jascha_oakes

<p>I live in Singapore (iv'e lived and worked in 6 countries), film here is thriving, and there is plenty of evidence and it's not anecdotal really. Of course digital is everywhere. There are more camera shops here than you could imagine selling film and film cameras, new and used. One shop has row upon row of Leica M's, there are 4 Leica shops from last count. I bought my Mamiya 7 here new for under 2.5k. There is a store entirely dedicated to black & white film photography, chemistry & paper. Film and processing (120 portra US$6) is cheap and fast. There are many people walking around with film cameras. I have asked the shop owners and they say film is very much alive and surging back into the market or else these stores wouldn't exist. They teach it at the university. Whilst living in Beijing briefly, walking through a high end mall, there was an interior being photographed with a 4x5 film camera...The chinese are designing and making large format cameras. <br /><br />My home town of Sydney, film (and most things) are expensive. Cameras are more expensive. I had recently been back home, shot some photos of a friends wedding and had it developed an scanned. I had one lab 'hand print' one of the negatives and I was shocked at the quality. This lab used to be one of the best, doing ilfochrome and negative optical hand prints. Because I do my own B&W dev & printing I could see that the image was either out of focus or just poorly done. Turns out, the lab scans the neg on some flatbed scanner and then prints it on RA4 paper. For me this was just unacceptable....<br /><br />The second issue with film is scanning. I have experimented with different scanners, and in my experience the only scanners that are acceptable are the high end flextights or drum scanning which does not exist here (only privately and in the university). I own an epson V700 and for negatives at least, they are only getting 60% out of the film so I only use it for scanning prints. So they too are unacceptable for scanning negatives. Scanning negatives is difficult, and requires allot more skill. The minilab scanners here are rubbish, probably the operators mostly. Jonathan Canlas seems to get allot more out of these frontier type scanners, but here for some reason they again are just not acceptable. Even if you do, printing 16x20 will yield inferior results to that of an optical print, no question.<br /><br />So knowing what information is actually in the film, I decided to do colour RA4 printing with an enlarger. At first I was concerned that it would be too problematic. I fact at the beginning it was impossible to source the chemicals here. The chemicals cannot be shipped but the paper easy enough to get from B&H and other places. I finally managed to source the chemicals here wholesale. And what did I pay? A little over $100 dollars for 16 liters of chemicals (dev & blix). And to my surprise they print perfectly at room temperature (it is warm here though). I recently bought a colour analyzer (way off in the beginning but calibrating now) as everything is now working. I simply just process in trays, as I would in B&W. Actually colour has a superior range than B&W so it requires less manipulation, almost none. The printing and developing times are less than half that of B&W.<br /><br />What you get on a piece of RA4 paper is everything the film has, and it simply stunning. Forget scanning, print it. The irony is although there is so much film here in Singapore, there are no 'pro' labs such as you get in the US and UK. There are NO facilities for RA4 optical printing (maybe at the university??). People shooting on film are also missing out on what it can actually do on paper as it was designed and have prob never held an optical colour print in their hands. I have no doubt they will be blown away (I do use a mamiya 7 which is one of the best film cameras in the world) with a print from a quality lens and enlarger. I cant even see the grain on a 16x20 print with 100 speed film....Although sharpness and grain is not what it is about. William Eggleston's new work on digital, to me, is another photographer from the days of his dye transfer prints.<br /><br />I have used digital too, and I look forward to advances in digital technology. Nostalgia & coolness aside, speaking objectively, for me film is my medium because I like it and I am glad I have stuck with it. With a bit of skill, training and patience and some good quality equipment you can get everything out of today's superior film technology with results that are truly outstanding. Yes, there is a learning curve that’s pretty big for those brought up on digital.<br> <br />If anyone needs any hand prints done here in Singapore, let me know……<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>