Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

I'm a book addict. I can't help it, I know I should resist it but whenever I see a photography book that looks halfway decent I have an overwhelming urge to own it. I suppose it's because, in my opinion, photo books are the most effective way of disseminating photography and the pleasure to be had from sitting down and browsing a good photobook is unique. Viewing photographs in a gallery is obviously better in some ways, but I find it difficult to absorb pictures when viewed over a short period of time. I like to absorb my favourite pictures; sit down with them again and again; view them as my tastes change. As much as Joe Cornish's gallery is an excellent visit (and highly recommended) it still only has a set amount of pictures. If you own First Light, Scotland's Coast and Scotland's Mountains then you have nearly 300 of Joe's best pictures and can 'dip' into them at any time you want. As for photographers like Christopher Burkett, Jack Dykinga, Paul Wakefield, etc. We stand little chance of seeing his 'original' pictures and the only way we can absorb them is through their books. As such, my bookshelves are the best gallery in the world and I spend an awful lot of time in there.

So my book reviews are a chance for me to share the location of these galleries for your pleasure. However, I can only review so many books at a time and I thought you might be interested in seeing what is on my shelves. The following link is to my 'virtual bookshelf' at Shelfari. I use it so that I don't end up buying the same book twice (when you are buying from second hand websites, different editions can sometimes even have second names) and also to remind myself who I've lent books to. As the days of 2010 go on, I'll try to include reviews of many of these books. In the meantime, anything with four or five stars is very recommended reading.

My Landscape Photography Bookshelf

Whenever digital photographers talk about large format, they end up getting obsessed about resolution. Most large format photographers know that this isn't the main reason the large format experience is so enticing (i.e. perspective and focal plane control, the huge view, the luscious nature of film, etc) but being as it gets talked about so wrongly in so many places, I thought I'd get my own geeky view in. First of all let's review some of the existing literature on the subject.

Probably the best known is Mr Reichman's Luminous Landscape essay on the subject, where he compares a medium format camera with a Canon 1Ds, 11Mp, with a Pentax 67. He comes to the conclusion that the 11Mp camera has equivalent if not greater resolution than the digital. Well Michael gets a few things wrong, the most basic of which is effectively down sampling the medium format image to match the resolution of the DSLR.. duh! If you want a rough idea of where he's going wrong, compare the images where he looks at noise content, you'll see the reflections are more details and the edges of the window frames show 3d modelling, not blurred anti-aliasing. And this wasn't using a drum scanner or medium format hires scanner (like a Nikon).

Moving on to someone who appreciates film and digital, hopefully who has a non-biased viewpoint, Ken Rockwell has an excellent article. Ken quotes a 25Mp count for 35mm film but having looked the Clarkvision website who has an enormous amount of information on the subject, it seems that 15Mp is about the limit for line resolution, read more about the capabilities of large format here. The surface area of 35mm film is 864mm2, 645 film is 2090mm2, 6x7 is 3920mm2 and finally 4x5 is 11520mm2 ... This makes the scaling factor for 645 is 2.4x, 6x7 is 8.4x and finally 4x5 is 13.3x. So according to the very thorough research by Mr Clark, we should need 199Mp in order to reach the ultimate limit of high resolution slide film. However, bear in mind that various other aspects of the imaging chain mean that this ultimate resolution for 4x5 isn't quite acheivable.

Charles Cramer does a comparison of 4x5 and a 39Mp digital back on the luminous landscape website where he says that a P45 'almost' equals 4x5. However, his definition of almost isn't quite almost the same as my almost definition. Take a look at the close up leaf comparison and look at the vein patterns and also look at the texture of the wall in the background. This difference looks to be more than just the difference between maybe 39Mp and 42Mp. It looks to me like the difference between 39Mp and 80Mp or more.

The problem with comparing film and digital is that they are effectively doing two completely different things. To understand why we need to know a little bit about how digital works. Each pixel in a digital camera can only be green blue or red. i.e. the pixels are essentially monochrome. The colour information comes from the fact that the pixels are distributed around the sensor in different colours and 'clever' algorithms try to work out the missing information. Below is an example of a bayer array (the name of the sensor pattern that is used in most cameras). Every four pixels has a block of two greens, a red and a blue pixel. The reason for two green pixel is because it was worked out that most textural, luminosity information can be worked out from green data and the colour information can be interpolated from the red and blue data (here for examples). This is pretty cool, it means that for each square of four pixels, you can work out the luminosity resolution using two of them and the colour information from the remainder. Oh! Hang on! That means that you only have half of the pixel count to work out the luminance data and only enough information for accurate colour every four pixels. So a 16Mp is actually an 8Mp luminosity camera combined with a 4Mp hue camera. But digital cameras look like they have more resolution than this! Well, sort of. RAW conversion software then uses various edge detection algorithms to try to increase the apparent resolution. So you probably get some symptoms of a 14Mp camera, maybe the occasional edge that looks like a 16Mp camera but mostly probably a 10-12 Mp camera. So perhaps digital does have some resolution after all. Well... no. What is effectively happening here is digital upsampling. You can apply this sort of edge detection and upsampling to a film shot just too.

A thorough paper from the Stiftung Warentest institute measured the colour resolution response (effectively separating out the saturation component of the picture and working out it's resolution) and produced the following graph showing how colour resolution falls as the frequency of detail increases. The blue line shows a foveon sensor (which works like film) and the red line shows a bayer mosaic'ed sensor. As you can see, the camera has a half of the linear resolution of the film/foveon equivalent. This equates to a quarter of the number of pixels. You can see the full paper here

What is very important about that last paragraph, and something that is often missed when looking at comparisons like this, is that the colour resolution of a digital camera is only half of the luminosity resolution. For most instances, this doesn't matter as the 'upsampling' algorithm uses all sorts of cleverness to make sure colour 'looks' good. However, it does show up along colour edges and also, most importantly for landscape photography, in high frequency colour details, i.e. colour texture. For example, a distant field of grass and flowers or the tecture of moss on wood. The colour of leaves in an autumn tree, etc., etc. How does this lack of colour resolution affect real world photographs? Well, a good example is in this show below where we compare a 5x4 large format transparency with 5D file. Now I'm not comparing resolution here, the 4x5 transparency is way, way better than the digital so for these purposes the 4x5 is equivalent to the 'real world' view.

This is a pretty extreme example and I plan to do some further tests to see how this effects some more modern cameras (hopefully a test of a phase one back against a large format transparency at some point). Anyway, how does this lack of colour resolution translate into real world landscape photography. Well, for one, don't expect very fine colour texture to appear correctly in digital images. If you do have fine texture, you will have to live with the fact that your pictures won't blow up as well as they might otherwise.

As far as how many megapixels does a colour large format transparency have? Well, if we're looking at a 'digital friendly' picture, probably around 80Mp for the typical shot, possibly 100+Mp with a good lens and great technique. With a highly textural picture, we could be talking about 180+Mp. This probably means that for an Imacon scan of a large format transparency, you probably have around 50Mp ish (but lacking in some colour detail).

We can also learn a little from the work at the Gigapixl Project who worked out a couple of things (along with an estimate of 12Mp as the equivalent of a 35mm picture), one of which was that 360dpi is the maximum a typical human can resolve in print. This is handy as it gives us an 'optimum, eye resolution limited' print size for various sources. The Imacon scanned print is optimum when printed at 17x21 inches.. which is pretty handy given the size of most affordable printers! But it also means that if you get a good transparency and drum scan it, you can get an eye resolution limited print of 20x25 inches. Of course, we've also learned that digital cameras, 'cheat' to get a better resolution and it 'works' fairly well. So we can do the same with our digital prints to get an increase in maybe 30% linear resolution (for 'most' pictures where things like 'edge detection' can work).

This post will be continued when I get a chance to play with a digital back... :-) Let me know if you've learned anything from this or if you think I've missed something.

UPDATE: A good example of raw comparisons and how they go wrong here and here

UPDATE: Ian Scovell has pointed me towards an excellent film comparison with digital on Marco Boeringa's website which supports the 15+ Mp for a 35mm transparency idea - possibly even more.

UPDATE: I found a good example of the difference between pixel level resolution and bayer array resolution at the Foveon website. Foveon uses a technology where each pixel records all three components. The comparison is here and the background on Foveon is here

UPDATE: Another example for a Luminous Landscape reader that falls into the trap if testing monochromatic, line images where raw converters and bayer sensors are at their best here

UPDATE: A great example of the resolution capabilities of a film camera here. 35mm vs digital M7 vs M9 using Spur Nano Edge black and white film here

As posted previously, the discontinuation of quickload is a blow to large format photographers but is it "the beginning of the end"? Well I don't think so and hopefully I can articulate a few reasons why.

Fuji as a company have made vast losses recently and this has been reflected in share prices. In order to respond to shareholder pressure, FujiFilm have declared that they ..

To this end, beginning with the current fiscal year, to build a robust corporate constitution, the Company is resolutely implementing concentrated structural reforms and thoroughly implementing measures to reduce costs and expenses throughout the entire Group and in all businesses without excluding any business fields from the scope of these measures

Fuji's losses in the Color Film subdivision were nearly 40% and I have a feeling that 'without excluding any business fields' is probably to do with the 'Film' in fujifilm having 'extraordinary protection' within the business. However, film as a whole is a huge revenue earner for the business (£1 billion dollars! Excluding the colour paper part of the business) and so as a whole, film will most definitely remain alive.

However, each subdivision of the company will have been asked to make cuts somewhere that will reduce overheads and anything that doesn't make a big part of that £1bn will need looking at. One of Fuji's other stated aims is to move production over to China where possible. If this is the case for film production, consolidating suppliers, inventory equipment, storage space, employee salaries, etc. will be a strong contender for consolidation.

Compared with this, the production of sheet film is a minor job of slicing up some sheets and packaging. Even if Fuji were to decide that they couldn't manage to cut film to size, an agent may be able to purchase raw sheet film and cut it themselves. Not a technically complex task and not something that requires a huge equipment investment. In contrast, the production of quickloads have a significant equipment overhead and custom manufacturing and materials input.

My guess this that we will see consolidation of film lines before we see consolidation of film sizes (maybe this was demonstrated when velvia 50 was discontinued even when quickload was still alive and kicking). So we may see Pro160S discontinued before we see 4x5 sheet film become unavailable.

Fuji have a christmas surprise for large format photographers everywhere with the declaration that they are to discontinue production of QuickLoad film from April 2010.

The British Journal of Photography website says:

BJP has learnt that Fujifilm plans to discontinue its Quickload film products next year.

The 4x5 film holders, beloved of large format landscape photographers, will cease manufacture in April 2010, though stocks are expected to last until the end of the year in the UK.

Designed for use 'where carrying many double-dark slides could be either inconvenient or impossible', they hold the 4x5 film in light-tight envelopes that can be loaded into a special holder in daylight, and which are less bulky than a dark-slide loaded with film.

BJP understands that its Acros Quickload products were discontinued earlier this year, and that its Velvia 50 versions have been in very short supply.

Fujifilm UK will continue to sell Quickload versions of Pro 160S, Provia 100F, Velvia 100 and Velvia 50 while stocks are in supply.

A spokeman for the firm in the UK described it as 'an end of an era'.

Hopefully this has no implications for the production of 4x5 film itself (although all bets are off I imagine).

My worry over the sheet film is based on the fact that Fuji say QL discontinuation is based on lack of sales and my observation that nearly everyone I know who shoots colour films uses quickload. This must mean that colour film sales are low also?

For those interested in the weight implications, a set of three double dark slides is approx 500g wheras a quickload holder is 350g and six sheets of QL film is 150g.. So if you are carrying six sheets of film only, there is no difference in weight.

If you carry twelve sheets of film, the weight for DDS is now 1kg whereas it is 650g for quickloads. Not too much of a difference really.

However if you want to get out and about with 18 sheets of film, your DDS package would weight 1.5Kg whereas your quickload equivalent would be 800g.

I don't know many walks where I've taken more than 10 sheets (and most of the times I have done so are when I've taken multiple exposures). Even if you do want to take 18 sheets of film, the extra 700g is hardly onerous.

My recommendation would be - stop taking B sheets and get it right first time ;-) (ok, glib comment, sorry)

When I had just started photography I was down in Rock, Cornwall and bought a copy of 'End of the Land' by Andrew Nadolski. Many things impressed me about this book (I'll try to review it soon) but one of the things that continued to impress me with this and a few other books since is the rendering of the film used. I had no idea at the time but since then I've discovered that it is probably Kodak Portra 160NC or 160VC. More recently, just as I was starting large format photography, I saw the Harry Cory Wright book, which despite my confusion as to what it was trying to be, I was again captivated buy the quality of colour. As I have used Provia and Velvia since and understood it's behaviours, I've realised that in certain circumstances the muted, warm colours of Portra can allow the subject matter to shine through (especially when there is already significant colour in the picture or a wish to create more muted colours).

If you've been following my journey into film, you'll have also noticed me using Fuji Astia, which has a similar colour response to negative film but which has the benefit of being easy to interpret wheras with colour negative film you need to remove the orange cast, which is pretty much impossible to do in a way that is repeatable. This means that with negative film, you never quite know whether your conversion is accurate or not. I've also played with Fuji 160S for quite a while and have never been really happy with it; the results have always tended to a strange green or magenta tinge which I have never managed to remove.

I finally decided it would be a good idea to try out some Portra after all I had heard and, as you can't buy it in quickload format, I had to decide how to use it which really means either double dark slides or the 'mythical' graflex grafmatic film holders; A beast that is rumoured to eat film stock raw and spit out the results in a hail of celluloid confetti. Fortunatley I had a friend who was a well know grafmatic tamer who had managed to build up a coterie of over ten of the beasties and had yet to be bitten by one. So when I saw a couple of mint condition ones come up on ebay for £50 each, I crossed my fingers and pressed the 'buy it now' button.

For those of you who don't know what a grafmatic really is, I'll try to give a quick review. Each grafmatic has six 'septums' within, each of which is a flat peice of light metal the same size as a sheet of 4x5 film with a lip folde at the top and sides to keep a sheet of film in. Once a film is slipped into this sheet, simple tension (and I think a slight curve of the crease at the bottom) holds the sheets in. The container for these septums is a sprung container that when operated (lifted up fully and reinserted) moves a septum to the front of the cue, and then the darkslide reveals the film. The next operation moves this sheet to the back of the container, increments a mechanical counter and the whole unit is then ready for the next shot. For a better guide to what is going on, have a look here and

So, combined with the purchase of 50 sheets of Kodak Portra 160VC and a Harrison film changing tent, I was ready to go. I took a few shots in Scotland (as I've shown in my previous post here ). The results were initially dissapointing when I use Silverfast to scan the film. Silverfast's NegaFix has a couple of problems as far as I'm concerned. The main problem is that it just doesn't do a great job (in my opinion). The second is that, if you don't get a a good result, you have to rescan the film. What a pain! The revelation was when I found ColorNeg, a Photoshop plugin by CF-Systems. The key to ColorNeg is that you make a 'linear scan', which is basically as close to a scan raw file as you can manage (instructions for the v750 using Epson software are here) then you take the 16bit scan you have produced (which look a loveley orange colour) and firstly process it using Scantique (comes with ColorNeg) which removes the gamma curve from the film to finally produce a 'flat/raw scan'.

The ColorNeg plugin itself is fairly complicated and not the most user friendly but the default settings produce results that are miles better than Silverfast. I've also processed 160S which, despite the scans being a lot better than those using Silverfast, the results are nowhere near as nice as Portra (at the moment I hasten to add - I'll still carry on with it as I would like to make an A/B comparison). The colours with Portra appear more 'stable' and respond well to adjustment in photoshop.

This post is about the film holders though. Grafmatics, if in reasonable condition, don't eat filml They've been simple to use and the only problem so far has been keeping a track of which exposures are which (not too much of an issue as the film stays in the same order and as long as you try loading and unloading in the light - with 'used' film obviously - keep a few of those quickloads where you forget to close the lens first. I you're like me you should get 6 of these fairly quickly :-) )

Next time I take a shot with my grafmatics, I'll make a little video to show it off. Hopefully that will be this weekend as I'm up in the Peak District with Dav Thomas to research a location for a weekend large format introduction course we're planning (well everyone else is so why not - so if you are interested in learning a little from a certified large format geek, just let me know).