Underwater photographers are trading in their traditional film cameras for digital extensions to their computers. So why are some professionals now moving back in the other direction - could there still be a case for using film?
John Bantin takes the shots and lets you examines the evidence
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DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY IS ALL THE RAGE but recently, as one of the jury at the prestigious Open Fotosub contest, held annually at El Hierro in the Canary Islands, I was surprised to find that every one of the 28 top Spanish and Portuguese photographers taking part was shooting film.
Rick Frehsee, a well-established US underwater photographer, tells me that more and more of his contemporaries are going back to film.
I have been chided by many people as being a "photographic dinosaur" for still using film, so I decided to compare the results I get with wet-film Nikon equipment with an equivalent high-quality digital camera.
Photographers have always been obsessed with resolution, or the "sharpness" of their images, and the overall quality. Can a digitally gathered image offer this, plus the same depth of colour as an old-style image on film?
I bought my first professional camera, a Hasselblad 500C, in 1968. It was already five years old, but the success I had with this, and equipment like it, earned me enough over the following 25 years finally to swap the advertising business for diving.
The high quality of the Hasselblad, with its Zeiss Planar, Distagon and Sonnar lenses, was undisputed. But in the beginning the grainy quality of the E2 and E3-process colour films available for it was a weakness.
Professionals then thought of the Hasselblad as a small camera. Any photograph due to be reproduced at an appreciable size was shot on colour film measuring 10 x 8in instead.
But colour films gradually improved. Soon we had E6-process films, which had built-in colour-couplers to allow quick processing (unlike Kodachrome), but also had fine enough resolution to use in smaller sizes.
My own epiphany came when I had to shoot a poster campaign for Whiskas cat food.
I had just done a successful campaign for Spillers Winalot with dogs on a slow-to-operate 10 x 8 camera. There was no way that fast-moving cats would wait around for that.
Despite misgivings, the pictures of cats achieved on little film transparencies only 6cm across later appeared on every high street in the country. They were massive 48-sheet posters, and printed sharp as a whisker!
Then came the digital camera revolution. The weak point of early digital cameras was that CCD chips were pretty poor on resolution. These cameras boasted a million pixels, but that was still not enough.
CCDs have improved since then, and now we have CMOS chips too, which are bigger. Six million pixels is almost the norm and 12 million and far more pixels are available for those who want and can afford them.
In fact, the market has become obsessed with how many pixels a digital camera's chip can provide.
It's like being obsessed with the quality of film. People want pixels just as they wanted fine grain!
However, somewhere along the way we have lost sight of those other important factors that were always implicit in the judgment of how good an old wet-film-process camera was.
These included the precision of the construction regarding the register between the lens and the image plane, essential for perfect focus, and the actual quality of the lenses themselves.
We now see digital cameras boasting high-resolution image-gathering devices, but often included in hardware with the optical-equivalent quality of a Box Brownie.
You can view film as prints, slides or, more likely for the serious photographer, you can digitise it. In the latter case, you need a sophisticated software package such as Photoshop CS, and probably a gigabyte of RAM on your computer to allow you to work at a convenient speed. All this adds to the initial cost.
Processed film costs around £10 per roll or more, which mounts up over time. The expense of a digital camera, apart from batteries, is all upfront. Once you have bought the hardware, including a suitably capacious memory medium, computer and software, there are virtually no ongoing costs.
When you use a wet-film camera, you rely on experience to know what you're getting, though modern automatic TTL exposure control incorporating control of the flash makes life remarkably easy.
I have shot roll after roll of perfectly exposed pictures, thanks to the clever designers at Nikon. Of course, I need a strong stomach to pack my exposed film back in my bag to take home to a high-quality film processor.
I never let my film be processed on a boat, for example, because the one-shot chemistry commonly used to process E6 film provides too high a contrast and often causes pronounced grain.
With a digital camera, the LCD at the back immediately provides an indication of what you are getting.
This can be very useful, but it is only an approximation. The brightness of the image depends on the angle at which you view the LCD.
Sharpness cannot really be assessed, even if you take time to zoom in on the image, and fine details that can make or break a photograph are hard to see.
Contrast is also a lot greater than actually recorded. This is to help you view the LCD in bright ambient-light conditions.
Also, the obsession with seeing what you took often leaves you looking at the back of the camera when you might be better off seeing what your subject is doing.
However, even in RAW format, you get twice as many photo-opportunities with a digital camera than with film. If you are content with poorer-quality JPGs, you can take endless shots.
Provided you carry a suitably equipped laptop computer, you can also download and examine your pictures immediately after a dive.
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I use a couple of amateur-type Nikon F90X SLR film cameras for my underwater photographs. It suits me, because I can't afford to risk much more expensive professional kit in what is a hostile marine environment.
However, the quality they provide seems adequate. I looked for the digital equivalent and chose the Fujifilm S2 Pro, mainly because it has the protocols that will allow me to use the same * TTL flash. Built by Nikon with Fujifilm electronics, it also uses the same range of Nikon lenses that I already possess.
Digital SLRs address the problems of focusing speed, shutter-lag and file-writing times that disadvantage the users of simpler digital cameras.
I still have all the Hasselblads I have owned. By and large their design has not changed much in the 40 years since the first one I bought was made.
However, there have been many electronic advances in amateur 35mm film cameras, including auto-focus and multi-segment TTL auto exposure control, which has become almost essential given the constraints of working with film under water.
Amateur cameras such as the Nikon F80, F90 and F100 all have this facility.
The digital cameras we are most likely to risk taking under water tend to be consumer goods rather than professional equipment. They are still evolving, and change by the minute.
My Fujifilm S2 Pro is only two years old, yet I experienced great difficulty in finding an underwater housing for it.
Luckily Sea & Sea, the Japanese underwater camera manufacturer, had an example of a DX S2 Pro housing in its company museum and was prepared to lend it to me! This uses the same ports as the Sea & Sea NX90 housing I already use.
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Fujifilm FinePix S2Pro with 20mm lens: It needs a much bigger housing than the equivalent wet- film camera
Nikon F90X with 20mm lens: John Bantin was able to use the same dome port fitted to both housings
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I was ready to be convinced, so here is a direct side-by-side comparison of the two ways to get a photograph under water. I used the same port and the same flash and took the photographs in a swimming pool to get consistent results.
The Nikon F90X had a 28mm lens and was loaded with economically priced Fuji Sensia 100ASA film that gave 36 pictures in one loading. It was encased in its Sea & Sea housing. Exposure was determined by the camera's TTL system, which also accounted for the flash output.
The film was processed at a cost of around £5. All I needed to view results was a lightbox and a suitable magnifier.
The transparencies from this test were then scanned on a Nikon transparency scanner as 50Mb 16bit TIF files, and adjusted by looking at the scanned image via Adobe Photoshop on a Mac computer, equipment that many underwater photographers might already have. (The software supplied with the scanner can be used as a stand-alone application, with a resulting saving in software costs, if you like.)
The pictures were finally saved to disk as 28Mb CMYK 8bit TIF files.
Why was the film digitised in this way? For you to see the results in print, it had to be digitised. We did this on a home set-up rather than use the professional skills and drum-scanner available at a repro company, as this would be a fairer way for you to compare the results.
Thanks also to the waxing popularity of digital cameras and the waning of film, fewer facilities are available in the high street to supply colour prints. In the future slides will have to be scanned to obtain prints. Pictures for reproduction must all be finally supplied as high-resolution digital files, however they originated.
Close up: At greater enlargements digital pictures reveal pixels, and the sharpness appears disrupted.
Highlight, shadows and flesh tones: These areas are critical to the process of acceptable reproduction |
Close-up: At greater enlargements, pictures shot on traditional film reveal a chemical grain
Highlight, shadows and flesh tones: It's all about depth-of-colour and dynamic range |
The Fujifilm S2 Pro was equipped with a 20mm lens and a 1Gb Compact Flash memory card. This gives up to 76 pictures when shooting in RAW mode (or 28 TIF files recorded in the camera).
There was the option to save shots as JPG files, but although this allows for more pictures to be saved, there is a compression of information and a consequent drop in quality. The pictures were then converted by Photoshop CS RAW-converter and finally saved to disk as 28Mb CMYK 8 bit TIF files.
Angle-of-view is a function of the relationship between the actual image area recorded in the camera and the focal length of the lens. Because the CCD image-gathering device of the S2 Pro is typically a lot smaller than a frame of 35mm film, I need, as with other digital cameras, to use a wider-angle lens to obtain the same angle-of-view.
The reason for shooting in the camera's RAW mode is that the raw * data recorded can be adjusted almost at will after shooting, using Photoshop CS. This takes the pressure off "getting it right" at the time, and also allows the camera to store the data more quickly than it would if it had to write a TIF file each time.
This means quicker continuous shooting and fewer delays while the camera "catches up". Film can be shot as quickly as the flash can recycle, ready for the next shot.
The Fujifilm S2 Pro is very much like a Nikon F80 SLR, except that it has a small computer bolted on the bottom. This makes the housing for it that much bulkier and harder to handle in difficult currents than the equivalent NX-90 housing that I used with the Nikon F90X.
It also has an alarming number of through-body buttons to access all the camera controls. Every one must be protected by an O-ring, and each will at some time be susceptible to leaking.
During our test, the digital camera happened to run out of battery power shortly after I started shooting. This meant getting out of the water and stripping the camera out of its housing to insert freshly charged batteries. Digital cameras go through a lot of battery power.
With the wet-film camera set to autofocus and full TTL exposure control (aperture-priority set to f/8), I am confident that I can jump into the water and get perfectly exposed pictures.
Seeing the shot immediately, as one does with the digital camera, is not always an advantage for the competent photographer.
My experience of working with art directors with digital cameras is that they fuss around looking at each frame as it is shot, and end up saving only a few from which to choose later. They need only one picture, and reckon it's more likely to be there if they saw it immediately on shooting it.
It would be very inconvenient for a photographer to get out of the water every few minutes to remove the media-card from the camera, so you are reduced to showing what you've taken on the camera's LCD.
That said, the LCD image confirms that you have something. With film it's possible to make a big mistake, such as not loading it properly, or have the camera go "technical", and be unaware that you have nothing until the film is processed.
I used the digital camera set at the equivalent of 100ASA, the same speed as the film I was using. As with traditional film, using higher "film speeds" means more electronic "noise"' or graininess, but it also gives you the option to get a shot when otherwise there may be insufficient light.
You can change the "film speed" from moment to moment with digital, whereas you have to decide what film and film speed you are going to load into a film camera before you enter the water. I used the same lens aperture setting as I did with the film camera.
One intermediate option in a film camera is to shoot only colour-negative film, and then to scan and reverse that at the digitising stage.
Negative film tends to be grainier than transparency film and you will need to scan it all (or get cheap Enprints) to see what you are working with initially.
Quality of the water will always be a limiting factor with underwater photography, so all the pictures, whether shot on film or gathered digitally, were taken from a maximum distance of only about 1.5m from the subject.
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| One picture shot on film and one digitally recorded, but at smaller sizes it is very difficult to pinpoint any significant difference between the two |
Digital photographs are limited in the size to which they can be reproduced before the individual pixels from which each image is constructed become apparent. Film has grain, but this is much more random and therefore less obvious, and sharp grain lends a "filmic quality" to a picture.
Excuse the mixed metaphor, but actual colour reproduction is something of a red herring, because it can be so easily adjusted to suit individual tastes. In practice, it is only the skin tones that have to be acceptable.
When properly scanned, film appears to have a greater depth of colour and dynamic range. You can see this by examining the shadow areas of each picture and the black items of equipment worn by our subject divers.
Digital photography wins hands down on final cost, but there is a difference between pictures taken on film and those recorded digitally, so where pictures are intended to be reproduced very large indeed, film is still king.
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