 Start. Okay, so hi, my name is Fith. I'm a hobby photographer and a huge nerd in this context. So welcome to all of you here and to everybody in the stream currently watching from home or from different places because the room is full. Yeah, I will give you a broad overview of everything that is concerning film photography. You will have a basic understanding after it. If you have questions, we can do a deep dive later on outside. But first, before I explain anything to you, we have to get down to the basics. We have to understand what we're dealing with. So what even is film? It's a technology for capturing light on a physical medium. So instead of capturing data and then using that, we're also capturing data, but in a different way. So with a digital camera, you have a sensor that encodes it to ones and zeros. And with film, you have a physical film that has the information stored on it. It is a light sensitive emulsion on a support material. So not everything in the film is there to capture light, but I'll explain that in a few minutes. And the three most common types that you should have heard of concerning film are color film, black and white film and infrared film, just to keep that information in mind. But first, physics lesson. Yay, who's excited? Okay, I'm seeing, I'm seeing Smiles all right. Perfect. Okay, who knows this? Substructive color mixing. Hands up. Show of hands. Okay, some people. Okay. Who has seen this? Few more? Okay, yeah, a few more people. Okay. Great. Because this is everything we need to understand it. And it starts with this yellow filters blue. So just to give you a quick explanation of what we're doing, we have white sunlight, let's say, and with particles that have this color or this color or this color, we're removing certain wavelength from the light. So a yellow particle filters blue light and a magenta particle filters green light and a cyan particle filters red light. Okay, so we are filtering three colors, red, green and blue. And if we have these three color information, we can make a full color image just based on the sliders. So if any one of you has done graphic design, you usually mix colors by red RGB. It's the color space we know most and we are humans understand best. And this is also the same reason why printers use CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This is the this is the science behind color mixing in a subtractive manner. Don't worry if you don't fully understand it, just you need it for the next slide. And then one last thing just to give quick reminder, the way light is a wave and it has a certain length. And depending on how long the wave is, we see a different color. So everything that is very short is ultraviolet, we can't see it. And then it starts from violet blue, goes over to cyan, then to green, yellow, orange, red. And everything that goes above that is infrared and we also can see it. I promise this will be it with physics. So if we take a piece of film and we put it on the side and we cut through it, this is what we would see. It's greatly exaggerated, it's not to scale. But if we travel from the front of the film to the back, and the very first thing we have is a protective layer. This is only there, so if you accidentally touch the film with your finger, you don't damage it. It may still impact image quality, but it won't do that much damage. Then a UV filter, because we have a certain wavelength of light that we can't see, but that exists, and we don't want that impacting our image. This is why we're filtering it right at the start. And then there's the reason why we need the subtractive color mixing, because I'm saying blue here and it's yellow. As you remember, yellow particles filter blue light. So we have the information of the blue light from the light that is coming at the front. Then going further, we have a yellow filter, because there's quite a broad spectrum there and we don't want that to really impact anything behind it. So we're filtering that out. Then we have the magenta that gets us the green information and the cyan that gets us the red information. So we have three different layers that get us three data values, and this is how we're getting a full color image. Then at the very back, there's a subbing layer, which is only there to help the emulsion adhere to the backing material at the very back. And this is usually polyethylene, and it used to be a cellulose, but that mix was very flammable. So if you have very old film, it's quite hazardous now if it hasn't already corroded beyond any recognition. So old black and white film, very different to get proper images from in this day and age if it hasn't been conserved properly. So at some point we just switch to regular plastic. Good. Now we know what we have in our hand. Now we can shoot film, and for that we need film in different formats. The most common one you will see here, 35 millimeter film cartridge. The basic film everybody knows. Everybody gets at home for the home camera. I've seen some cameras in the audience. I think it was 35 millimeter. But super eight film for home movies, vacation videos and so on is also in a cartridge. It's a square cartridge that the camera pulls the film out of, but it's the same principle. You have a light tight container that the film comes out of. Then we also have roll film at the right here. I'll step to the side so you can see better. This is a roll of film on a spool that is just a piece of paper, a very long piece of paper that has the emulsion on it and it's rolled really tight. So this is why this is called roll film. It is about to scale to the 35 millimeter roll. So the advantage is you get way bigger images at the end of it. You get way more data. You can enhance it. You can crop it more and still get a good result. The problem is it's shorter in comparison, so you get less images per roll. It's a trade-off between cost and quality, as it always is, but this is a very common format for portrait shooting, product shooting. If you come to the Queer Portrait Shoot tomorrow, I will also use this. And then last type is sheet film. I don't have an example here, but many of you will know Polaroid or Fuji Instax images. You take a photo and then it drops a single piece of paper with an image on it. This is called Instant Film and this is one of the two examples of sheet film. The other one is single sheets that you have to load and those are four by five and eight by ten inch usually. And if you remember old Western movies, where they go under the cape and they have this huge camera, that is single sheet film. I'll show an example when I talk about the cameras. So three types. Most important one, 35 millimeter, 120. There are quite a lot of different cameras. More camera variations than for digital cameras. But this is, you will all have seen this single lens reflex. You have a lens. You can exchange the lens sometimes. Light goes through the lens, hits a mirror, goes up, goes into your eye. You see what you're getting through the lens. And you have a mirror. Single lens reflex. Slightly different looking, same principle. This is just a thing that some cameras have. This is called a waist level view finder. So you hold it at your waist level and you look down at it. It has a piece of ground glass that you can see the image at. So the advantage is you get a way bigger image that has a lot more quality to look at before you actually take the photo. But the disadvantage is this is reversed. So if you turn right, the image moves left and so on. Just take some getting used to. We have one lens now. Let's get two lenses. Why not? So these are 120 film cameras. Keep messing up my buttons. That you have one lens for looking through the viewfinder and one for actually taking the photo. The disadvantage with this one is obvious. If you change lenses, you have to get two new lenses. The advantage is that it is a very compact, very light and very quiet camera, despite its size. So they are usually about this big. You don't have a mirror that moves inside it because you're looking through the mirror at the top. And the bottom one is the one that takes the photo. So the mirror doesn't have to move. So you can get it really steady. Really nice for taking pictures. Sometimes you see them in videos of YouTubers in the background just to look nice. Third most common camera probably, viewfinder and rangefinder cameras. These are called a viewfinder because you don't look through the lens. You have the so-called viewfinder at the top here. And you can kind of see that you're looking straight through it. There's no mirror here. So same advantage as the TLRs. But obvious disadvantage, if you only have a viewfinder, you can't really focus it just by roughly guessing the distance on the dial on the lens. This is why they have rangefinder cameras. So you have a clever system in here where you have two images and you have a set of mirrors inside it that by turning the focusing dial, they have two images in your view that align the more focused you are. It's a bit tricky to explain and to get in your mind. But I hope you can. And if you contact me later, I can show you an example image. Viewfinder cameras, another, well, kind of subcategory of viewfinder cameras, point and shoots. The camera for everybody who wants to just take photos with it. They usually have a flash. They have a viewfinder. They have autofocus. They have a small lens. You load the film. You put a battery in. And the camera does the rest for you. People who don't want to mess too much with photography, who don't want to focus manually, who just want to take nice pictures at parties. That's what these are for. And last one, the one I mentioned earlier, large format sheet film. So most of you will probably have seen this in a movie or in an image or at some point in the past because these are the only camera that really works in a different way. There's a lot of physics involved because you can move the lens away from the film which you load at the back here and you can change the angle of the lens and of the image and so on. But you would take the blanket that you would put up here, go under it, look through the lens and get your image right and then you would go out from under the blanket, put in the film and then take the photo. So if you see someone in a movie under the blanket holding up the flash taking the photo, this wouldn't work. Just so you know that somebody didn't pay attention in movies. Okay, great. We have the film, we have the camera, we have shot our film. How the hell do we get the image out of the film? We need to develop it. And we have a light sensitive material so we have to work in total darkness. Developing is not done in a dark room with the red light on. That is for printing. Don't get those too confused and because if you use the red light you may still expose the image again or the film again so you will ruin your images. For this you can either use a total dark room and then do dip developing but the most common thing you use at home is you have a light tied back, you take the film out of the cartridge and put it into a development tank which is itself a light type but they have a system for pouring fluids in and out. So as soon as you have the film in the development tank you can open the light type back again, put it out and then work under normal sunlight. Which is good because you can see what you're doing. We have different processes. We will look at black and white because it's the simplest one. The other ones are extensions sometimes but also use different chemicals. So C41 is the most common color processing development technique and E6 is for color positive film or if you're German you would say DIA film. So the one you can later just directly project onto the wall at your grandparents house. There are a few old processes for example I think it's K76 which used chemicals that were cancerous, very flammable, very dangerous. So if there are films that use that for some there are replacement techniques but for some the the process is just no longer offered. So if you find a role of film always take a look at how it's developed and google that too because may no longer be of any value because nobody develops it. Good. Step zero in developing we have to actually expose the film and there the chemistry already starts. So we have this emulsion. I already talked about it. Emulsion is solid stuff in a liquid and we have what's called silver halide. It's abbreviated AGX. AG is chemical silver, X is just a substitute and it's mostly silver bromide. Depends and this is how it looks. On the left we have an array of crystals of this silver and let's say bromide and if we expose it to light wherever the light hits it will turn a small speck anywhere on the crystal to metallic silver and the more light the film is exposed to the more crystals will get in nucleus as it's called. Good. So we finished the film. We have this latent image as it's called. Now we have to amplify it which we do in developing. So we're looking for a way to turn this silver halide or this nuclei into full silver crystals which is what the developing chemical does. So it's the first chemical you pour into the tank and it only works on the crystals with an already exposed nucleus. So everything that hasn't seen light is not affected. Okay. We pour it out. We have the latent image amplified. Step two, we have an active chemical still somewhere on the film. We have to actually stop the reaction. So what we do with the so-called stop bath just stops the chemical reaction. It's another chemical that works to neutralize the developing agent but if you don't want to spend money on a stop bath you can also just use distilled water shake it a bit and rinse it off. Works too. Not too bad. Okay. Now we have stopped the reaction but we still have this image we want to do. So we do what's called a fixing. So we already have the elemental silver but we still have the silver halide around it and fixing gets rid of those. So it chemically removes the remaining silver halide from the film and now we have the great advantage that at this point the film is no longer light sensitive. All of the silver halide that was still on it is in the waste we pour out and now we can open the tank and work the rest of the way which is only a little bit in light. And the fourth step is actually an array of steps that we do that I just summarized because the first thing you would do is you would rinse the film. You would give it 10 minutes under running water or in a water tank just to get every bit of dirt out of it, get all the chemicals of it, make it nice and evenly hydrated and then another optional step but I like to do it is add a so-called film wetting agent which is a soapy solution that makes the film itself a little bit more flexible bit more resistant to wear so you can still look at the negatives and get a good quality scan in 15-20 years. Optional step, very cheap I would recommend if you develop at home you do it. At this point usually for me I take the film out of the tank and it's the first opportunity to look at if the images are even worth it because before this you don't know and if they turn out the worst part is you hang them up and you leave them there for a few hours and you have to actively ignore it because if you touch the film at this point it's still wet and you will get fingerprints on it and don't want that because you can't get them off late and last step for me if you use a dark room and you want to actually print your images this would be the opportunity for that but I like to scan my images there are a few ways to do it so I have a dedicated film scanner if you have a flatbed scanner you can already get a pretty okay scan with that some people scan with backlight and a normal film or like normal DSLR camera or if you want you can give this to someone who professionally scans it and gives you the files back good we have a film we have shot it we have to develop we have developed it we've scanned it we have an image so we why is there still 10 minutes left in my talk I don't just want to talk about it the technical things behind it I also want to want to talk about why why some people still do it but first there is not only photographic film there's also movie film which works in a bit of different way and there are some still some directors in Hollywood who use only motion picture film for example Christopher Nolan Quentin Tarantino two most prominent examples and ones I have picked out here now the disadvantage of film wrong order okay um yeah the reason why the why they do it especially now I'll talk about it in the example of the movie Oppenheimer that will release I think in roughly a month some film formats beat digital resolution protectors it's only one format at this point in time that still does that but Christopher Nolan shoots at what's called 15 perforations 70 millimeter IMAX film format and it's it's 70 millimeters wide and the equivalent of 15 perforations of movie film on the side high it's a huge negative and film emulsion is way more advanced than photo and or common people emulsion so you get a way way higher quality image but the disadvantage is you have these huge rolls of film you have to shoot them in a different way film needs a crazy amount of light you have to process it you have to edit it differently you have to handle it differently they they are very sensitive to environmental issues and so on is a really expensive really really expensive thing so if you aren't a huge director already but you still want to emulate this there are processes for that and they work really well um the example I've picked out here is Steve Jettlen he is the director of photography for the movies Knives Out and Glass Onion both available on Netflix I think and he has created a process to make digital film or digitally shot film look like a um a film that has been shot on film if you are interested in this please visit this link it's a really really good write down and with comparison images it's crazy how good this technique has gotten so why the fuck would anyone do this for me there's three points this look the feel and the inconvenience and I'll start with the look because the movie or the film stock you choose defines what colors you will end up with so these are two images I shot both from the same manufacturer those so those are both Kodak the one on the left is gold 200 and the one on the right is Portra 160 so roughly same ISO but you can see on the right way more highlighted red tones bit more saturated the one on the left bit more balanced bit more lush greens even though it doesn't look like it because these are trees in full bloom and this is somewhere in the Alps don't worry they are the one on the left is actually way more balanced I like to think about what I want to shoot and then I pick a film for it and then I have these colors said I don't have to do some crazy editing later on image texture and grain um this is not a full picture this is cropped form from a picture and this is a very grainy film ilford hp5 um it gives a certain so if you have a digital image you'll have almost no grain if you expose it properly and use a low ISO but even for film you get this nice uneven texture and grain that gives the image a bit more real reality in my opinion and this is something that digital noise for me doesn't really rep you reproduce my father shoots digital portraits and there are plugins for Adobe not Photoshop but Lightroom that emulate film stock grain it works to give this the same feel but I like to do it properly lens imperfections if you have really old lenses they had different manufacturing processes for it you sometimes get a bit of unsharp sides and edges that for me again for me personally the modern lenses that are just sharp every day of the week every point in time every focus distance they don't they don't work the same way and it gives it a bit more and last thing light artifacts and halation so halation is what the effect of light going through the film bouncing back and re-exposing the film is called and this is a film stock that does not have a so-called anti-halation layer and it gets this effect of light this was shot at night so you don't have very much ambient light this is thin is still 800 t a very known film stock for this effect so you get the light bleeding through and a bit outwards from the light source itself really really nice effect and gives especially like carnival or country fairer a I think it's a stranger things vibe where you really amplify the light sources I think it looks really nice there are some film stocks that abuse this to perfection and it's an it's a style so third bit the feel I can't describe it really I can just say it works it feels different you have this physical medium all the way it you have this thing in your hands you know how to do it it's there you can touch it digital not so much you have to you have to I can't describe it it you have to try it if you feel it you can work with it if you don't then I won't blame you and there is no harm in working with digital cameras because it's it's way easier I'll freely admit that and yeah there are some cameras that just you can you could fidget with them for hours on end because they just feel really good in your hand and it's a good tool that and working with a good tool to do something that you love it you like to do it a lot and to me the most important part is the inconvenience in a time of instant gratification where you can immediately see your image shooting to processing to scanning to getting to see the image for the first time it takes a week it sometimes takes two weeks if you're on vacation and you can't develop immediately it's something I really like that forces me to think about what I want to do because I have 36 or 24 or even 10 shots on a roll I have to look for something I have to think about how I want to frame it and just takes a bit more work and it forces me to make decisions and if you have to think about it you just after some some rolls of film you start to know what you like and what you want to do so it helps you build your style as a photographer and if you screw up you screw up you can save a roll if the entire roll has been underexposed for example you can fix it in development but you can't fix a single image you can't erase it you can't get the frame back so you learn from it and yeah this for me has been a big point in rekindling my love for photography this has gotten me back into the hobby it has gotten me around my city more around in the nature and as a final note I think the workshop is quite full already but if you want to actually take a look and maybe also sometimes use the cameras I have a queer portrait shoot so if you're queer you don't have to look queer you can come by I can see if there's still slots available meeting 1 pm tomorrow outside the kitchen tent I will have a sign so thank you all for listening this is my contact information if you want to learn more my emails in there and yeah thank you for being here okay so if you have questions if it's a longer question I think we should do it outside if you don't have if you have something really quick you want to ask we can do it now okay great then thank you all for being here and I'll hand over to the next speaker now