"I've never shot with film" That statement caused the salesclerk at B&H Photo in Manhattan to almost fall out of his chair. Especially since I had a Nikon D3 slung across my shoulder.

It's half-true though. I remember using a few film cameras growing up, but nothing significant. When I became serious about taking photos I purchased my D80. From there I went to the D300, then the D3...obviously the logical next step was a used Nikon F4 from the late 80's.

Why? Well as bad as this sounds, I wanted to see what it was like in the old days. I also played a bit with Derek Miller's F4 at Gnomedex and was intrigued.

I purchased the camera and a few rolls of black & white film and set off to the streets of New York to learn. The Nikon F4 features dials for every setting (ISO, Aperture, Shutterspeed, etc) there are no LCD screens. The camera is build like a rock and heavy, but that's good in my book.

I wanted to see if shooting on film would make me a better photographer. Of course there is no preview or LCD to review your photo. There is also no cropping on processing you can do in Lightroom. What you shoot is what you get.

Suddenly I found myself thinking much more about composition and the settings. To cheat a bit I would shoot something with my digital camera and look at the final settings, then attempt to dial in something similar on the F4. But once again with no way to look at the photos I didn't know if any of them were turning out.

The F4 has the same lens mount as the D3, so I am able to use all my lenses. I primarily shot with the 50mm f/1.4 but did shoot a soccer game with my 70-200mm f/2.8. The F4s has the extra battery grip mounted and the speed at which I was able to shoot was just fine.

Over the next few weeks I shot two rolls of 36-exposure black & white film. With the instant gratification of the LCD preview gone I constantly wondered if I had gotten the shots I wanted. Now it was time to develop the film, which was an adventure in itself.

In my neck of the woods there are very few film labs left. Calling around to a few friends one suggested Sam's Club or Costco since they still developed film on-site. Heading to Sam's I was told they don't process black & white film on site, it's sent to Tennessee and has a turnaround of 3-4 weeks. Ouch.

Luckily there is a great camera store in Orlando called Colonial Film & Hobby which has a lab on site and can develop black & white film. I had the rolls developed and the negatives scanned to CD.

Looking over the photos I was actually quite surprised that I was able to get some good shots. Yes the exposure was off a bit in some, but overall I liked what I shot. The black & white is a bit of a crutch since it will mask many of the off-tone color if I had shot normal film.

I've uploaded all the shots to a group and will continue to play with the film camera. The only bad thing is now I'm carrying a number of cameras with me.

Add Your Comment

"Does Design Matter?" That's the question I asked during my presentation with Matt Jones from Dopplr at the Sarasota International Design Summit this past Tuesday.

Before I was crucified by the audience, I quickly said it still does, but perhaps not as much.

Why? I threw out the concept last week, asking, "when so much of a brand's content is consumed via RSS, Facebook, Twitter...does design matter?"

Sure you can design a good looking blog, but if a large percentage of the readers use an RSS reader, does the design matter? Also, what is going to keep you coming back to a corporate blog? It's the content, not the design.

Many organizations are realizing the interactions they have with customers on sites like Twitter and Facebook are very rewarding, however you have very limited design flexibility on those sites. In the case of Twitter you can tweak some of the page settings, but your primary brand-design element is a 48 x 48 pixel avatar.

We recently dealt with a client that had a logo that didn't shrink well, that is when it was 48 x 48 you couldn't really tell what it was. It sounds funny, but things like that are now a design consideration. I remember a while back when a brand was always worried about how a color logo would transition to black & white for print purposes, now it's shrinkage :-)

In a post over on the Mplanet blog I touch on some of these same subjects. However one point I made was that perhaps in this new world of distributed content that small branding you can supply (even if it's 48 x 48) might help you stand out in the crowd. Those that are customers or evangelists can look for that 'official' seal.

As I said at the Design Summit, I don't have the easy answer. But, it's an interesting issue that I think that every organization that engages in social media will have to deal with.

Cross-posted to VoceNation

Add Your Comment

This past Wednesday night I was in New York. Shortly before nightfall it rained, and then stopped. Nothing better than neon and night combined with wet streets.

I had some of the same luck in Seoul earlier this year.

Add Your Comment