 I'm back to shooting 35 millimeter film. In this video, I'm gonna attempt to explain this new chapter in my photography journey. And if you stay to the end, I'll show you how I'm using affinity photo to invert my black and white negative scans. Have you ever heard someone say, I don't shoot 35 millimeter film anymore? What's the point? If I wanna shoot 35 millimeter, I'm gonna shoot in digital. Well, in the not too distant past, I think I've been guilty of saying that myself. For this YouTube channel, I try to be as transparent as possible for what gear I use, how I do my photography. And some of my decisions may not make a lot of sense to people watching, but my decisions are based around my needs or my perceived needs. And so what I would find important, you might not. And like many photographers, I can convince myself I need a certain piece of gear. When I really probably don't. After using medium format for a couple of years after returning to film photography, I went to large format, four by five. Now I know I said I was gonna keep my four by five gear. I do have a large format camera. It's four by five. And I don't plan on getting rid of that. I plan on keeping using that. Well, it's in transit right now to be sold. And when this video comes out, I may have already sold it, the lenses and the camera itself. I couldn't keep trying to justify using a camera that didn't work well with my style of photography. I think I had a romantic attachment to the format and I've decided to face the truth and be honest with myself and part ways with that format. So that brings me back to where I started. From now on shooting film, I'm gonna be shooting 35 millimeter. So what changed my mind? Well, it was a number of things that all came together at the same time and observations I've been making over the last year on my photography. First, I got a new film camera. A subscriber to this channel. He goes by old film guy. Also, I know him as Robert Gully. He generously donated this camera to the channel. It's a Nikon N80. Works great with all my lenses. And he wanted me to have this camera to use on the channel. I'm extremely grateful and moved by the gesture. I'm very humbled by it. So we're gonna put this camera to good use. So thanks Robert. And secondly, I finally figured out how to do some scanning with my DSLR. It's not that I didn't know how to do it. I just didn't have a good lens to allow me to do it. So what I did is I went out and bought a 55 millimeter macro lens, a manual focus. It's an old lens. It works good enough to do the scans. I'm getting some really good results. And that's really been kind of the barrier between me and 35 millimeter was, I wasn't really happy with the scans I was getting on a flatbed scanner. So this last couple of weeks, I've been scanning some old negatives. And seeing the work I did my early years on SlideFilm, I was quite moved. I was almost moved to tears at some of these images. I don't know if it was just experience. So it brought back experience and motion, the emotions of making the images at the time. But I really liked the images I was scanning. And I was thinking, I'm not giving up anything when I shoot 35 millimeter. I may not have the big negative, but there's so many other attributes to shooting 35 millimeter that for me make up for not having the big negative. So that really went a long way to pushing me towards shooting 35 millimeter. Another point would be the cost of film. It just, it seems to be going up every day. And I started looking at the amount that I'm shooting larger formats, especially four by five. When I have, when I buy a box of 25 sheets and it's 60 something dollars, what kind of project can I do with 25 sheets of film? In 35 millimeter, I just feel like I can, I can be more expressive. I can take more risks. I can do a lot more photography. And if I'm truthful with myself, my enlargement needs aren't that demanding. Most of the stuff that I print are in magazines and book sizes, maybe calendar with an occasional large print. And if I really need to go large, I've always got my 35 millimeter digital camera, which has plenty of resolution. If you work carefully with 35 millimeter film, decent size enlargements are possible. But resolution isn't the main reason that I do photography. I think I've come to the point where I'm not chasing resolution anymore. There was a time in my early film years that I thought I needed a bigger negative. But for me, there's just too many compromises now when I'm using a bigger negative. Medium format's not too bad, but large format just slows me down way too much. What I get when I use 35 millimeter is a lot more lens choices. And for me, that's like having more paint brushes. I like being able to shoot wide and telephoto in areas that other formasters can't touch. I like being able to shoot longer lenses and the lenses are actually manageable in size. I like to be able to carry just one format with multiple mediums. I like to be able to shoot film and digital. These are all the reasons why I've come to the conclusion that 35 millimeter just works best for me. And it always has. It's just one of those things where I've never been willing to admit to it. It's so easy to have a romantic idea of photography. I'm gonna go out with my large format camera and I'm gonna do all this stuff, but the reality is it doesn't fit my shooting style. I put a high value on versatility. I love the fact that I can have multiple mediums, I can have digital, I can have film, and all I need is the lenses I already have. I don't have to carry multiple formats. That versatility to me is really sexy. It really, I really find that to be very cool. I like that it's kind of future proof because the reality is I'm gonna be buying more digital cameras in the future. I mean, right now I'm kind of slow to move to something else, mainly because I don't have the money. And I like that ability to keep one foot in the past and one foot in the future. I think that's a good place to be. No, I'm not saying any of this to discourage you from trying out different formats. I think it's a great experience to use different formats. And I'm not saying that you can't take great pictures with larger formats. I'm just, for me, I have to give up too much of the way I do photography. And most of that's been ingrained over 30 years of photography. It's really hard for me to use a different approach to making images. When I've done it on a regular basis, thousands of assignments shooting a certain way. It's not that I can't learn to do other things. It's just that I don't really see the need to. That sounds a bit arrogant. But I've spent a lifetime developing the way I do photography. And it has worked out pretty well for me as far as the images I was able to produce. But I wouldn't want to discourage anybody from trying large format, four by five, eight by 10. If you can afford it, go for it. I mean, this is a hobby or a personal form of expression for a lot of people. Maybe your dream camera is a Pintax six by seven. It's a big old camera. And maybe you're happy with just a 105 lens or something. But that's what really helps you create the image you want to make. Then that's what you should do. I don't want this to come across as being negative. This is just, it's taken me a while to get to the realization that there's really no reason for me to shoot larger formats. When the photography I want to do is done best with the flexibility and the lens choices I get with 35 millimeter. Hopefully this isn't too confusing. I just wanted for the regular viewers of this channel to understand kind of the direction that I'm gonna be going here in the future. And as I promised, I'm gonna show how I use a affinity photo to edit my DSLR scans. I'm gonna use the infinity photo to invert the black and white negative. Something I thought I had to have a special plugin for. Turns out it's way not that hard. So let's jump in and take a look. Okay, we've got a raw file from an icon D810. That's the camera I used to do my DSLR scanning. I photographed this image with the emulsion sight up. And the reason that I did it that way was I read somewhere where it was a little sharper to copy it that way. It's not a big deal because it's just one extra step. So the first thing we're gonna need to do here is go to tones. We're gonna go ahead and click on black and white. Then I'm gonna hit curves. I didn't realize how easy it was to invert a negative. I thought you needed a special plugin, something like negative lab pro, like you would use in Lightroom. But really for black and white, it's quite simple. You just come to curves and you pull down the highlights all the way down and you lift the blacks all the way up. And then you'll grab it in the center here and you'll use that for exposure. And you can darken it to where you want it. What I'm really doing here is trying to get a balanced file to take into the photo persona. Something with enough information. And this is a 16 bit tip. There's a lot of information here. And you'll notice in the histograms that now that it's been inverted, it works backwards. So just keep that in mind. You can also come over here to basic and lighten and darken with this as well. But you have to remember, there's still, it's backwards than you're used to. So instead of darkening the image, when you slide it to the blacks, it's actually lightening it. Not a big deal. I think that looks pretty good. I will finish it in the photo persona. So we'll go ahead and hit develop. So the first thing I need to do here is flip the image, get it on the correct side. So go documents, flip horizontal. And now we need to get it in right orientation. Cause this was in a landscape orientation. So we're going to rotate it clockwise. And that's how it should be right there. Now we're going to crop it. Plenty of information here. I can crop it quite a bit. Just going to fine tune it. I think that looks pretty good. Bring in just a little bit more. It's a little dark area in the corner. I don't really need in the frame. At this point, now that I'm happy with the crop, I'm going to go ahead and flatten this one. So this next step is where I want to lighten, darken the image, and work on the contrast. And I like to do that by starting in levels. And I'm going to pull the slider all the way to the edge here. And if you hold down the option key, you can see where you're starting to clip the highlights. I'm going to go right up to where it's just starting to clip. This is a lot of white in this image. So we're going to want it to be pretty white. This is a frost-covered scene. That's what drew me to it. And we're going to do the same thing with the blacks. Right up to where it's starting to clip the blacks. Right where there's not going to be detail in the blacks. This is something you can do to taste. I mean, you could definitely make it darker and make it more contrasty. That doesn't fit what I want in this image. So I'm going to just go right about here. Now, I could leave this just like it is. And that would probably be just fine. Now I'm going to kind of fine-tune the image just a little bit. I think overall I want to lighten it up just a tad because I want it to have that cold kind of frosty feel to it. So we're going to lighten it up about, I don't know, maybe 10%. That looks pretty good. And I think I'm going to burn in a little bit of the leaf to give us a little more definition. But you have to have it on the pixel layer to do that. Here we go. Just subtle, just enough to give a little more definition to the leaf. I'm happy with that. While I'm at it, I'm going to go ahead and darken up the edges just a little bit, give it a little bit of a vignette. Just subtle. Now we're going to need to sharpen it. So I'm going to zoom in just a little bit. I find that any time I do scanning or of any kind, it's going to need some kind of sharpening. I'm going to use a little Unsharp Mask. This is an area where each file, each image, is going to need probably a different amount of sharpening. You want to be careful not to overdo it. If you can tell, but if you're overdoing it, it'll add a halo effect to some of the lines and stuff and you don't want that. You want to have a fairly light touch. This is film. There's only so much sharpening you can do. I think that's going to look just fine. That's a good detail here. This is going to be an image that would enlarge quite well, I think. I'm actually quite happy with that. It's pretty simple stuff. This is, like I said, this is so simple. I almost feel silly doing a video about it. But being able to use your DSLR as a scanner really opens up a lot of possibilities for shooting film. Now, I know I probably seem like a flake. Probably seem like a flake. I've changed my formats over the last few years a couple times. And here I am back to 35 millimeter. What's wrong with that guy? But when you're passionate about something, you want the best. You want the best tool to get the job, to get the image you want. Funny thing is, that best tool for me has always been the best tool. I just forgot that. Just forgot it. Well, I'm going to end today's video right here. Kind of rambled on long enough. Hopefully I haven't forgotten anything. If you've got any questions, leave them in the comments. Hopefully I'm going to have a shoot video for you pretty soon. I'm waiting for some decent weather. I've got to be pretty picky about when I go out and shoot now with gas being real expensive. So hopefully I can get out with this new camera pretty soon. And once again, I really want to thank Robert for sending this camera. I'm going to put it to use shortly. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.