April 14, 2024
SOTQ Apr 14 and Gear Check: Old school cool, pt 1
challenge yourself to take better pictures by rolling back the clock
State of the Queues
Going to bundle the SOTQ update into the blog post, since didn’t have time to make a separate post.
This Week
April 14, 2024:
| Site | Queue Length (# of photos) | Last fully screened day | Number of days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jetphotos | 23,107 (incr.) | March 31, 2024 | 14 days (incr.) |
| Airliners.net | 5,781 (similar) | March 26, 2024 | 19 days (unch.) |
Also bonus, ROTW, we’ll call it number 2: from a.net - dirty picture?
The main event
Why film, are you some kind of hipster or something?
Film is making a resurgance for photographers (big film couldn’t be happier, looking at you Kodak — I think this roll of Fuji is actually manufactured by Kodak…). Why? I’m not entirely sure, but the gear afficianado that I am, I had to try it.
What are you shooting?
Canon’s EF mount has been around since 1987, and remarkably compatibility still exists even with today’s brand new mirrorless cameras. Am I going full hipster, manual focus, FD lenses…uhh no, since I want to use my good glass. But also yes, also soon, since G.A.S.
Canon’s film bodies from the 90s work perfectly with the EF glass that I already have. So I took to ebay to get a EOS-1N body (Canon’s flagship professional body from the 90s). It has five autofocus points and a whopping 3 frames per second (considering one frame costs about $1 accounting for developing, scanning and the film itself, you bet I’m going to keep it on one shot…). It is otherwise remarkably similar to Canon’s digital SLRs otherwise in terms of the rear wheel and the main wheel by the shutter release.
Why bother with film?
We’ve established that Jetphotos and Airliners.net are highly subjective, they are more of a test of your editing abilities (to match the screeners preference) and luck — NO don’t start with the bullshit about the upload guidelines, have a read of them yourself, they are not exhaustive.
Modern equipment can take upwards of 40 frames per second with immediate feedback. Take a bad shot (see the 404 page) and delete it instantly.
Everyone has their own reasons that they enjoy spotting, but there is something souless about standing in the assembly line of photographers all panning and taking the same pictures of the arriving aircraft. Yes, there is the fleeting moment of the capture du jour of a unique arrival, but the stream of Air Canada Embraers and Airbus is kinda boring…and yes, I will still have my digital body there to take those pictures too as jetphotos fodder.
My philosophy is to get the best picture straight out of camera possible. You have to meter correctly, you don’t get immediate feedback on your images, so it forces you to be thoughtful about your settings, your composition and taking the shot. Raw files have tremendous lattitude in pushing and pulling exposure which makes the time of capture sort of a trivial exercise (for taking pictures of commercial airliners). We’re going to ignore for now the fact you can do fancy stuff in a dark room/developing to push/pull exposure on film etc. since I don’t have a dark room or the time to do that, so it will really be ‘straight-out-of-camera’ experience.
There is a caveat, in that the negatives themselves need to be scanned, there are some further processing that can be done with colours in this regard, but I’ll try to remain consistent in settings for the whole roll, I think a rotation (and the very minor crop) to level things out is fair game, if something is WAY off.
Film generally comes in 24 exp or 36 exposure rolls. I went with Kodak Gold 200 ISO and a 24 exposure roll Fuji 400 film (last minute switch, since it was cloudy to get 400 ISO) to start since it’s a bit more managebale for sharing. It’s a pretty vanilla 400ISO color negative film (allegedly a rebrand of a Kodak film), I’ll experiment with other film stocks later. In this series here and on Instagram, I’ll share all 36 exposures on the roll, good AND bad.
Stay tuned…