The last post got me thinking…
We still had a fair bit of creative control when shooting film but it was, and I’m not sure if this is a real phrase or not, pre-process as opposed to post-process.
That is choosing film stock.
If you were a wedding or portrait shooter capturing on neg film, you might choose Kodak Vericolour III to have the warm “Kodak skin tones” or you might choose a Fujicolour product to capture more vibrant blues and greens in the environment. And if you shot commercial work on transparency (reversal) you might choose Ektachrome E100VS for saturation or, if you really wanted punch, Fuji Velvia; that was over the top punchy. One of the real challenges was finding a film stock that would record accurately the colours you were trying to capture for a client. Greens were sometimes especially tough and I remember trying a number of different film types to record a particular green of some luggage. Something very particular, like Cadbury purple, was tough to record faithfully. And the other challenge, unlike neg or digital, a very narrow exposure range; you had to get it right and you carried a hand-held meter.
And then, of course, there was arguably the best film ever made, Kodachrome. Shot basically as a B&W film without the colour dye layers, it was sharp, neutral, forgiving in different environmental conditions, and had it’s colour added at the time of processing, a very ‘neat’ methodology. And it’s got to be good if Paul Simon wrote a song about it. (and my Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph…)
So basically, you made a lot of your choices creatively before you set out to capture the image. Or you had multiple cameras/backs with you. Besides the second on your shoulder with the B&W neg!
Another thing digital has allowed us to be a bit more flexible with is lens design. One of the examples from the last post, without lens corrections applied by a pre-written profile that is built into Lightroom and the same with the lens corrections. The lens is a Nikon 28-300, a very versatile lens and very high quality when it comes to sharpness and use but would it be considered such a stands out lens if we had to live with the barrel distortion?
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Without the profile applied |
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With the profile applied |
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