filter that you have placed in front of the lens:

lens-circle-50mm-hard-grad.jpg

Not only are you using a small portion of the actual filter, but consider that the filter has been placed up close to the front of the lens and that the lens is focussed much further out than where the filter is. So the filter will be quite diffused as illustrated in the diagram above.

Filter gradations become more soft as the focal length increases

When you zoom-in, the filter graduation becomes softer. Let’s look at how the hard-grad is now working with a 70mm lens:

70mm-grad.jpg

The hard-grad is becoming more diffused, and less effective as we ‘zoom in’. In essence, you are zooming into the graduation or ‘feathering’ of the grad.

As you go down the focal lengths, gradations become more defined

When we go down the focal lengths, we are essentially ‘zooming-out’ of the gradation of the filter. So it becomes more defined. However, there is still a degree of diffusion because the filter is in-front of the point of focus of the lens:

24mm-grad.jpg

So we’ve learned that:

  1. Hard-grads aren’t as hard as we think they are.

  2. Hard-grads are always diffused more than we think they are going to be.

  3. The diffusion or ‘gradation’ becomes softer as we go up the focal lengths (zoom in).

  4. The diffusion or ‘gradation’ becomes harder as we go down the focal lengths (zoom out).

Soft Grads are very soft

For years, I always thought soft grads would be more suitable because I wouldn’t see the sudden line of the gradation, but I often found myself pushing the soft-grad all the way down, in a futile attempt to affect the sky. In my view they're too soft for most applications.

I’ve come to realise that soft-grads are only useful for when I want very soft gradations over the entire scene and that they are of little use for when I want to grad the sky only.

Consider these illustrations:

50mm-soft-grad.jpg

At 50mm, soft grads just apply a very gradual change across the entire frame. I find them mostly useful for images of large expanses of water or other subjects where there is a gradual change from ground to sky of around 3-stops.

Let’s consider if it’s any better if we go down the focal lengths to 24mm:

24mm-soft-grad.jpg


It’s slightly more defined, but still very soft.

Feathering

What we have seen is that hard grads, as well as soft grads have a degree of ‘feathering’ to them. The transition is gradual even for hard-grads.

This means that placement isn't so critical.

If you are finding your placement is bad, is more likely that you are using a grad that is too strong, rather than your problem being bad placement.

It also means that the grad isn't going to bite into mountains on the horizon so obviously, as the effect is too gradual to be noticed.

For those that do find their mountains are darkening down too much, I would suggest that it’s not the use of grads that is often the problem, it’s usually down to one of two things:

  1. The wrong strength of grad is being applied (I’d say this is mostly the case)

  2. The subject matter has very dark mountains and the grad has been placed a little too far down in the frame. Our eye tends to adjust and ‘not see’ the effect after a while, so when re-composing, always ‘wiggle’ the grad to see where it’s placed. Often times, it’s much lower than you intend it.

Conclusion

Firstly, grads don’t work the way we thought they do.

  1. Hard grads are much softer than we think they are.

  2. Placement is less critical, so long as we choose the right strength

  3. Soft grads are very soft. I’d choose medium or hard grads over soft-grads for most of my work.

  4. As you zoom in, grads become more diffused

  5. As you zoom out, grads become more defined

With regards to point 4 and 5, I now own a set of Lee Filter medium grads alongside my Lee Filter hard grads (not all filter manufacturers make different degrees of gradation - hard, medium, soft). When I zoom in, I use the hard grads and when I zoom out, I use the medium grads. You may want to go one stage further and buy a set of very-hard grads. They will come into their own for focal lengths above 100mm.

6. Lastly, but most importantly, grads are more feathered than we assume. They don’t bite into the horizon as suddenly as we assume they do, and if you are finding so, then it’s most probably due to either the grad being too strong. Or it’s been placed too far down the frame. Wiggle it around to see where you’ve placed it. Often times our eyes adjust to the placement and we can’t see where the grad has been positioned. By wiggling it, we allow our eye to re-adjust to where the filter has been placed.

Finding out the right strength of filter

There are two ways to find the right strength of filter:

  1. By trial and error (not recommended)

  2. By learning to use your light meter and learning to read in f-stops

With point 2, I’ll reserve this for another blog posting.

Writers don't write, they mostly re-write

I was listening to an interview with a writer recently. He said that most of his time was spent re-writing what he had written, and was keen to emphasise that for the most part, writers don't actually write. What they mostly do is re-write.

In essence, I think what he was saying is that the first draft of whatever a writer writes, is never up to a publishable level of quality. A writer spends a lot of time honing the work, or expanding on it. I can see for most writers, that the choice of the right word is important because it brings nuance to the meaning. So there is a need to go back to rework things until it fits just right.

I would say: all creatives maybe spend about 20% of their time finding the initial concept, and 80% of their time honing that concept.

Song writers spend 20% of their creative time coming up with the initial song idea, and 80% of the time fine tuning it, doing micro adjustments and trying to remove all the loose ends in the work.

A movie in Hollywood can spend twenty years in script format before it is made into a film. Often going through several re-writes, several script writers, producers and actors until it is finally made.

I think this kind of 20/80 spit idea isn’t unusual. In fact, I think it’s perfectly normal and I think it proves one thing: that no matter what discipline, seldom do creators make things that are instantly up to publishable quality.

They will do as many drafts as is needed until it reaches a level where they think it is ready for publication.

Keeping things fluid is just as important as is chasing a final product that is up to publishable standards, and I think most creatives know they have to go through several drafts of their work to get to that point.

So again, I think that writers don’t really write. They mostly re-write. Photographers don’t really photograph. They mostly spend time recomposing, re-adjusting their compositions until they think they’ve got the right balance in camera. They spend a lot of time re-evaluating the numerous shots they got of a shoot and then further evaluating what kind of edit might suit them. They will re-edit the work and it may go through several drafts before it is considered ready for publication.

I know this, because this is how I work. I rarely publish my edited work once I think I’m done with it. I tend to leave it for days and weeks. I live with it. Sometimes I tire of it which is a great way of knowing that the initial idea wasn’t as strong as I had hoped. Sometimes something starts to annoy me about the work and I realise that I have maybe overdone the contrast, or something. I re-edit.

I keep re-editing until I get to a stage where it feels as though it is sitting comfortably for me. At that point, I know it’s as good as I can currently make it. It is then that I let it go.

And so I publish it and move on.

Osmosis happens when you keep returning

Osmosis

the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas

I feel that my latest images from Bolivia are really the result of cumulative visits over a fourteen year period. I couldn’t have produced this set of images on my first attempt fourteen years ago sure, because I was a different photographer back then. But at the same time, even turning up now, knowing what I know, I don’t think the work would be the same. I am sure that the previous fourteen years have provided time for my unconscious mind to assemble and process what I’ve seen / felt / experienced coming to the altiplano repeatedly over so many years.

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of not discarding a landscape too quickly. I hear people say all the time ‘I’m done here’, or ‘I won’t be going back as I didn’t find much there’. Often times, the reason why the landscape offered little has more to do with our own lack of ability than anything. Or we simply fail to understand that some landscapes don’t reveal their best work immediately. Some require a lot of work, and some you need to coax the best you can get out of them over an extended period of time.

Osmosis can only happen if you keep returning. Even for landscapes we love and feel we’ve reached the end of the road with. I am aware that there have been occasions where I felt I couldn’t find anything new to shoot in Bolivia because I had been going for so long. In these circumstances I often find a hiatus of a few years can help me return with a fresh perspective. Either way, assuming that your work with a landscape is done, is a limited and self-restricting view.

‘Sometimes when I think I can’t go any further,
I discover a few years later that I had only really just begun’

For me, Bolivia has been, and still is a teacher. It has shown me how to get more clarity in my work over the years and how to push the envelope in simplifying my compositions. Even though I thought maybe five years ago or so that I had reached the end of the runway with this landscape.

This year, I felt the work had moved to something a bit more abstract and minimalist than I had achieved previously. All I know is that I’ve had many different phases in my relationship with the Bolivian landscape and this new work from this year has confirmed that there is still mileage to be found in a familiar place.

Tthere has been a process of osmosis at play in my photography from the very beginning. I feel most of us greatly underestimate that the invested time we spend in a landscape - even one we find difficult, contributes to our development and learning. Bolivia is just one of the sub-plots in my work and by looking at it in isolation, I have been able to see clearly that it has had an impact on the other locations I visit.

‘my experiences of a landscape not only affect it,
but also spill over to affect every other landscape I spend time with
It is all encompassing and cumulative, it all feeds back into itself.’

Landscapes that I have found challenging, or limited can be learning experiences. I am aware through my repeated visits to Bolivia that my relationship with this landscape has fluctuated like any other relationship. Sometimes I’ve felt I’ve hit a wall, other times I have felt progress. No matter what, I still keep returning. I still keep turning up. Because to discard a landscape because I found very little there is self-defeating and ultimately self-restrictive to my photography.

Do you discard landscape too quickly?

I’ve said previously that all photographers need to find the landscapes that resonate with them and keep working them. If there is a mismatch and you visit a landscape you don’t quite get, then rather than diss the actual landscape and say ‘there was nothing there’, it would be more accurate to say ‘I was unable to connect with it’.

As a workshop and tour leader, all the landscapes I go to are of value. But whether you are going to get them is really down to where you currently are in your own artistic space.

If you’re not ready, then you might struggle. If the landscape is too difficult, or not so easy to work with, it might simply be that it requires more investment than you had imagined. I am of the firm belief that not all landscapes are equal, not just in terms of beauty, but also in terms of how much you have to work at them.

Just because you may have found a place difficult, or found it didn’t offer up as much rewards as another place, doesn’t mean it’s a place to forget about. For me, I have returned many times to places that I found difficult, because at the core of my feelings about them, I knew there was more to be found there, but it would take some time and effort.

South Korea was exactly like that.

During my first visit there, I remember thinking that I was going to come home with no good images.

I was so wrong.

The place was very difficult to work with, and I shot a lot less film than I normally do, but in retrospect, I got one of my own personal favourite portfolios out of it.

I have since been back to South Korea and my second visit was even more difficult than the first. But I still think there is something of value to be found in South Korea and I should keep returning.

This taught me that I should avoid judging landscapes. If I’m not seeing anything there, then the issue is most probably me. No, it is me.

The other aspect that I’ve found interesting to deal with is preconceived expectations. I think being on social media can lead one to expect that your own images of a place will be on par with what you’ve seen elsewhere. This is dangerous territory to be in and can have at least two downsides as far as I can see:

1) Going there with preconceived ideas of what a place looks like, might mean you’re only able to see it the way it’s been shot countless times before.

2) if the scenery does not match what you had anticipated, you may be disappointed, and not able to ‘connect’. If that happens, you’re definitely not going to be able to see an alternative view that it may be offering you.

Both of these approaches is due to one having the illusion of control. Landscapes, often remind me that I have no control over them. But what I do have control over, is how I choose to deal with them presenting me something I had not anticipated.

I try not to diss landscapes. Often times when I do, I know deep down that what I’m really doing is offsetting my own lack of ability to find something there. I will often excuse my poor experience away as a problem with the landscape, when ultimately the problem was with me.







Life isn't a rehearsal

Well, I actually hope it is. But perhaps that is a discussion for another time :-)

But I’ve been thinking today that we are all essentially the cumulation of our memories. What defines us is what we’ve experienced and seen.

As I age, I’m aware that time is the rarest commodity I have. But I think I often forget that it’s not how much time I’ve spent that is important, but more the quality of the time spent. And whom I’ve spent the time with.

I am still very much getting over some personal grief. I was extremely close to my dad and although it is now approaching three years, he is often on my mind. I treasure all the fun I had with him, and his passing is a stark reminder that ‘all we have is now’. It is only in grief that we can realise how precious time is, and how precious the connections are that we have formed with others.

Wealth isn’t money. Wealth is in living a life of meaning. And to get meaning in our lives, we have to form connections.

I would like to thank Ulana, Geoffrey, James and Steve for coming to Hokkaido this Autumn with me to help me research a future tour here. As you may already have figured out - I love Hokkaido and Japan. Although I always go in winter time, I have for some time wanted to find out what Autumn is like.

I am now wondering ‘what’s next?’, where to go next on my adventures? Because I realise that investing in one’s future memories is an important thing to do. And this I think, is really at the core of why we all take pictures. We don’t just want to record things because they are beautiful or interesting. We record them because they are part of our own visual journal through this incredibly wonderful thing we are all experiencing called life.

Manual or Aperture Priority?

This is a re-post. This article was published February 2020. I’m going to re-publish articles from my extensive blog as I think many of them are still relevant.

This article deals with using Aperture Priority along with grads to work out your best exposures. I’m aware that many use manual, but if you read below, you may see why I think AP is a good mode to work in.

—

Each year I get participants using Manual mode for almost everything they do. Today I’d like to cover why for me I would tend to use Aperture priority (along with exposure compensation) for most of my work. The only caveat about this is that when you get into very low light situations, most cameras prefer to work in Manual. They somehow fail to be able to give sensible readings in AE.

My main reason for using Aperture Priority above anything else is mainly due to this:

‘when using grads along side aperture-priority,
the camera automatically re-balances the exposure’

Consider the diagram below. On the left I show how the exposure of sky (blue) and ground (green) are worked out. Bear in mind that the light meter inside your camera just sums up all the tonal differences and takes an average (if you’re not clear on metering, see the previous article Light meters are dumb, they just try to turn everything 18% Grey).

exposure-grads.jpg

The main point about this diagram is:

  1. Before applying a grad, the camera just has to take an average between sky and ground. So the ground is underexposed and the sky is over exposed.

  2. When applying the correct strength of grad, the sky gets darker (as we have been taught - this is what grads do - they darken the sky). But something else happens as well………

The ‘something else that happen as well’ is this:

  1. The ground gets lighter.

Why is this? Well if you study the diagram, and think about it for a little bit, you can quickly see that if you apply a grad, the difference in stops between the sky and ground is reduced. Since the camera’s light meter is looking for an average, the new mid-point is much less further away from the sky and ground tones. In other words, the contrast range has been reduced and the light meter just picks a new average between the new light and dark tones.

When working in Aperture priority, the average exposure is being computed in real time. You can even see it adjusting the mid-point exposure as you push a dark grad down on the frame. As you do so, the ground gets lighter, because the difference between sky and ground is reduced.

This doesn’t happen in Manual. You don’t give the camera a chance to automatically re-balance the exposure for you.

Manual isn’t always the way to go

For me, I would shoot in Aperture Priority for most of my work. I’d prefer to do this because each time I apply a grad, the camera just recomputes, and works out the new average meter reading for the scene.

Before I am shot to bits by people declaring that I think Manual mode is bad. I’d like to make very clear that Manual still has its place. Often times when working in very low light, most cameras give up metering in Aperture priority, and so I have to resort to using Manual for these times.

It’s just that in Manual, you don’t see the ground lifting up in value when applying the grads. So I prefer to use Aperture Priority when I can.

Aperture Priority + Exposure Compensation

If it were me, all cameras would be designed to have just these three elements:

Aperture Priority
Exposure Compensation
Manual mode

Because most of the time, aperture priority with a bit of exposure compensation is all that’s required. Sometimes I need to go longer than 30 seconds, or need to set up the camera is very low light, so I’ll resort to Manual.

Grads are still valid

If you’re a digital shooter that believes you don’t need grads, I’d like to urge you to think again. There are many benefits of working with grads:

  1. As pointed out above, when you use a grad to darken the sky, you also lift the tonal values in the ground.

  2. You get more shadow information in the ground

  3. The negative you come home with is more pleasing to work with. It requires less effort in processing to figure out if it’s any good to begin with

  4. Working with nicely exposed negatives is much more inspiring that working with negatives that need a lot of massaging in post.

  5. Are you really going to process ALL of your digital files to see if they turned out well? I doubt it. How can you tell if the image is any good when the sky is bleached out and the ground is muddy?

For me, points 1, 2 and 4 are perhaps the most important for me.

On Reworking

They say that Ansel Adams’ printing style evolved over his life time. If I am correct, his earlier prints were more towards mid-tones, and as he progressed with his printing, the skies got darker and the contrasts were developed into the classic style we tend to remember him for.

Laig Bay, Shot in 2007, reinterpreted in 2023.

I have often commented on this blog, that going back to endlessly rework older images can be unhealthy. I still think that this can indeed be very true. At some point we have to commit, and let go. You only move on if you are able to put an end to older work, and as a musician that could never finish anything because it was never perfect enough, I know all too well the pitfalls of seeking perfectionism in one’s work.

Regarding perfectionism, I’ve written about this in the past, but I will summarise my feelings on it as being entirely a destructive unhealthy approach. Seeking excellence in what you do is one thing, but perfectionism by definition means you are aiming for something that is impossible to achieve. All artist never feel their work is good enough, so at some point you have to accept you’ve done the best you can do, and move on. Keep the creativity flowing. Perfectionism halts it.

Anyway, I digress a little.

I think my views on returning to earlier work has softened a little. I think the main reason is that once you have been making images for several decades, you’re going to have amassed a lot of history. A lot of stuff to live with. I tend not to look at it, and prefer to keep looking right ahead and looking forward to what’s coming up the pipeline. But if you do have a lot of older work, and you keep returning to certain places as I tend to do, then I think I am going to find connections between some of my newer work and the older work. Sometimes I will see unfinished edits in the older work, and realise that the full potential of the image in question (see above) was not realised at the time it was made (2007 in this case).

I just completed a new set of Eigg images. I know these images are a culmination of me working that beach for over sixteen years. I did not have all the answers when I made the original capture, and I feel it is only now that I’m able to fill in the missing gaps.

Often when I look back at my earlier work, I see hints of where I was going to go. It is like a puzzle that I could not entirely see the completion of at the time of capture, and it is only later on, with a lot of water under the bridge, and hopefully more experience, that I can see what was missing.

At the same time though, I am at a conflict: there is often something in my older work that is not present in my newer work. An innocence, naivety, lack of experience? Whatever it is, there is always something endearing about our earlier efforts that, when we tinker with the older work to bring it more in-line with where we are now, we lose something in the process.

Well, I think I can give myself a free pass on this one, as I have no history of endlessly reworking my older work. On the occasions that I have done so, it has always been due to a specific purpose: a book to complete for example. It is often from a functional purpose, rather than a need to fix the past.

On looking back at Ansel’s prints, I realise now that over a career of several decades, you’re going to slowly build up a core collection of maybe a dozen images that you think represent you.

Ansel never left his signature work alone: he always reinterpreted them and printed them to fit where he was as an artist. I think that is cool. I can’t quite claim to be in someone who has an extensive body of work over a long period to do that with, but I’m aware that if I keep going, I might. I think it’s just too early to say. So perhaps I’ll get back to you about this in 2043 ;-)

Kodak E100 film

In case you hadn’t noticed, the supply chain from more than two years of lockdowns, has caused problems. Whether it is silicon chips (I met someone on the plane recently who works in semi conductors and he told me that the supply / demand chain was always ‘just in time’, which means that any hold up in making chips, will last for more than a decade).

Kodak E100, Recovered from a seriously underexposed transparency. Which is impossible to do with Velvia 50.

As a film photographer, it has been a little bit trying - I placed an order for some Fuji Velvia 50 in March 2022, only having bought some with ease in January, to find out that I have had to wait more than a year to receive a few packs. Just recently, I received around 20 more packs. A false sense of security is what I’m feeling, and it’s just as well that my freezer is stocked with enough film to last a couple of years.

But the fact is, that when the supply chain is affected so badly, costs go up. Velvia is now selling for somewhere between £70 and £120 for a pack of five rolls. That is getting expensive. I’m not personally concerned about the expense because for me, I have always assumed that if you want to do something, cost rarely comes into it. But it does concern me that others will stop shooting it because of the cost, and when that happens, we may see the film becoming something that film manufacturers stop producing. If there is no demand due to cost, there will be less films available for sure.

My main issue right now is supply. It is hard to find the film I like using. So I decided to research into some other films, and I’ve just spent the past month shooting Kodak E100 slide film which, based on some of the reviews I’ve seen, suggest it’s close, and in some ways better than Velvia. So I thought I would experiment with the film to see how I go, as it would be nice to know there is a replacement for the film I’ve used for more than three decades.

I’ll tell you now, that Kodak’s E100 is nowhere near a replacement for what I do, and I will not be continuing to use the film at all. Before I go into the details as to why, I do wish to point out some of the positives of this film:

  1. It has amazing shadow detail. I managed to seriously underexpose some images whilst in Iceland and they would normally be unusable if shot on Velvia. I was quite stunned as to how much recovery I could do to them. Images where the histogram was bunched way down to the left were easy to recover.

  2. It is super fine film. Very fine detail. Almost digital like (this for me is a negative, as I do not wish to buy film to make it look like a digital camera. I wish to use film that makes the images look like film).

  3. No reciprocity. I went all the way up to 1 minute with no compensation and the exposures when I got the right ND on the camera were very good.

  4. If you like a less saturated film, then this might be for you as its colour rendition is very ‘real’, or ‘true’. Again this is a negative for me. I do not wish to use film to record accurately what is there. I wish to come away with something that gives its own look and feel.

I am aware, or perhaps thinking that my negative views towards E100 say more about how the choice of film I’ve used for several decades has imparted my style. There are particular properties and nuances of Velvia 50 that I know so well, that when I am editing or adjusting curves, the film behaves in a way that E100 doesn’t. I am wondering if I have become so married to Velvia 50 that it is hard to move away from it, because it is so integral to the look of what I do. Something for me to consider.

Fuji Velvia 50, shot this September on the Isle of Eigg.

Which brings me on to a topic I know has been discussed by other photographers. Many ask, and I have to paraphrase this:

‘why does Bruce shoot such a saturated film if his work is usually muted or monochromatic’?’

The answer is simply that I know the film well. It has become second nature to my fieldwork, and editing.

The longer answer is below (The first answer is perhaps the most important one):

  1. I like the look of where it goes when I desaturate. If I were unhappy with the results, I would have changed. I am still very happy with what it gives me, and so I continue to shoot it.

  2. The colours look great straight out of the processing lab. Someone at Fuji worked out the colour science so I don’t have to bother.

  3. As a general principle, it is much easier to desaturate than the boost colour when editing. So using a saturated film with good colour already pre-programmed, is ideal. If I wish to turn the colour down, it’s very easy to do that.

  4. I love film grain. It gives a sort of ‘misty’ look to some of my images. The grain structure in Velvia 50 by modern standards is grainy. For an 50 ISO film it is now old technology. There are much smoother films out there, but when I decide to add contrast, I love how the film grain is exaggerated in the edit.

  5. I know the reciprocity times off by heart now. I like how easy it is to push this film into the long exposure territory very quickly.

  6. When I edit using this film, it seems to respond in a way that I am comfortable with. When I am on a workshop with a group, I often find digital files by comparison an alien place to be. The tonalities are not the same. The same is true when I use another kind of film. E100 feels more like a digital capture to me. It has amazing latitude to push and pull, but the files do not respond [emotionally] in a way where I feel inspired to work on them.

I have been tempted / considering using other films for a while, and the recent supply issues made me try out E100. It’s just not cutting it for what I like to do with my work, but of course - your mileage will vary. It may be a film you love using. I say this because this post is not intended to dissuade you from using a film you may like shooting with. The main point for me is this:

‘if you like your process just the way it is’, then don’t mess with it.

Sometimes when we buy a new camera, or try out a different ball head, or filter, something changes. If you’ve got your process in a place that makes you happy, then keep running with it, and try to do as little change as you can.

If however, you’re feeling bored, need to shake up something you feel is wanting in your work, then exploration by using different film types, maybe different editing software is something to consider.