“Show Notes”
Marcus used film for fifteen years. He thinks using film will develop your technique. He says it is magical seeing your own photo being developed on a dark room. Film slows you down and makes you think. Also black and white film will make you appreciate black and white photography and help you with your digital black and white images. If you want to buy a film camera they have got more expensive than they used to be as they are becoming popular with collectors. A film camera may be around £250. Marcus says films start at around £6 a roll. Marcus doesn’t see the point of using colour film for this.
He thinks the key is using black and white and developing it yourself. Marcus says that Nikon F-Mounts mean that you can use modern lenses on an old body. That isn’t the same with all manufacturers. To develop film you also need some equipment and you can get this quite cheaply on ebay. To develop an image the film needs to go into a light tight tank and have some chemicals added. After a few minutes the film will be developed. Marcus says this needs to be done in a light tight room or a bag. The rooms doesn’t have to be 100% dark. Marcus used to use his cupboard under the stairs at night. After it’s developed the film is washed and then needs to be dried out.
At this point the work can be done in light. Most of creativity is done when printing images, but there is some creative things you can do at this development stage. The rest of the work needs a dark room, but you can have a red light bulb so you can see what you are doing. You can use a room in your house or clubs and local colleges may have dark rooms you can use. You do need an enlarger which is a more expensive piece of kit. But you can rent them and get them second hand on ebay.
Printing the image involves 3 trays, each with different chemicals in. Marcus used to do this on an ironing board. Once you start this process there is lots of things you can control, for example the contrast. There is then dodging and burning which is about making different parts of the image darker or lighter. You can actually add colour tints as well such as sepia. And then finally the paper choice itself makes a difference the end result. Marcus says the development process is an experience in itself which is worth doing. He says having to pay for every shot on the film makes you slow down and think carefully.
“Show Transcription”
Sam: Hi Marcus, how are you doing?
Marcus: I am good, thank you, Sam. Yeah, I was just telling you earlier off-air, we’re having a bit of a funny English summer here, but apart from that, I’m really good.
Sam: Excellent, excellent. I think you’ve got something lined up for us, Marcus. I think we’re going back to the days of 35mm and the like, are we today?
Marcus: Yes, we are indeed. Before we do that, Sam, how are you?
Sam: Uh, yeah, very good. Yeah, yep, doing well as always, bouncing around.
Marcus: Cool. Yeah, you’re right, Sam. I’m going to be talking about film, a little bit of an ode to film—film photography, that is. So yeah.Hi there, it’s Marcus. A quick plug, if I may, for my online portfolio reviews. These are just perfect for the photographer who wants to get better clients and, of course, make more money. They are an hour long, one-to-one, and they are recorded on Zoom, so that means I can send you a copy. For the hour, it’s only £95, and you can sign up via my website on the tuition page. So thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you there. And obviously, I don’t want to make it a nostalgia fest because I really think some of our listeners, maybe the vast majority, know all about film or even shot on it. But there may be some people who haven’t, and there may be some listeners out there who have done it before and, maybe after listening to this, might get back into it again. So yeah, obviously I’m talking about color film, slide film, and black-and-white film, but primarily, I’m going to be discussing black-and-white film for reasons I’m going to go into. When I started, film was the thing. Digital didn’t really come out until about 2010, so I had a good 15 years of being heavily involved in film photography—being in the darkroom, printing, developing, and really, you know, really nailing it down. Hopefully, you know, getting quite good at it, I would like to think. And then, all of a sudden, yeah, digital. I switched to digital in 2010, and I haven’t really gone back. But I have noticed in the last, what, five or six years, film photography is becoming really quite popular again. Have you noticed that at all, Sam?
Sam:Yes and no. So yes, I think it’s a bit like records, if you know what I mean. Everyone talks about it an awful lot. When you look at how much it’s used, it’s a tiny, tiny amount. If you look at everyone getting excited about record sales, and then you look at the record sales compared to anything else, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, it’s non-existent,’ and I imagine it’s the same. Yes, there’s a lot of people talking about it, and yes, a few people are using it. But if you look at the number of people using film compared to digital, it’s tiny, tiny, tiny.
Marcus: It is small, Sam, but I do know—I just noticed—I think it was a really major film manufacturer, a camera manufacturer, that had just brought out a new film camera. In my research, yeah, a really lovely little 35mm camera. And in my research for this, there seems to be quite a lot of film stock available that people are selling, and I think a new manufacturer is coming onto the scene. So there really is a resurgence. But you know what it might do—okay, let’s go through what I’ve got here. So I’ve got, why use film? First of all, it’s a great experience, not just taking photographs with a film camera but being in a darkroom, developing your film, and printing your own work.
Sam: Quick question then, Marcus. Are we talking here commercially, or are we talking for fun—or a bit of both?
Marcus: That’s a big intake of breath for me there. I wouldn’t do it commercially, personally. I think it’s not viable anymore. But yeah, having said that, if you’ve got the right client and they’re prepared to pay for it, and they’re like, ‘You know, you’ve got to do it on film,’ yeah, you’re gonna do it, aren’t you? So yeah, yeah.
Sam: Maybe this is sort of linked to those creativity podcasts we’ve done—thinking about developing yourself as a photographer, developing your creativity, developing your skills, and using film for those sorts of things. And then, kind of, all the stuff you’ve learned, you can then apply back into the digital commercial world.
Marcus: 100% exactly, Sam. So the experience. The second advantage might be that it is going to slow you down when you’re taking photographs and make you think more. And yes, Sam, as we’ve talked about before in previous episodes, or as I’ve talked about regarding creativity, slowing down, thinking, internalizing—all great things to make you a better photographer. The third thing that I think it might help with—well, it will definitely help with, in my opinion—is the editing of your images, especially black-and-white. And in some ways, this podcast was brought about because I’ve seen so many black-and-white images that are really not proper black-and-white. They’re just color images that have been desaturated, and you’re really not getting the benefits or the beauty of a great black-and-white photograph out of it.
Sam: So you’re saying it’s not the same if you take a color—are you talking now about film or digital or both?
Marcus: Yeah, sorry if I’m making it confusing. I’m talking about digital images that I’ve seen that have been turned into black-and-white, and basically, people have done it in a very haphazard way or without much knowledge of how it should look.
Sam: Oh, I see. So if you’ve worked more with black-and-white film, you’ll then get better at making your color digital photos black-and-white and understanding the nuances of that.
Marcus: That’s exactly right, Sam. That’s exactly right. Okay, so let’s steam in. Investment—that word ‘investment’—we all use that, you know, when we’re trying to sell our photography, I’m sure. The investment has gone up. Ten years ago, you could get a film camera very, very cheaply. These days, just having a quick look on eBay, a 35mm camera—you can still get one like a Canon AE-1, which is a classic, for about £150.
Sam: A perfect one. That’s what I used to have, Miles.
Marcus: There you go, the classic AE-1.
Sam: I still have it somewhere.
Marcus: Maybe I should dig it up a lot. Well, you’d be surprised, yeah. And this is on eBay—I mean, you might be in second-hand stores, or people really, you know, on Facebook, might be selling them cheaper without knowing what they’ve got. Certainly, a medium-format camera like a Hasselblad or something like that is going to be a lot more, maybe £1000 or even more than that. So they really have gone up in value, they really have. That’s because people are collecting them. Film—a 35mm roll of black-and-white film is about £6. It starts from £6 to £8. I was just trying to think before I did this podcast how much I used to pay for a roll of film, and I don’t think it was a lot less than that—maybe about £4 or something.
Sam: I remember paying about that, but including processing. So is that without processing?
Marcus:Yeah, that’s without processing. How much is processing now? Well, the processing I’m going to be talking about is black and white, Sam, and this is the reason why: really, with color film, I don’t see the point in doing it. It looks like digital can pretty much mimic color film, and it’s quite expensive to have done. You can’t print or develop it yourself, which I’ll go into in a second. So, this podcast is about black and white, really, and the beauty of black and white film. Just as an aside, if you’re a Nikon user like myself, all Nikon lenses, the F mount—the DSLR ones—will fit any camera, so they’ll fit all their film cameras.
Sam: I always say it’ll retro a bit. Unlike Canon, where when they brought in the EOS, they introduced a brand new system, you can retrofit the Nikons right back to the old stuff.
Marcus: Exactly, so all Nikon F mounts will work on any film camera. Canon is a little bit different; some will, some won’t.
Sam: It depends on when you got it—like the AE-1—you can’t put a modern EOS lens on, but once you’re onto EOS, I’ve got film EOS cameras, and you can put the modern EOS lenses onto them.
Marcus: Yeah, for sure, so you can use the old lenses; you might just need to buy a film camera. That’s what you need, or you might go the whole hog and invest in a whole kit—who knows? And then, on top of that, you’ll need some equipment to put your darkroom together. Surprisingly, not much, though, and again, I’m sure you can get this cheaply through eBay or whatever, or from people selling off old equipment.
Sam: Cool, so you’re kind of saying if you’re going to do black and white film, you may as well develop it—that’s kind of part of the learning—and there’s no point in sending it off to Boots or wherever it is you send them nowadays.
Marcus: Most definitely, Sam, most definitely. And I’m going to dive into my memory vault and try to remember how I did it and hopefully give some tips on how you can do it a bit cheaper and at home. Because really, yes, you’re right, it is the developing that can really bring the cost down, and there’s a lot of control that you can have when you’re developing an image, in terms of how it’s going to look. To develop an image, basically, you put it in a tank, which is like—let’s just say—a jar, a jam jar with a lid on it, all black, all light-tight. You put your film in on a spiral, add chemicals to it, shake it up, and leave it for a few minutes, and then basically, it gets processed within these chemicals. So, the first challenge is finding a light-tight room to load the film onto the spiral. Have you done it, Sam? Have you?
Sam: No, we used my dad’s stuff, but no, I’ve never done it. But you don’t actually have to have a light-tight room, do you? Some people have bags—a whole bag is… yeah, a room is a lot of work, isn’t it?
Marcus: I’m going to go into that, I’m going to go into that. First of all, yeah, it’s got to be done in a light-tight area, but it doesn’t need to be super, super, super light-tight. Basically, they say if you can be in a room for about 30 seconds and it’s still dark in there, or you can’t make out anything, that’s light-tight enough. So, the way I used to do it: I’d wait until nighttime, and believe it or not, I’d go into a cupboard under my stairs in my old house and do it.
Sam: I guess a downstairs toilet sometimes doesn’t have windows or anything like that.
Marcus: Yes, yeah, and especially when you do it, combine that with nighttime as well; it’s surprising how little light comes in—or no light comes in.
Sam: But don’t put yourself in a fridge—that’s dangerous.
Marcus: No, a fridge would not be good. And the other way, as you quite rightly mentioned there, Sam, is you could buy a bag, which is like—you put your arms inside it—a light-tight bag, and you basically load the spiral with the film in this light-tight bag, and then you could do it in daylight. The difficulty with the light-tight bag is sometimes you might get dust inside, and it might get on your film. You know, it could add to the aesthetic—who knows? So yeah, basically, you need to load the film onto the spiral, then put it into this jar and add the chemicals to it. Once that is done, after about five or ten minutes, and maybe washing the film through with some running water, you can basically take it out, and you can do it under light. You take the negative out, and it’s all fixed and stable. You dry it off, and it can be done in a cabinet or in another dust-free room, and it just dries out naturally. So, then you could do all that without having to do it in the dark. So basically, yeah. Yeah, so basically that process—the developing process—can be done fairly easily, but certainly cheaply. Once you’ve bought this tank and the chemicals, which will last forever, you’re going to save loads of money having to send it away to a darkroom.
Sam: It’s the next bit that is the more creative part—where you turn it into a print.
Marcus: Indeed, it is more creative, but there is creativity or choices to be made when you’re developing film, Sam. You can overdevelop or underdevelop it, which will affect the contrast of the negative. You can add different chemicals, which will make it maybe more grainy, less grainy, more contrasty—so there are little things you can do in there, you know? All the things. But you’re right, the main creative process for me is in the printing. So, let’s move on to that. Again, this all needs to be done in the dark, but you have a red light this time. So, you get a bulb—a red light bulb—that you can screw into a light socket, and you can basically turn a regular room into a darkroom, as long as you’ve got no light coming in. There are options, though. You can maybe find within your own area a community darkroom where you can hire out the printing process, the printing area, or the enlarger. You might go to a local college or university, and they might let you use it, or even camera clubs might have their own darkrooms.
Sam: Cool. So, what do we do once we’re in there, Marcus? And presumably, we need an enlarger, which is a slightly more expensive piece of kit.
Marcus: Yeah, again, you do need an enlarger, which basically puts your negative in a little tray, light comes through it, and it projects onto a board at the bottom where you get your negative—you can see it. You will need an enlarger and a lens to go with it. Again, people are getting rid of this stuff—you know, car boot sales, etc. You can find it, or you can rent one out. So yes, you need the enlarger. The other equipment you need with it, Sam, is a timer. It’s all very time-critical.
Sam: I think we all have one of those on our phones nowadays, Marcus.
Marcus: Oh, I think—no, you can’t use the phone because it has a light on it, and it turns the light on.
Sam: Good point, yeah. Thank you.
Marcus: You need a tick-tock timer that you can actually see, that glows in the dark. I think that’s how it works. You also need a magnifying glass, which is like a loupe, so you can see the grains of the negative when you’re focusing on it. But again, you can buy all this as a kit, and hopefully, it’s not too expensive. And then the actual printing process involves three stages, similar to the negative one, which basically involves a tray with developing solution, a tray with stop solution, which stops the developing process, and another tray with a fixing solution, which makes the image adhere to the paper. I think for want of a better word. So it’s a three-bath process. You don’t need running water for this until the very end when you have to wash the print. You can just do this with—I mean, Sam, what I used to do was have an ironing board set up with these three trays on top of it, you know, so I could collapse it down and take it down and put it all away. So, the creativity in this process would come from, first of all, deciding what grade you are going to print your negative at. You’d have between 0 and 5, with 0 being very, very low contrast and grade 5 being very high contrast. High contrast would mean there would be very few gray tones in the image, with more black and white, while low contrast would mean lots of gray tones but very little black and white. So that would be a decision you would make: How do I want this print to look? Do I want it to be contrasty and punchy, or do I want it to look flat and low contrast? And of course, within the printing process, when you get better at it, you can mix different grades in there and have different parts of the image with different grades. Your next process is dodging and burning, which is based on making some parts of the image lighter and some parts darker. You do that with your hands or different gizmos—it’s all very organic and really good fun. You can move your hands around. The third creative process would be the color toning, which means you could turn your black-and-white print into, say, a blue tone, a coffee tone, sepia tone, or any of these different myriad colors.
Sam: Do you need special paper for that, like it’s no black-and-white paper that only does black and white, or is it just paper that does everything?
Marcus: It’s the paper that does everything. It’s actually a chemical that you add in the fixing process, if I remember correctly. Look, I mean, these are a little bit dodgy chemicals—there are plutonium, palladium, and platinum prints, which are not optically very healthy chemicals to have on your skin. So it’s all a bit, you know, not… yeah, well, what can I say? You’re going down that route, right, clubs? And finally, as you just said, Sam, you’d also have a creative process with your paper stock. So you could go for matte paper, a middle luster paper, or a high-contrast type paper, or glossy paper. Yeah, so that’s it. And what do you get out of this? As I said earlier, it’s an experience—watching your print come up in front of you. I have to say, if you’ve never done that in a darkroom, you have not lived. It is unbelievable, Sam, just seeing it come up there, agitating it, seeing it come up—it’s like magic, and it is magic. Shooting on film will slow you down because you’ve only got 36 exposures to use. It’s costing you a bit more, and that’s the key, isn’t it?
Sam: That cost is going to make you think.
Marcsu: Yeah, it’s really going to make you think about what you’re doing, which is a good thing. And finally, as I said in the intro to the show, it’s going to help with your digital editing. Now, once you’ve been in the darkroom and appreciated what a proper print can look like in your hands, you’ll be able to go into the darkroom and use those same tools, like in Photoshop or Lightroom, to create what I would say would be a more informed and better image. There we go—an ode to black and white. So, have I persuaded you?
Sam: Maybe. I’ll have to go and dig—I’ve got some film cameras kicking around. I’ve got some film, though I don’t know how long it lasts. Yeah, I’ll… I’ll have it last forever, cameras.
Marcus: It lasts for a long time. And yes, I’ll be sat in the downstairs toilet. Cool. Right. Thank you, Marcus. As always, if you want to keep up with all the shows—which I know you do because you’re a Shoot to the Top listener—you need to be on the newsletter list. That means the show pops into your inbox every week, you get extra weekly marketing and photography hints and tips from Marcus and me, you get links to old shows, you get an opportunity to be a guest, and so on. So, to sign up, simply go to shoottothetop.com, and you can sign up for the newsletter list there. Marcus, great to speak to you, and I will see you next week with our next guest.
Marcus: Next week, Sam. See you then.
Sam: Take care. Bye.