Some photos are completely unplanned, and simply and suddenly appear out of nowhere, asking to be captured into existence.

This photo is one of those. I was standing on one ridge photographing the rich colors of the setting sun on the rocky formations of the Badlands. After I was satisfied that I had done my best from that spot, I turned around and saw a group of people standing on the opposite ridge. Their silhouettes stood in stark contrast to the yellow and orange sky on the horizon from a sun that had already set.

My position on the ridge was perfect to be able to capture the full shape of their bodies, all the way from the tops of their heads to the bottom of their shoes. I quickly metered the camera for the brightness of the sky, then shot a few frames as they milled around and shot some photos of their own.

I love the way that these silhouettes reveal so much about each individual, despite showing no light or shadow detail whatsoever. They exist only as outlines. I also love the way the last person on the right in the closeup below is standing at the exact perfect spot on the ridge so that no part of his shoe is hidden. He appears to be almost disconnected from the land upon which he is standing.

I also like seeing the drink in the person’s hand in the left of the photo below and the back of the LCD screen on the back of the camera in the hand of the person on the right. These little details make me excited to think about the scene that I happened upon that evening.

I’m not always ready when moments like this happen. But when I recognize the moment, and when I react to it quickly enough, it is satisfying to see the result in the captured image.

Last summer, I drove from Logan, Utah to Washington DC. Along the way, I camped in the Tetons in Wyoming and the Badlands in South Dakota to take photos. I also meandered over to Devil’s tower in Wyoming, the Black Hills in South Dakota, and stopped in Chicago and Detroit to visit a couple of my siblings. I took lots of photos with my Nikon D7000 and Hasselblad H3D-39. Many of these photos were taken in panoramas so I could stitch them together for high resolution composites. Sadly, after spending a couple of weeks of full time work creating these composite images and fine tuning the results, I managed to delete all of my hard work when I transferred those composites from one computer to another. I’m not sure how I managed to do that, because I thought I was being extra careful to preserve everything, but apparently I wasn’t careful enough. They’re gone. The saving grace of this story is that I still have the original raw files, meaning that I can reconstruct those multi-photo images if I want to, and I do. It’s just that it’s a lot of work.

Regardless of how the data loss happened, I’ve been slow to return to these photos to start over again, because I know it will take another couple of weeks to do all of that work again. I’ll do it though, eventually. You can see some of the photos that I lost in my Facebook albums. Sadly, these are just low resolution versions:

• Badlands landscape photography in black and white
• Badlands landscape photography in color

One of the photos I recreated was one of the first ones that I took in the Badlands.

It was well past midnight when I took it, and it would be a couple of hours before I got to sleep… and then I’d get up the next morning before sunrise. Here’s the story:

I left the Black Hills in the evening after taking lots of photos of Mount Rushmore. I thought I’d have just enough time to drive to the Badlands and find a place to camp. You see, I had read that it’s legal to camp anywhere in the Badlands. You don’t need a permit, and you don’t have to camp in a designated camping spot as long as you’re out of sight from the main roads. No problem, right? Well, I didn’t think through that one very well. There aren’t any street lights in the Badlands. It’s kind of a remote area. That means that I can’t see where the roads are, which, by extension, means that I can’t tell if I’m setting up a tent within sight of a road or not. There was no way for me to know how far I would need to walk out into rattlesnake country in the dark before I could legally pitch a tent where no one could see me. Not only that, but the wind was blowing like crazy, and there was a lightning storm off on the horizon. I had driven through some rain to get here, even though the sky was completely clear above me. I knew that I would either need to find a real campground or go find a hotel.

But I set that matter aside for a little while, because I was excited to be in the Badlands, even if it was completely dark. When I drove into the park, I came in the west entrance, near the ("world famous")
town of Wall. There was no park ranger at the entrance, and no gate to stop me from entering, so I drove in. Within a short distance, the road got very winding and hilly. My headlights showed me that there were massive dirt mounds and rocky structures all around me, and that we were weaving in and out of them. I could only see what my headlights illuminated, so I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I could tell it was impressive, though. I was getting excited for the sun to come up so I could actually see what I was driving through.

The winding road led down, down, down. I was beginning to realize that I was getting pretty far from the nearest town. Where was I going to sleep? I didn’t know. But look at that lightning! I could see the lightning in the distance and I knew that I wanted some photos of it, so after driving for quite some time, I stopped at an overlook and set up my camera on a tripod. The wind was so strong that I was worried that I might not get any stable shots, even with the tripod. I took some long exposures so that I could capture the lightning strikes. They weren’t very frequent, so I took a lot of exposures, hoping that lightning would strike in some of those exposures. Not many frames captured lightning. I had a lot of nearly black shots of the horizon that I ended up deleting.

During this process, I noticed that the motion of the stars was showing up in my photos. They created little streaks of light, instead of specks of light as I wanted. The only way to solve this problem, short of setting up some sophisticated astro-photography contraption, was to set a higher ISO and take shorter exposures, so that’s what I did. The pictures are grainier this way, but the stars show up as stars, instead of streaks.

It was amazing to me that I could see the milky way as clearly as I could, and that I could also capture the lightning storm in the same frame. Nature does some interesting things sometimes. The sky was so, so black, and there was no moon, so the only light source was the stars and the intermittent lightning. The ground was completely dark. Even after spending about half an hour out there taking photos in the darkness in the harsh wind, I still couldn’t see where I was stepping on the ground. It was a beautiful moment, even though I still hadn’t solved the problem of where to sleep.

After I was satisfied that I had captured at least a few frames with good lightning strikes, I packed my gear back in the car and headed toward what was supposed to be a campground. It ended up being a long drive, and I didn’t find the campground. I gave up before getting there because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to set up my tent quietly enough to not disturb those around me (I brought a blow-up mattress, which is very loud when inflating; I didn’t have a regular camp pad with me, unfortunately). I turned back to the freeway and then went back to Wall. That was another long drive.

When I arrived at Wall, I tried to book a room in a motel, but all of the motels were full because of the annual motorcycle rally that was passing through town that week. Great. After all that driving, I still had nowhere to sleep, and I had to be up in a few hours to catch the Badlands at sunrise. I drove around until I found a campground in Wall. They had a vacancy, so I set up my tent, paid my $20, and went to bed for a couple of hours, knowing that my alarm clock was going to call to me long before I was ready to get up.

Morning came, as it always does, so I packed up again, and drove back down the road to the park entrance. I didn’t make it before sunrise, but I was there pretty early still. There was a park ranger there this time, so I paid my fee and entered the park. Within a short distance of the entrance, I came across a herd of bighorn sheep grazing by the road.

They didn’t present themselves in the most photogenic ways. Mostly they turned their back ends toward me and nibbled on the grass, but it still felt like a privilege to be among them. After I took a few photos of them from my car, I kept driving until I came to the first big overlook in the Badlands. I had driven right past this the night before. Now I knew what I had been missing.

It’s difficult to convey the massiveness of the formations in photographs. This photo was taken from a high vantage point above a valley that was full of these sedimentary pinnacles. It is somewhat akin to trying to capture the grandeur of the Grand Canyon. The canyon in the Badlands doesn’t drop down as far as the Grand Canyon, but the formations below are so impressive and so numerous that it deserves to be called awe-inspiring. I had been driving through this in the dark, and got only a taste of it that way. Now I was beginning to fully enjoy the complete experience.

That was the beginning of my photographic experience in the Badlands. The cold, windy night turned into a hot cloudless day. Eventually I made it over to the campground in the Badlands that I had been trying to find on my first night. I camped there for a couple of nights so I could drive around and photograph as much of the landscape as possible.

It was time well spent.

It’s always nice when there’s a story behind a photo, and even nicer when it has to do with a nice person (or two).

I spent a day photographing cityscapes in Pittsburgh. It was a cold, wintry day, which was perfect for what I wanted, even though my hands were swollen at the end of the day from the constant exposure to the cold. I spent the first couple of hours driving around to familiarize myself with the city. I drove to the top of Mt. Washington, which has a fantastic view of the downtown skyline. The morning light was not particularly flattering, but I knew it would be better in the evening with the city lights on and the sun setting to the back left of the hill, so I planned to come back right before sunset.

I was with Katherine, a friend of mine who moved to Pittsburgh not too long ago. She hadn’t yet ridden The Duquesne Incline, so this was a chance for both of us to experience something new. I brought my tripod and my Nodal Ninja panorama head so I could get some sweeping shots of the river below me. One of the cable car operators, Clyde, saw that I had a tripod with me, and he immediately offered to let me go to a gated area on the overlook so I could photograph the cable car in the foreground. His enthusiasm for The Incline, and his excitement to talk about it and show it off was palpable. I accepted his invitation and made my way past the closed gate to a platform closer to the tracks. I set up the tripod and took a few shots, but it wasn’t long before I realized that this vantage point had a few disadvantages, such as the tall fence that made it difficult to position the camera. I decided to go back up to the main observation area and set up the tripod there. The fence was still there, but it was a larger space, so the fence wasn’t quite as big of an obstacle.

The sun had already set, so all of the exposures were rather long. I wanted to keep the ISO on my Nikon D7000 at 100, to keep the colors vibrant and the file easy to work with in terms of shadows and highlights. The slow shutter speed meant that it was impossible to photograph the moving cable car with any clarity. It would just be a long blur. Clyde mentioned that he had wanted to take a photo using a strong light on the car, but had so far been unsuccessful. I thought about it, and realized that I could probably get a pretty good effect with the Nikon SB800 flashes that I had in my camera bag. I told Katherine to go down to the lower platform where we were before and fire off the flashes on my cue. I had one flash set manually at full power and another flash set at full power in the SU-4 remote mode, which means that it will flash as soon as the first flash goes off, producing essentially a simultaneous flash at full power from to SB-800 flashes. This worked well enough, but it didn’t give me a great visual effect. It ended up looking like this:

Note: the colors are different form the final photo, in part because they were taken at different times in the evening. The colors of the sky (and reflection in the water) change very quickly at this time of night.

The flash did its job, but the end result just isn’t that pleasing. When I mentioned this to Clyde, he immediately offered to stop the car anywhere I wanted on the track so that I could get a clear picture of it. He talked on his walkie talkie with the other person operating the car and told him where to stop the car. The car went down the track, then had to backtrack a bit to get up to where I wanted it. The (extremely slow) backtracking was apparently necessary because there was some sort of safety mechanism in place that wouldn’t allow the car to stop until after it had passed a certain point. I didn’t quite get that part of it. In any case, once the car was where I wanted it, I took a couple of frames and had Katherine fire the flashes twice. This gave me four bursts at full strength from the Nikon SB800 flashes. It was enough to give me the look I wanted.

Thank you, Clyde, for being so willing to help me get the photo that I wanted! You were a great help, and a fun person to meet. And thank you to Katherine for firing the flashes on cue, even in the hand-numbing cold temperatures. I later told people that Katherine flashed the funicular. She wasn’t too thrilled about hearing me put it that way.

Here’s a wider panorama version of the same shot:

The car has pretty much the perfect amount of lighting, and it looks great against the backdrop of the city lights reflecting in the water.

Clyde was great. He is very proud of what he does, and he took us on a long, detailed tour of the machinery that makes The Incline run. Here are a couple of those shots:

He and the other operator talked about some of the celebrities that have come through and used the incline. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were a couple of the most recent ones. They were filming a movie in Pittsburgh not too long ago.

So there’s the story behind the photos of the funicular cable car in Pittsburgh. I’ll end with some photos that I shot in black and white:

I photographed a corporate event at the Crowne Plaza National Airport Hotel in Crystal City (Arlington, VA), under my brand for wedding and event photography: White Ribbon Studios. Most of the photos consisted of people giving presentations and mingling, but I also took a few photos of the catering services, so here’s a little on-location food photography.

All of these photos were taken with either my Nikon D7000 or my Nikon D5100, which is essentially a Nikon D7000 sensor in a non-pro consumer camera body. The D7000 is a lot easier to use, because all of the features that I use on a regular basis are available from buttons, knobs, or dials on the camera’s exterior. The D5100 has the same features, but the interface for many of them is accessible only through the LCD menu system, which is less convenient. Still, the image quality is identical, and the camera costs a lot less, so its a passable backup camera on a job like this.

All of these shots are with prime Sigma lenses, either the Sigma 50mm f1.4 (full frame lens; equivalent to 75mm on the D7000) or the Sigma 30mm f.14 (for crop sensors; equivalent to a 45mm lens on the D7000). I also had Sigma’s 85mm f1.4 lens (equivalent to a 128mm lens on a D7000) with me for photographing speakers. All of these are stellar lenses for this type of photography. They allow me to keep the ISO low and give me wonderful background blur (bokeh). I used to use a close range zoom lens (24-70mm on a full frame camera) and a long range zoom lens (70-200mm on a full frame camera) for this sort of photography, and that’s still a good combination, but those lenses are two stops slower at f2.8, so by using prime lenses at f1.4, I can usually keep the ISO at 1600 or lower. Some of the conference rooms were extremely dark, though, and I had to boost the ISO to 3200, even at f1.4. I was able to take those shots at 1/60th of a second… without a flash, which would not have been possible with my cameras with f2.8 lenses. I could always buy a D4 or a D3s, I suppose, which would allow me to take the ISO even higher, and maybe some day I will. For now, though, my D7000 is up to the tasks that I’ve given it, and I’m quite happy with it.

The Breakfast Buffet

Buffet items Available During the Mingling and Networking Hour

Other Decor

I used to own a Hasselblad H3D-39 (39 megapixels), but sold it a few months back (the current equivalent model, as of right now, is the Hasselblad H4D-40). That was a fantastic camera, and, to be honest, there have been times when I regretted selling it, but it’s also a bit of an aging technology. It produced fantastic results at ISO 50 and ISO 100, but anything above that started to break down. ISO 200 was passable for some things, but ISO 400 and 800 just weren’t worth much. With film, on the other hand, I could get great results with Portra 400 (ISO 400) and Portra 800 (ISO 800) and high resolution negatives that were almost as detailed as the H3D-39 files. And with my Nikon cameras I could get great results at higher ISOs too, which can be really handy for late evening or night shots. And with the Nikon cameras, I can always stitch images together to produce higher resolution files if necessary. So I sold my Hasselblad, not knowing exactly what I would do or buy next. I was content to stick with film and my Nikons for the time being

That didn’t stop me from at least looking at other options though. I tried out a Pentax 645D, which is a stellar camera and, at $10,000 is several thousand dollars less than comparable products by Hasselblad (e.g. the H4D-40 at $18,000), or Phase One, or Leaf. If the Pentax 645D back were detachable, I would have already bought it. The trouble is that I want to use a digital back on my Mamiya RZ67 and on my view camera. I can’t do that with the Pentax 645D.

The one thing that makes me less than fully enthusiastic about the Nikon D800E as an alternative to a medium format camera is the 2:3 image aspect ratio. I’m just not a fan of the wider format. I love the squarer 4×5 format of the RZ67 and the 3:4 format of the 6×4.5 smaller medium format cameras. I can always crop. That will give me a reduced resolution in the range of 31 to 33 megapixels, which still is pretty good. And if I need to go bigger to compete with the people out there using the Hasselblad H4D-60 (60 megapixels) or the Phase One IQ80 (80 megapixels) or the Leaf Aptus II 12 (80 megapixels), I can still do that with stitching.

The Nikon D800E will come without an anti-aliasing filter, which means that, in theory, it should resolve as much detail as the medium format digital backs. There may be other intervening limitations, such as the lenses or the pixel density, but I think the camera should perform quite well. There will be a version with the anti-aliasing filter too, for about $300 less.

I really like the fact that Nikon decided to put this large sensor in a small camera body. The Nikon D3x, which I owned for a couple of years — in fact, I used to own two of them — is a great camera, but the large pro body isn’t really necessary, especially since the camera isn’t capable of high frame rates for action or sports photography, at least not at 14 bit image quality. The smaller size of the
Nikon D800E will make it easier to travel with. A vertical grip is available as an option too, for those who still want that.

I’m excited to get my hands on this camera!

I took my Contax 645 film camera to a recent corporate event photography assignment. I wasn’t planning on using it much, but I wanted to get a little more practice using the camera in dark indoor lighting. (I do my corporate event photography in Washington DC through my other brand, White Ribbon Studios.)

Normally when I shoot events in dark places (and most corporate event photography tends to be in dark places), I use my Nikon cameras with on-camera flash, which I bounce off of walls and ceilings. I never shoot with direct flash, unless there is literally nothing to bounce the flash off of, such as outdoors in open spaces in the dark of night. The Nikon cameras perform admirably, and I don’t have any complaints about them. But I’m an experimenter, so I wanted to find out what my Contax 645 was capable of.

One complication is that I don’t yet have a flash for my Contax. I knew that the camera was capable of firing my Nikon SB800 flash, even though the TTL (through-the-lens) pre-flash metering won’t work with the Contax, because the TTL feature is a Nikon proprietary technology. I had read that I could use the flash on the "automatic" setting, so I set the mode to "A" and set the focal length selector on the flash to 85mm, since I was using an 80mm lens on the Contax (that’s the closest setting that the SB800 allows), and I set the ISO to 800, because I would be using Kodak Portra 800 film. That sounds like what I’m supposed to do, right? I loaded the film and I was set to go, or so I thought.

Things started badly. I arrived early enough to do a few test shots before the event began. I took out my Contax and tried to take some photos of the decor. I focused and press the shutter button, but nothing happened. The shutter didn’t trip. What’s going on? I tried turning the camera off then back on. I tried switching buttons. After about a minute of fiddling with the camera settings, I had to put the camera back down because people were arriving, and I didn’t have time to continue troubleshooting.

Later in the evening, after I had taken plenty of photos, I went over to my Contax to see if I could figure out what went wrong earlier in the evening. It took me only a second to realize that I still had the dark slide in place, covering the opening to the film. Grrr. That was an easy, if embarrassing, fix. I didn’t spend time wallowing in my embarrassment though. For one thing, I was the only one that knew, and there was no need to tell anyone else. I took out the dark slide and I started to take a few photos of the scene.

One of the great things about the Contax camera is its fast lenses. The 80mm f2.0 lens, in particular, allows for low light photography at a level that no other medium format system can match. The lens still isn’t as fast as a Nikon f1.4 prime, though, and you can see in the imprint on the side of the negatives that I was often shooting at 1/15th of a second in order to get the ambient light to register appropriately. That’s a very slow shutter speed for handheld photography. The photos turned out alright, I think, considering that limitation.

One thing that is definitely NOT fast about the Contax is its focusing system. It performs adequately in good lighting, but it has a really hard time performing in low light. In fact, in many corners of this room, I could not get the camera to focus at all. It just wouldn’t do it. I gave up trying, and focused instead on scenes that had enough ambient light to allow the autofocus system to work. At this point I already had plenty of photos of the event itself, so this was my own time to play around a bit.

When the lens is set to f2.0, it’s about equivalent to a 50mm f1.2 lens on a 35mm camera. It allows the background to fade into really beautiful abstract blurs and blobs of light, as you can see from this set of photos.

One thing that I didn’t discover until getting the negatives back is that the flash seems to have failed to fire on about half of the photos. I’m not sure why. It may be because the Nikon SB800 flash was set to automatically go into sleep mode after a certain amount of time. That’s something I’ll have to investigate. I’m not convinced that’s the problem, because I think it would have affected even more of the photos if that were the case, but I can’t rule it out yet. When the flash did fire, it seemed to produce good, accurate exposures. I was bouncing the flash, and it still seems to have metered adequately.

[EDIT: I did some testing, and yes, the auto standby was the culprit. I'll have to disable that feature in the future when using the flash on non-Nikon cameras.]

Most of the photos that I took in which the flash didn’t fire are too dark to be usable. Film seems to have some rather dramatic and unpleasant color shifts when it is not exposed correctly — particularly when it is underexposed — and it’s really hard to correct those color shifts in post production. Here is the only usable under-exposed photo that I took:

The rest of the underexposed pictures (when the flash didn’t fire) look like mush, both in terms of the color and in terms of the motion blur, because the shutter speed was so low.

So what have I learned?

1. Portra 800 takes excellent low light shots indoors when it is supplemented with on-camera flash. The colors are beautiful and natural, and the grain is not too noticeable.
2. Without a flash, Portra 800 isn’t fast enough, and underexposed Portra doesn’t look very good… or at least I wasn’t able to make it look that good. I scanned the negatives and did the color adjustments myself.
3. The Contax 645 does a horrible job of focusing in low light. Manual focusing is the only option in these circumstances.
4. I probably need to buy a flash that’s made for the Contax camera, or else find out why my Nikon flashes weren’t firing reliably. [EDIT: The reason the flash wasn't firing was because it was set to auto standby. I still think I'm going to get a dedicated Contax flash though.]
5. Shooting film in these situations isn’t as hopeless as I thought it might be, but…
6. … I’m not giving up my Nikons any time soon. They’re faster and easier in low light situations, and they produce beautiful results.

Below are a few of the shots from my Nikon camera (D7000), set to ISO 2500 most of the time. A few of the shots from my Nikon also turned out underexposed, but I was able to make them look decent in all cases. Digital captures don’t suffer from color shifts in quite the same way that film does when underexposed. The underexposed digital captures still end up looking noisy, and the colors have a much narrower gamut, but they don’t start to turn cyan or other weird colors the way that color film does.

And for those of you looking for a corporate event photographer in Washington DC, I would love to do that for you! I do my event photography through my other brand, White Ribbon Studios.

The view of Rosslyn, Virginia, from near the top of some stairs in Georgetown, Washington DC. The stairs were used in the movie “The Exorcist” and have come to be known as “The Exorcist Stairs."

This photo is a composite of several photos, to make a high resolution image of 102 megapixels.

I asked Maki to put on a kimono that her mother purchased for her. It’s not every day that I get to see this kind of traditional Japanese attire, so it was a privilege for me.

Maki even let me help with the makeup and hair. I’ve discovered that I’m better at makeup than I am at hair. For one thing, her hair was so smooth and straight that it was a real challenge for me to put in an up-do. We used lots of bobby pins. The makeup was really light. I wanted to keep it as natural-looking as possible. I applied some base and some light lipstick. She had already applied eyeliner. I’m not going to become a makeup artist anytime soon, but it was fun to be able to participate in that aspect of the preparation for the photo session. These were all shot with a Nikon D7000 camera.

The lighting equipment for this photo session is all Paul C. Buff AB800 lights. For the photos with the light background, I used a medium-sized silver parabolic umbrella with a diffuser as the main light, and a large silver parabolic umbrella with a diffuser as the fill light. I also pointed lights at the background, with just the standard reflectors that come with the AB800s.

I took a series of photos with a light (AB800) behind the parasol, as you can see in the photo below. I told Maki to come home with a parasol from her recent trip to New York, so we could use the parasol in our photo session, and she came through, though she says it almost made her miss the bus back to Washington DC.

Here is the same parasol without the light behind it:

I also took a series of photos with a dark background. For these, the main light is a 3-foot gridded strip box. You can see that there is some falloff of light down toward Maki’s feet. I did that to help put more of the emphasis on her face. A silver parabolic umbrella with diffuser provides fill light.

Thank you, Maki, for a fun photo session!

Am I really getting 35 megapixel scans from Kodak Portra 160 film with my Mamiya RZ67 camera, on an Epson V750? Maybe, maybe not, but the scans hold a lot of detail.

A while back, I posted a blog entry about my experiences scanning photos taken with my Mamiya RZ67 Pro II camera, using Portra 160 film, scanning with my Epson V750 Pro. I explained that I was getting files with the equivalent of 33 megapixels when scanned with my Epson V750 Pro, which far exceeded my expectations. It turns out that a math error exaggerated that original claim. But since then, I’ve had time to fine tune my scanning technique, and to create a more accurate profile of the color characteristics of Portra 160 film. I rescanned some of the same negatives, plus a few that I had never scanned before.

Here are a few of the re-scanned images:

This time I scanned them at 4800 dpi, which produced files at about 140 megapixels. That’s big. Viewing the scans at 100%, there is plenty of detail, with nice, smooth transitions between tones and hues, but it does look slightly enlarged past its optimal resolution. Viewed at 50%, the file comes in at 35 megapixels, and it has a level of crispness and detail on par with digital files. That means that, to my eye, my original estimate of about 33 megapixels turned out to be about right.

I no longer own my Hasselblad H3D-39, so I can’t do a direct comparison of files to test the resolution. It may be that the digital camera still produces more detail, but there is a lot of detail on these film captures. Perhaps the film resolution is between 25 and 35 megapixels, or we can split the difference at 30 megapixels. Without the benefit of a side by side comparison, those are all just guesses, but take a look at the 50% crop below from the 140 megapixel original (i.e. this is equivalent to a 100% crop from a 35 megapixel original) and tell me what you think.

So, regardless of what the actual megapixels turn out to be, this is a high resolution photograph that can print at very large sizes.

How did I achieve this level of detail? Here are a few contributing factors:

• Sharp lenses: The Mamiya RZ67 lenses are some of the best in the world. I’ve used them with film and with digital cameras, and they’re every bit as good as the lenses for the Hasselblad H3D camera that I had, if not better. I used the same digital back on both the Hasselblad H3D and the Mamiya RZ67, and the results were both fantastic. I’ve also been using a Yashica MAT-124 G twin lens reflex camera, and I love it, but the lens, while very good, is not as sharp as the Mamiya lenses. I’ll still keep using the Yashica, because it produces good results and is fun to use, but if I need maximum resolution, I’m going to turn to the Mamiya RZ lenses.
• Small aperture: With 6x7mm negatives, the lens has to be stopped down more than with 35mm cameras. The photos above were taken at f9, I believe, which still has a relatively shallow depth of field, as you can see in the way the nose is less in focus than the eyes. I took some other photographs during this session with the aperture set at f2.8 (on the 110mm lens) and f4.5 (on the 180mm lens), and while the results were very sharp at the plane of focus, the plane of focus was so narrow as to put most of the photo out of focus, decreasing the perceived resolution of the files. For headshots like this, f16 might be the optimal aperture.
• Studio lighting: Using studio lighting means that I don’t have to worry as much about camera shake, because the flash duration is short enough to freeze most action. All of the shots above were hand-held.
• High resolution film: The Kodak Portra line of film is fantastic. Portra 160 speed film has a low level of grain and beautiful colors (once you figure out how the proper color balance in the scanning software, which is exceptionally difficult to do, unfortunately). Fuji Pro 400H is also a great film, but its grain structure is more visible, especially in the shadows, than the Portra films.
• Adjusting the scanning tray height: I had to experiment a lot to find out what height was best for the focus of my Epson V750. It turns out that propping up each corner of the scanning tray with a penny (a US coin) did the trick. Not every scanner is exactly the same though, so I don’t guarantee this will work for you. You’ll have to experiment.
• Wet scanning: Scans with ScanScience’s Lumina scanning fluid look slightly sharper than dry scans. Part of the sharpness is due to way that wet scans force the negative to be completely flat. The fluid also helps with shadow and highlight areas, reducing the graininess and increasing the dynamic range somewhat.
• Using the bottom of the scanning tray: ScanScience recommends putting the negative on the bottom of the scanning glass, rather than on the top, so that the light doesn’t have to shine through the thickness of the glass. The light still has to shine through a thin layer of plastic which is placed over the film, but any diffraction from this plastic is minimal, and definitely less than the diffraction that you would get from the glass.
• High resolution scan: I scanned the negative at 4800dpi, which is more resolution than I’ll really need for these images, producing 140 megapixel files. If I then cut the size by 50%, that cuts the resolution down to 25% of the original value (because both dimensions are half as large as before), bringing the resolution to 35 megapixels. This size is more in line with the true resolution of the scan. Still, it’s nice to have large scans to be able to produce large prints.
• Unsharp mask: The raw scan from the Epson scanner is not as sharp as the final images above. I applied the unsharp mask tool in Silverfast 8, which produces wonderful, natural-looking sharpness. It turns out that it works better than Photoshop’s unsharp mask tool, probably because the Silverfast tool is optimized for film grain, and the Photoshop tool is optimized for digital noise. I set the Silverfast unsharp mask tool to: Power 290, Radius 2.3, Threshold 10. I’m not sure these are the absolute best settings for all situations, but they produced the results that you see above, which look pretty good, I think.

It’s nice to be able to get this kind of quality and resolution out of film. It’s time-consuming to be sure. I had to develop the film (or, in my case, take it to a lab to have them develop it), wet scan it (slow and laborious), and remove dust spots (even more slow and laborious). Before getting to this point, I had to figure out the right color balance for these shots. That involved weeks of experimentation and re-experimentation, and re-re-experimentation. It was frustrating, but it was nice to finally get a good result with my custom "Negafix" profile in Silverfast.

For those who are curious, here are the curves in the Negafix profile that I created:

One caveat, and another frustrating point, is that these curves don’t work for all situations. I took some photographs in more dramatic lighting conditions, using the same film and camera, and I had to create an entirely different custom Negafix profile to get the colors even close to right. Here’s what that profile looks like:

As you can see, these curves are dramatically different. This second set of curves still isn’t perfect for the photos I used it on. I had to do additional adjustments in Photoshop to get the images to look acceptable, so I’m not sure the second Negafix profile is worth much. I’m very happy with the first one, though, at least for the photos in that photo session. I hope I don’t have to create too many more custom profiles for the same film. I don’t even know why I have to do it in the first place. I guess the film handles deep shadows and bright highlights differently than more even lighting, in terms of the color response. I don’t know. If anyone has any insights on that issue, I’d be interested in hearing them.

And if someone out there with a high resolution digital back wants me to do some direct side-by-side comparisons of the resolution of film vs. digital, just let me know. I’d be happy to set up a controlled test. I just don’t happen to have a digital back available to me right now.

For those wondering what the original scan looks like at 100%, here’s a crop:

As you can see, there is a lot of detail, with generally good rendition, but it looks enlarged past its optimum resolution. The original scan would still make excellent large prints — very, very large prints — but the 50% downsize looks better at the pixel level.

I’ve been shooting more film than digital lately, mostly because I want to learn what the differences are between the two. I’m not talking about trying to decide which one is "better," because that’s too much like trying to debate between religions or political parties. I’m just trying to find out what makes them different and why. Here are a few comments about a comparison between a film photograph and a digital photograph of approximately the same scene, almost a year apart.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of crops of two photographs taken in approximately the same location on two different days. One was taken with Kodak Portra 800 film using a Yashica Mat-124 G twin lens reflex camera at about f11, handheld, but braced by a railing. The other was taken with a Nikon D3x 35mm digital camera, with a 24-70mm lens, handheld at ISO 1600 at f2.8. One was taken at Christmas time in 2010. The other was taken at Christmas time in 2011, so the color of the Christmas lights is different (blue one year and magenta the other year), and the illumination of the roof in the foreground is very different. Even with these differences, we can make some useful comparisons between the film capture and the digital capture.

Can you guess which photograph is digital and which is film?

Did you make your guess yet? You should definitely guess before reading the answer.

What qualities of the images influenced your guess?

Sharpness? Colors? Something else?

The answer is that the image on the left is the film photograph and the image on the right is the digital photograph. Aside from differences in the color of Christmas lights, and the slight variation in the framing and composition, there are a few things that distinguish the quality of the two photographs.

Sharpness/Motion blur: The image on the right shows some slight motion blur. That’s because I was hand-holding the camera in a rather dark environment. The shutter speed was 1/20, which is quite a slow speed for hand-held images. I moved a little, so the image isn’t as crisp as it could be. You can see the motion blur most clearly in the lights directly above the chimney. This motion blur at 1/20th of a second would have happened no matter what camera I was using, so it doesn’t actually mean much if the point is to compare digital to film.

Color temperature and saturation: One meaningful difference between the film and digital captures above is the color of the hall lights above the chimney. The digital photograph renders the light with a purer yellow color. Portra 800 renders the light as a more subtle yellow, giving it a more natural appearance. Some people may prefer the more saturated look of the digital photograph. It’s a subjective matter of preference. It is possible to boost the saturation in Aperture, Lightroom, or Photoshop, of course, though this would diminish the look of film and push it toward a digital appearance. Also, different films would handle the colors differently. Fuji Velvia ISO 50 would produce very saturated colors, perhaps even more saturated than the digital capture.

Blown highlights: A more significant difference is the way the two photographs handle the highlights. Look at the highlights created by the ceiling lights in the hallway above the chimney. In the film photograph, you can still see the color of the wall in most instances, and there is a gradual transition between the unlit portions of the wall and the highlighted portions of the wall (The wall sconce in the film photo does seem to blow the highlights, but none of the other lights do.) The same is true in the spot of light on the ceiling above the ceiling light. By way of contrast, the digital image renders all of the highlights as pure white, and adds a yellow fringe to these hot spots.

As a general rule, film captures details in highlights much better, and with more subtlety, than digital sensors do. Film excels at highlights. Digital sensors, on the other hand — at least the newest generations of digital sensors — tend to handle shadows better, allowing for greater shadow recovery. And yet, with films like Portra 400, the shadows are usually rendered somewhat brighter by default than digital captures, so the advantage to digital cameras is reduced somewhat. When I need to recover details from shadows, I tend to have more success doing this with digital photographs, but the natural dynamic range of film already displays much of this detail to begin with, so I don’t need to recover shadow details as often. When I do need to, though, it’s harder with film, and there is less room for recovery before the film grain starts to become a problem.

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It isn’t that film is "better" or "worse" than digital then, it’s just that film has certain strengths. One of those strengths is the ability to retain details in highlights better, rendering the highlights in a more natural way, with less jarring colors and smoother transitions.

Here are the full photographs from which I took the crops. You can see the difference in the highlights in multiple places in the two photographs (again, even aside from the very different lighting schemes from one year to the next).

And here is a multi-image panorama of the scene (this is the Gaylord resort/hotel at National Harbor in the Washington DC area):