Analog

Eadweard is a new indie biopic about the life of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who's considered to be one of the godfathers of cinema due to his early experiments with capturing and projecting motion. The film is a 104-minute psychological drama that tells the story of Muybridge's life, from his controversial photos of nude and deformed subjects, to the murder of his wife's lover, to his work as one of the earliest "filmmakers."

If you're a film photographer, here's something you should be aware of: many film processing services at major drug and retail stores will no longer return your original film to you after developing and scanning it.

Lomography began as an art movement in the early 1990s after a group of Viennese students discovered the LC-A, a camera manufactured by Russian imaging company LOMO. The fixed lens 32mm f/2.8 compact camera produced unique images that were off-color, vibrant, and soft. On a mission to advocate the use of these creative cameras and experimental film, photographers quickly formed the Lomographic Society International in 1992.

Despite the movement producing wonderfully interesting images that have been exhibited in both Moscow and New York City, it has received substantial criticism from self-dubbed “real photographers.” This opinion piece aims at breaking down the wall of prejudice, and opening minds to the possibility of creative photography outside of normal standards.

Yesterday marked the end of another piece of Kodak's once-powerful film manufacturing business. The company used 100 pounds of dynamite to take down the 92-year-old Building 53 at Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York. The sprawling 250,000-square-foot plant, once used to manufacture acetate base for camera film, was reduced to 1,500 tons of steel and concrete in less than 20 seconds.

In January of 1961, Canon introduced the Canonet, a consumer-friendly 35mm film rangefinder camera aimed at the average person. Over fifty years and fourteen variations later, film photographers still look back on the Canonet as an excellent choice for beginning and experienced photographers alike. Let’s travel back in time to see how it all began and why the Canonet remains popular even today.

Rocket Rooster is a digital filter company that produces affordable plugins for Adobe’s Creative Suite. After creating over half a dozen styles for cinema purposes, the company set their sights on creating products for still photographers using Lightroom. Rocket Rooster’s latest filter set, the Analog Film Pack, includes 20 old school film presets and over 100 variations.

I’ve shot digital for as long as I can remember, but for a number of years I have been considering delving into film for my street photography work. Every time I became adamant about pursuing it, I talked myself out of it.

"What are you going to do with your negatives? How will you print? It’s so expensive! Your hit rate on digital isn’t that great...you have more control with RAW anyway...It will be waste of money"

In response to struggling film sales, Fujifilm has repeatedly discontinued unprofitable lines and raised prices over the past several years. The company has now announced its latest round of price increases and film discontinuations for its Japanese market in an attempt to make sure that its popular and profitable films can live on.

Director Sean Baker’s latest film, Tangerine, features two transgender prostitutes in Los Angeles on a hunt to find a cheating boyfriend. If that premise isn’t interesting enough to attract your interest, then consider how it was filmed: the movie had a budget of $100,000 and was filmed entirely using the iPhone 5.

Cinema and photography are two close-knit relatives that help us to tell stories through the use of a camera and mindful composition. This week, we are taking a look at the visual style heavily relied upon by the film noir genre that was most prevalent in the mid 20th century. Through the exploration of Hollywood's film noir visuals, we can learn a bit more about the history of cinema while finding inspiration for our own work.

You will be hard pressed to find a reasonable working photographer today, who won't admit that film still has a place in photography and really offers some unique characteristics, even if they choose to not use it. But often photographers who love shooting digital and don't want to deal with film attempt to write off and make excuses for why they can't shoot film. I'd like to offer a rebuttal to such excuses, inspired by a recent thoughtful PetaPixel post.

Photographer Levi Bettweiser and his Rescued Film …

I love film. I purely, madly, and deeply love film. I learned on film, I shot my first wedding with film, traveled around Europe with a film camera, and have taken Polaroids on road trips, adventures and portrait sessions. I have boxes of beautiful little Polaroids that I treasure more than anything I’ve ever taken with a digital camera. Film is a wonderful, brilliant medium for taking photographs with real soul.

Last week, we took a look at an excellent Photoshop alternative for Mac OS X, Affinity Photo Beta. This week, we are taking a look at a possible Lightroom alternative, Emulsion, to see if it can also help you step outside of Adobe’s ecosystem. While Adobe provides an excellent range of products, some photographers are looking to expand their horizon with more affordable alternatives.

Economist Films just published this 12-minute mini documentary that puts the spotlight on …

If you shoot film, you know how difficult it can be to properly organize your photographs once they have been digitized to your computer. Modern digital cameras allow easy organization with built in metadata that provides every bit of information you could ever need; however, digitally scanned photos contain no such data. Promote Systems has introduced the Meta35, a device to easily import and sync your film camera’s metadata.

In the digital age, there is a demand for instant gratification; however, is it possible that the perfect solution for the modern individual is an analog one? Instant film was a product introduced during the late 1940s and remains a popular option for instant physical prints to this day. Hold up your camera, press a button, and minutes later you have a fully processed physical image. And to think that it all started with a little girl’s simple question…

Back in 2013, photographer Pat David released a large set of film emulations as open source color lookup tables. Software developer Jonas Wagner just took that data and turned it into a free online analog film emulator. It's a simple web app that lets you give any photo the look of a particular film stock.

Like single serving coffee pods, film canisters aren't exactly the environment's best friend. One startup over in Italy is trying to change that. Called compagnia-imago, the company is trying to create a high-quality eco-friendly film canister that's biodegradable, compostable, an reusable.

Ilford, a company known for their high quality black and white photographic films, has announced that they will begin to manufacture once again their Harman Direct Positive Fiber Paper.

The paper had disappeared from the market in 2013 when the emulsion used to craft the paper had become no longer available due to a sale of one of Ilford’s Switzerland-based factories. The direct positive fiber paper, which is used for pinhole photography, is now back due to demand and being manufactured at the company’s Mobberley plant in England.

The debate between analog and digital may never end, but there can be a happy medium. One of the reasons that analog continues to live on is due to the wondrous ‘color profiles’ that one can find in different packages of film, along with their unique grain profiles. VSCO, a company that designs presets for Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, has released their latest collection “VSCO FILM 07” - the eclectic films package.

In a world in which photographs are primarily taken with digital image sensors, there are a growing number of photographers who are newly interested in film formats of the past. But why would anyone in our age of technological convenience still choose to shoot with analog film?

Photographer Andrew Jamieson was recently asked to give a presentation at work on …

Bending the Light is a new documentary film by renowned filmmaker Michael Apted about the journey of glass from the artisans who have dedicated their lives to crafting the perfect lens to the photographers who spend their careers chasing after the perfect shot.

Above is a 3-minute trailer that will give you a taste of what the movie is about.

In March 2014, we reported that inventor Bob Crowley and his startup New55 were working on producing a new line of 4x5 instant film. That Kickstarter campaign turned out to be a smashing success. As the company continues to work on its instant film aspirations, its has released a new product that many photographers may find useful.

It's a new monobath developer called R3 that lets you develop, stop, and fix black-and-white photographic film with a single bath.

Brave New Camera is an upcoming documentary film that looks at how recent developments in cameras -- things like Internet-connectivity, near-infinite storage, and powerful algorithms -- has changed and is changing the world we live in.

This year will mark forty years since the invention of the first functioning digital camera, and despite it being a measly 0.01 megapixels, it heralded a new age of digital photography and with it came a death cry for film.

Prompted by this incredibly dull article published recently by the BBC, I decided to ask some fellow photographers what reasons they had for still shooting the so-called "outdated" technology. Here’s the list of what they told me...

Personal trainer Cassey Ho is a YouTube star with an exercise channel boasting more than 2.1 million subscribers. In recent days, however, she has seen an increase in the number of negative comments by people criticizing her appearance. In order to express what she felt in reading those messages, Ho came up with the idea of creating a video in which she Photoshops herself to create "the perfect body" based on what commenters want her to look like.

Canadian freelance photographer Jesse Yardley created this mini documentary about the current state of film photography in Calgary. Worried that analog may be a "dying art," Yardley did interviews with some notable photographers in the area to find out if film still has a chance.

Photographer and filmmaker Matt Mangham has launched "Analog: Stories of Film Photography," a series of short videos that explore the current state of film photography. "Ever since getting into film photography, I've been so passionate about learning from others using film in one way or another," he writes. "It's a dying medium and yet in a lot of ways a thriving one."

The first video (above) is a profile of surf photographer Brooks Sterling, who talks about how he uses film cameras (including the 35mm Nikonos underwater camera) for his images.

I recently stopped into the Costco in Mountain View, California with 164 rolls of Kodak Portra 400. You should’ve seen the look of the staff -- it was a look of confusion, awe, and amazement.

They were surprised that all that film I brought in was all shot by me. They were also partly worried that they would have to process all of it. I reassured them by telling them to take their time. I wasn’t in a rush. After all, I had been sitting on my film and letting them “marinate” for nearly a full year.

A few years ago, we wrote about how phones can be used as negative film strip viewers by simply inverting the screens. Swedish photographer Adam af Ekenstam took the idea a step further by using an iPad and iPhone together as a simple yet powerful negative viewing station.

Say hello to drone pinhole photography. A photography class at the Rochester Institute of Technology has successfully created what appears to be the first documented case of a pinhole photograph captured from a drone.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a much-debated method of obtaining oil or gas from the Earth that involves injective a chemical cocktail at high pressure through deep rock formations in order to create cracks through which things can flow. Artist Grayson Cooke recently came up with his own spin on the subject through a project called "Virtual Fracking."

Cooke used the exact same chemicals used in fracking to destroy photographic slide images of sedimentary rock, capturing the strangely beautiful effects on camera.

If you're a fan of both photography and major Hollywood movies, there's an upcoming film to add to your "must watch" list. Steven Spielberg has signed on to direct a war photographer biopic with actress Jennifer Lawrence as photojournalist Lynsey Addario.

The film will be based on Addario's new memoir It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War.

Preset maker Really Nice Images has announced RNI All Films 3.0, a new film simulation suite that aims to rival the software offered by companies such as DXO and VSCO. RNI claims to be so realistic in its simulation of film that film photographers are fooled by resulting photos in blind tests.

It's "simulation more convincing than actual film," Really Nice Images says.

The Impossible Project is continuing to branch out from the standard frame design for instant photos that made the original Polaroid pictures iconic. Last year the company launched a new line of film with colorful frames. This year it's the shape that's getting a makeover: the company has unveiled a new color instant film with round frames rather than square ones.

As a tribute to Photoshop for its recent 25th birthday, Lynda …

In 2013, we reported that the Italian film company Ferrania was planning to reboot its production of analog film. The next year, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign and ended up raising over $300,000 to bring film back.

Now that the company is working to restart operations, it has been posting regular progress updates on its website. The most recent "dispatch" shows how the company is cleaning a precision film coating machine to prepare for production.

For the past two years, British photographer Paul Thompson has been trying to push the boundaries of night photography with his large format film camera. His images of landscapes and seascapes are captured under moonlight and require exposure times of up to two hours. The resulting project is aptly titled "Moonlight."

Last month we shared a news segment that explored the renaissance that appears to be happening in the world of analog photography. Now a new poll is backing that idea up with statistics.

Nearly a third of film photographers are younger than 35 years of age, and "support for traditional film is growing," says Ilford Photo. The company, best known for its analog photo products, reported these findings after doing an international survey of film users.

Above is a full 50-minute documentary from 1998 about the life and work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the legendary photographer who's considered to be the father of photojournalism. It's titled "Pen, Brush and Camera."

In 2013, photographer Brad Goldpaint and his wife Marci quit their day jobs, sold all of their possessions, and began living out of a motorhome while traveling through the Western United States. Their new career was teaching photography workshops while educating the public about the damaging effects of light pollution.

As the duo moved from place to place through some of the nation's most pristine wilderness areas, Goldpaint spent countless nights out in the dark, capturing long exposure photos over many hours with his camera gear. The images have since been put together into an independent stop-motion film titled “Illusion of Lights: A Journey into the Unseen.” Above is the film's trailer.

Countless photographs have been captured by numerous photographers over the course of Super Bowl history, but only four photographers have covered all 48 Big Games since Super Bowl I in 1967: John Biever, Walter Iooss, Mickey Palmer and Tony Tomsic.

"Keepers of the Streak" is a new documentary film by sports photographer Neil Leifer that chronicles the journey of those four men. Above is the official trailer for the movie.

The first mistake I made was hate on film photography when I knew nothing about it. My earliest experience with 35mm was on my 10th birthday. I got a point and shoot camera from my family overseas as a present. Went on a day trip with my school and shot half a roll before I opened the back and ruined whatever was on there.

I shot a second roll and all the photos came out blurry, some of which were double exposed. I never used that camera again and didn't fully get back into photography for over a decade.

“Film didn’t die with Kodak’s Chapter 11” bankruptcy filing in 2012, says the Financial Times. The British …

San Francisco-based cycling team/brand Mash SF is selling a line of “Purist” water …

Using an 8x10 camera requires patience, attention to detail and a whole lot of steps in between. But don't worry if you've never done it before: here to walk you, step-by-step, through the entire rewarding workflow is Tim Layton of Black and White Fine Art.

Being forced to pull a loose, already-exposed roll of 35mm film out at a security checkpoint in a foreign country might seem like a disaster, and in most ways it is, but that's also the circumstance that led to this beautiful image by photographer Gavin Johnstone.

Photographer Stefan Litster created this “photo adventure” video showing how he shoots portraits …