How to start a new year
New Year's Day is always an outdoor day for me. I use to stay up late on NYE but over the years I have begun to favor an early bedtime in order to get a head start on the fresh year - generally heading out somewhere to be in nature. This year saw me hiking Silver Falls State Park. But I have talked about my New Year habits in previous posts over previous years. The thread of today's image is actually involving Harman Phoenix 200 - the film used to make this image.
I will say, I have not completely made up my mind on this film, though my opinion of it has evolved since my first roll with it. It is definitely interesting stuff and I am glad Harman is making it. How long it remains available is still to be seen though. But even if it is phased out, it seems like that will be just to make room for a newly evolved color film.
But it does surprise me sometimes how film photographers don't quite seem to realize how malleable a material film is to work with. I see it sometimes at work. Customers will drop off film and then be amazed to discover how much work we can do to an image at the printing or scanning stage. Some think the image is more or less baked into the film and there is only one possible way that it will come out of a printer. But this also happens online too, especially with the rise of home developing and home scanning. Folks will develop a film like Phoenix then scan it (sometimes poorly) and characterize it by the results they get as if those are the only results possible. One example of this is the fact that Phoenix has a purple base. Most color films have a dusky orange film base. But Phoenix must share technology with XP2, a black and white C-41 film also known for a blue-purple film base. This purplish base makes it trickier to scan since a lot of film scanners are calibrated to see, and negate, the orange film base. And since we are dealing with negatives where everything inverts, that purple base of Phoenix inverts into a yellow-orange color cast in the positive scans. That is to say unless you work to correct/calibrate for it. My initial tests with this film only had modest color corrections and I just kind of let it be yellowish. But then I saw some optical prints we had done in our lab where our printing tech had put in a bit more effort to see if he could correct Phoenix to something a bit more neutral. The results impressed even me and at first I did not even realize the prints I was looking at had come from Harman Phoenix. So having seen this as an example of what the film could do I spent more time scanning my next couple of rolls. Specifically I used the Nikon Coolscan's ROC (restoration of color) feature to automatically correct the color cast. It did an impressive job but also had a tendency to add too much contrast. So lately I have been dialing in the color corrections manually and ending up with results like this image and without the heavy yellow tinge of my earlier images made on Phoenix.
I guess my point is multi-pronged. One - be careful about rushing to conclusions, especially when you have relatively little evidence to work with. Two - don't believe everything you read online because the folks giving you info might be failing at point One. Three - Remember that you are blind to your own blind spots. Meaning you have them, but you cannot see them. And it is easy to forget about something you cannot see. I had begun to characterize my own expectations of this film without realizing it and it took the print work of our lab to make me conscious of the bias I was forming about Phoenix. Four - keep your mind open and be curious, don't stop asking questions and don't stop looking for the answers to them, even if you want to think you already know those answers.
Anyhoo, just some Phoenix-related thoughts that may or may not be applicable in other ways.
Hasselblad 500C/M
Harman Phoenix 200
How to start a new year
New Year's Day is always an outdoor day for me. I use to stay up late on NYE but over the years I have begun to favor an early bedtime in order to get a head start on the fresh year - generally heading out somewhere to be in nature. This year saw me hiking Silver Falls State Park. But I have talked about my New Year habits in previous posts over previous years. The thread of today's image is actually involving Harman Phoenix 200 - the film used to make this image.
I will say, I have not completely made up my mind on this film, though my opinion of it has evolved since my first roll with it. It is definitely interesting stuff and I am glad Harman is making it. How long it remains available is still to be seen though. But even if it is phased out, it seems like that will be just to make room for a newly evolved color film.
But it does surprise me sometimes how film photographers don't quite seem to realize how malleable a material film is to work with. I see it sometimes at work. Customers will drop off film and then be amazed to discover how much work we can do to an image at the printing or scanning stage. Some think the image is more or less baked into the film and there is only one possible way that it will come out of a printer. But this also happens online too, especially with the rise of home developing and home scanning. Folks will develop a film like Phoenix then scan it (sometimes poorly) and characterize it by the results they get as if those are the only results possible. One example of this is the fact that Phoenix has a purple base. Most color films have a dusky orange film base. But Phoenix must share technology with XP2, a black and white C-41 film also known for a blue-purple film base. This purplish base makes it trickier to scan since a lot of film scanners are calibrated to see, and negate, the orange film base. And since we are dealing with negatives where everything inverts, that purple base of Phoenix inverts into a yellow-orange color cast in the positive scans. That is to say unless you work to correct/calibrate for it. My initial tests with this film only had modest color corrections and I just kind of let it be yellowish. But then I saw some optical prints we had done in our lab where our printing tech had put in a bit more effort to see if he could correct Phoenix to something a bit more neutral. The results impressed even me and at first I did not even realize the prints I was looking at had come from Harman Phoenix. So having seen this as an example of what the film could do I spent more time scanning my next couple of rolls. Specifically I used the Nikon Coolscan's ROC (restoration of color) feature to automatically correct the color cast. It did an impressive job but also had a tendency to add too much contrast. So lately I have been dialing in the color corrections manually and ending up with results like this image and without the heavy yellow tinge of my earlier images made on Phoenix.
I guess my point is multi-pronged. One - be careful about rushing to conclusions, especially when you have relatively little evidence to work with. Two - don't believe everything you read online because the folks giving you info might be failing at point One. Three - Remember that you are blind to your own blind spots. Meaning you have them, but you cannot see them. And it is easy to forget about something you cannot see. I had begun to characterize my own expectations of this film without realizing it and it took the print work of our lab to make me conscious of the bias I was forming about Phoenix. Four - keep your mind open and be curious, don't stop asking questions and don't stop looking for the answers to them, even if you want to think you already know those answers.
Anyhoo, just some Phoenix-related thoughts that may or may not be applicable in other ways.
Hasselblad 500C/M
Harman Phoenix 200