The topic of photographic nostalgia seems to crop up with some regularity, especially among the people too young to possibly be nostalgic about it, since they weren’t even born when it was a thing. So, if you consider shooting film, I have some opinions on the matter.

First of all, when I used to shoot film, I didn’t do it because it was a “retro” or “nostalgic” medium. It also didn’t look the way most people today think it looks – basically, like faded-out, color-shifted crap. It wasn’t any of those things when it was current. What you have today are faded-out photo albums, and digital simulations that emulate this look. This isn’t what film used to be, it’s some kind of a nostalgia market that obviously has customers. If you want to see what film used to be, watch some of the high-production Hollywood movies from the 1990s, before they switched to digital; I recently watched “You’ve got mail” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, that’s a great example of peak film.

I don’t know what emulsion they used, but it looks like Kodak, based on the color palette. It’s less sharp and clear than digital, but the colors are not faded, shifted or messed up in any way, and it’s still quite sharp and clear, thank you very much.

So, that’s what film used to look like, and if you’re nostalgic for film, and not the faded-out stuff the nostalgia-merchants are peddling, good luck with that because the best emulsions from that era are basically gone now and you can no longer shoot them. Kodachrome? Gone. Ektachrome E6? Gone; nobody is processing it anymore. C41? You’re in luck, some of the best emulsions are still available, although very expensive, and processing is also reasonably available. Black and white? You’re also in luck, there are plenty of emulsions and chemicals available. But, let’s assume you want the low contrast and yet still colorful stuff weddings were shot with in the 1980s and 1990s; that’s Kodak Portra, and it still exists and can be processed, since it’s a C41 negative.

If you want your pictures to look good, and not just fucked-up nostalgic, you will need to use the equipment that people used in the 1990s if they wanted their photos to look good. Forget old beaters, you’ll need something with good optics, that’s easy enough to use so that you get the impression of what film was actually like when it was good. I would recommend the Canon EOS system, which is essentially the most modern 35mm system that encompasses both film and digital eras, and why, because if you decide that film is not for you, you can use those lenses on a modern Canon or Sony mirrorless camera with an adapter, instead of selling everything at a loss or being stuck with something nobody wants anymore.

The cameras I recommend are the EOS 3 and EOS 30 (also known as Elan 7). You can get the body on ebay for the ballpark value of 250 EUR, and you can probably sell it for as much when you’re done with it. Those are excellent cameras that behave not that much different from the digital cameras; the autofocus is great (in case of EOS 3, unsurpassed), film loading and unloading is automatic, ISO value detection is automatic, and the ergonomics are great. This is what EOS 3 did with the EF 85mm f/1.8 lens:

This is Fuji Velvia 100 emulsion, so you’re out of luck, since it’s no longer in production and you probably can’t develop it properly even if you try to do it yourself. The technology that produced this photo is lost in the sands of time, like the Saturn V rocket. However, you’re still in luck, since the digital at that time produced this:

This is Olympus E-1 with the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens, and believe it or not people are starting to get nostalgic about that, too, projecting all kinds of stuff on it the way they do on film. Don’t. It’s great, but it’s not better, and in fact not even that much different than the current high-end digital cameras, except by having much lower resolution which limits your ability to enlarge. However, 35mm film is limited in similar ways, so if you don’t mind film, you would mind older digital cameras even less. There’s all kinds of nonsense around about Olympus colors, E-1 colors, or Kodak CCD sensor colors from that camera. It’s all nonsense. Olympus E-1 has colors that are almost completely identical to the Canon 10d, which was very popular at the time, and so Olympus seemingly adjusted their color profile to match it. Yes, it has great colors, but that’s because high end digital cameras with big sensors have great colors in general. Canon has great colors, Olympus has great colors, Nikon has great colors and Sony has great colors. What doesn’t have great colors is Fuji, because they made profiles to emulate what people think is film, and is in fact the faded remnant of film they figured people are nostalgic for. So, Fuji colors look like aged dog shit, and Olympus, Canon, Nikon and Sony look so much like film, that the only actual difference is in the improved clarity, sharpness and dynamic range. If you reduce those slightly, they will look exactly like the best film emulsions that I remember.

Also, film doesn’t deserve the nostalgia it’s getting. It’s a chemical process that is environmentally unfriendly, creates toxic waste from all the hazardous chemicals involved, and takes almost all control out of your hands, since you don’t produce the film, you don’t control the chemicals, someone else has to do all of that for you, all so that you could do the artistic hipster thing. The problems film introduced were significant even when film was at its best, and I had a huge qualitative leap in technical quality when digital cameras became a mature technology. I occasionally tried it again, but even at its best it wasn’t as good as 35mm digital, and it soon degraded way below its best due to abandonment of essential technological components necessary for it all to work, such as huge factories producing film and toxic waste, and Kodak pro labs processing the exposed film in toxic waste.

The reason why I’m immune to this kind of nostalgia is because I have good memory. I was there when film was at its best, I was there as digital looked like dog shit, I was there when digital became good but expensive, when digital surpassed film in every way, and film rapidly declined and fell out of favour. Interestingly, film started declining even when digital was still worse, because all those hipsters who now want to shoot film used to hype up the inferior digital cameras because it was the new thing, while I said “nope”, and produced digital files by scanning film, which was far superior and cheaper. However, at some point digital became so good that I could produce colors, DoF transitions, background blur and fine detail very much comparable with the best film emulsions, and that was at the times of Olympus E-1 and Canon 10d. When the 35mm Canon 5d came out, it was all over. That thing resolved the detail of 645 medium format, with colors and dynamic range that exceeded the best film emulsions. It was so much better it wasn’t even funny, and without all the nasty mess with chemicals, scanning, delays and limited availability. Yes, film looked great, but digital looks better. My son made an excellent comment: that the only film that really looks “digital” is the 4×5″ large format. That kind of says it all – the main difference between film and digital, when film is used properly, is the superior clarity and detail of digital, and when the large format film allows you to get the colors of film without the blur and scanned imperfections of the film surface typical for the smaller formats, it looks exactly like digital.

So, sure, if you want to play with film, be my guest; God knows I did my share of that. If anything, you’ll learn to appreciate the modern digital cameras, which are incredibly amazing. I would know, since I was there throughout the process that produced them, so I don’t think that’s normal or common. It’s absolutely amazing.

I used the new landscape lens, the FE 24-105mm f/4 G, for the first time tonight:

It’s very sharp, contrasty, resistant to flare and easy to work with even in the night because all the controls are good. I like it. The whole camera/lens setup is bigger than A7II/FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 that I used for such purposes before, but it’s comparable to Olympus E-1 with the ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5. The camera is somewhat smaller and lighter, and the lens is bigger and heavier, but it amounts to the same:

The new camera (A7RV) also works very well in the deep dark, and the pictures don’t fall apart when pushed in processing. For instance, I pushed this one 2.5EV before the noise floor came out:

I think I have all the gear I wanted now, with FE 35mm f/1.4 GM on the way.

But I was thinking about something else. I’ve seen people react strangely to technically excellent gear such as the Sony A7RV, basically hating it because it’s too good, probably because they think their photography will be seen in a diminished light if they use it, as if it’s all merely an expected result from using the best camera. On the other hand, if they use something old, inferior or rare, they will be seen as more creative, and their photography as something they did, not the camera.

That’s silly. The point of camera is to get out of your way and make your creative process easier. It’s not supposed to be an additional problem to overcome. Sure, if you want to make it hard for yourself, by all means get a Holga, shoot expired film, process it in cat piss and deal with the light leaks for all I care. Will it make you an artist? Not really, but you can fake your way more easily as one in front of people who think that something that looks like shit must be art. Take blurry, grainy and fucked up pictures of old bicycles under trees, lamp posts and beggars in black and white, grow hipsteroid facial hair and eat tofu.

Good equipment, however, means that you’ll only get grainy black&white low-contrast images if you want to. It doesn’t just produce that look because you used shitty film, you can’t focus properly, you can’t hold the camera steady, you can’t measure light properly, and people think you’re some kind of an artist because of it. I don’t have to use Ilford Delta 3200 on a Leica to get low-contrast black and white shots, I know how to cook up that look myself from the raw file. It’s not something I depend on the camera for, because I have control over the entire process with digital. Art is not a function of the choice of equipment; it’s not something camera, film and lab do to you, it’s something you do.

Taken with Sony A7RV

If your “artistic choice” is a function of equipment, then it’s hardly a choice, is it? And that’s one of the main reasons why I shoot digital: because it gives me complete control over the entire creative process. I don’t depend on the availability of film emulsions or the condition of the film. I don’t depend on the availability of processing labs, or freshness of their chemicals, or quality of their scanners. I do everything myself. I choose the motive, the light, the perspective, the lens, the aperture, the focal point, the ISO, the exposure, the “film emulsion”, and so on. The pictures look a certain way because I wanted them to look that way, not because equipment happened to make the choices for me. The cameras aren’t supposed to just go around and take pictures the way they like to. If your pictures have a significantly different look between different cameras, it means you didn’t assert your style over the technology. That’s why my pictures have the same look, regardless of what I’m using – it’s just that higher resolution cameras make better enlargements, and cameras with better autofocus make it easier to catch the bees in flight.

Also taken with Sony A7RV

That’s the point of better cameras: they just do what I ask of them, so that I can concentrate on the motive, and not fuck with the camera. Some people think that’s too easy, but I disagree. When camera just does what I ask it to do, then it’s a transparent creative medium, that doesn’t introduce its own nonsense into the process. If there’s an error in the process, I want me to be the one making it, not the camera, because if I made a mistake, I can fix it. If the camera made it, now that’s a problem, isn’t it?

The beginners often ask what equipment to get. I honestly don’t know what to say to that. I should probably say something along the lines of “get something that works well enough that you know that all the mistakes are yours”. It creates a very large interval of possible choices, and yet, it eliminates a lot, too: for instance, it eliminates stuff that makes creative choices for you while you go around pretending to be “creative”. If your photography has a distinct look of a Rolleiflex loaded with Kodak Gold 200, that’s what the combination of camera and film did, not you. If you take a digital camera and carefully engineer the look of the picture to acquire the look of a Rolleiflex loaded with Gold 200, then you can say it’s something you decided to do.

People also get lost in the abundance of options and functions of new high-end gear, and they think they are expected to do something with it, the principle being “you paid for the whole camera, you use the whole camera”. Personally, I don’t care what options the camera has other than those I happen to need. I will learn where those are and how to best use them, and merrily ignore the rest. You can’t allow the gear to impose itself on you. Sure, it can do a zillion frames per second and shoot 4k video; fine. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll set it to single-shot drive and completely ignore the video functionality because I don’t shoot video. Is it a waste of camera? Not if it does what I need it to do.

There’s another thing: some people can’t stop talking about how certain old gear was just better, how it had that special look, those special colours and so on; whether it’s Leica or Zeiss glass, or Kodak CCD sensor. I usually can’t tell what they are talking about. If my equipment has “a look”, it usually means a bias from what I want it to do, and I tweak it until I get it to do what I want. If it refuses, I get rid of it. The only kind of look I want my cameras and lenses to have is completely the way I want it at the moment. When people start talking about some lens or camera having “character” or “soul”, it usually means it’s crap and it’s infested with gremlins, and I’m staying clear. Having character and soul is my job, and the camera’s job is to just do what I want it to do and be a completely transparent tool that will give me exactly what I want, not what it wants.

So, basically, it’s my opinion that it’s the bad equipment that’s making you less creative, because it does its own thing, and the good equipment is making you more creative, because it allows you to do exactly what you want. The assumption, of course, is that you know what you want.

Today all the clouds cleared and we had a fantastic blue day:

All taken with FE 100-400mm GM and A7RV.