Many people look at this kind of picture and say, “You manipulated the colors of that picture to make it look more yellow or brighter.” I shot this with the amazing Fuji Velvia and scanned it into the computer. Color slide film can’t really be manipulated. You get what the film sees and can’t adjust it to be more than what you see the same way a RAW digital file can be manipulated. Somehow the film engineers at Fuji were able to produce a film of such extraordinary color rendition the resulting pictures needed almost no adjusting to be perfect.
The picture is of the stand of black oaks on the west side of the El Capitan meadow with The Cathedral behind. I shot it with a Nikkor 80-200mm f2.8 lens in the fall many years ago. The picture was scanned using the Super Cool Scan IV. I shot the picture right on the side of the road.
I’ve been slowly switching over to Fuji cameras for my work because they’re lighter and produce exactly as good of pictures as the bigger cameras, but even the Fuji Velvia film simulation they have built into the camera processors can’t match the original film. Velvia showed a scene with some kind of magic. I always loved dropping off a weekend’s supply of film at the now long closed New Lab in San Francisco and picking it up later. I always had to whip out the pictures from a couple random white boxes to have a quick look on the light tables they had on the walls. It was always such a thrill to see the pictures new out of the box with the new film smell going on for a multi-sensory experience. The pictures were always so sharp, so bright, so colorful. Aside from actually being at the location originally doing the pictures, seeing a few of them on the New Lab light tables was always one of my favorite parts of any trip.
Alas, it’s all gone now and the pictures are getting older. Plus they aren’t as sharp as the digital pictures because the lenses now reach incredible sharpness levels to accommodate the bigger sensors. I wouldn’t be able to shoot with the lenses from then because the pictures would look blurry and soft. A few years ago I enjoyed bringing a tiny Nikkor 100mm f2.8D lens on backpacking trips. It worked fine for Velvia, but when I switched over to digital the pictures all came out soft and were unusable. Since then I really pay attention the nerd-fest MFT charts for lenses before spending any money. The sharpness of a lens becomes more important than how much it weighs the pack down. It’s also one of the many reasons why I shoot with prime lenses instead of zoom lenses. Except for the other worldly sharpness of the Canon 28-70mm f2 lens, most zooms aren’t as sharp as prime lenses and don’t render colors as nicely either.
Perhaps because Velvia was my teacher I don’t really like the look of heavily manipulated pictures. The pictures are eye catching when seen, but don’t match the real world as we see colors. The works of Claud Monet and Henri Matisse, for me, has become a great color-match tool for my pictures. If a picture looks more saturated and extreme than what they did, then it’s probably too saturated. We need to stay within the bounds of reality to stay relevant.
With my knee issues I’m just hanging out at the ACB outdoors pool four mornings a week and will be able to practice writing this blog and the other blog for wedding and portrait photography. Headed in for an MRI this Monday. Of course by the time the average of 2-6 readers see this, the scan will be done and whatever happens next will be taking place. Am I afraid of what it might show? A little bit. What I’m more afraid of is not being able to hike and backpack to do my work.
So enjoy! And get out there seeing the world!