so for the last year and a half I've been looking at a lot of my processes what gear I really should have and all the things are actually taking up too much of my time of thinking about what am I going to use rather than just be using the things I should be using so one of the things I was looking at I love shooting film I enjoy it but it's become so expensive and there's also lots of problems that go with it and I carefully looked at all the film that I've shot in the last sort of year year and a half and I realized my hit rate of images that I'm actually using is very low like very low so even though I'm not shooting as much I would still expect out of 2,000 images I'd expect to get five or six images that I absolutely adore I haven't got that I've got images that are cool they're cool for other reasons than it was a great photo because it was shot on film one things I realized I've always tend to shoot film a black and white and plenty of people say why don't I have a black and white digital camera and I say well it's once you've got a Leica or a phase one cameras that are just set to monochrome only you're very restricted in what you can do afterward you can change contrast and things like that but you're really tied into the look of that camera and films the same you shoot with Trix you're going to get Trix if you shoot all the different film stocks in black and white it's just that stock you don't have much room to change things that really bring in your style so I then realized that maybe I should be shooting color film and I started shooting color film and all of a sudden got much better results more of the type of look I want and then when it came into retouching I found that it was I could now do my look with the film I could get exactly the same feel to my images if I was shooting film or digital but then I started to realize some of the cons to film had grown a lot and you one of the main things is try traveling with film that's what sta does to my film and you know you you buy film even once you photographed it I've still got this damage around the edges like light leak and it's definitely not like because I use this camera all the time and it only showed up with the stuff that I traveled with America with the other problem I'm finding like the cost of film is horrendous the developing because I don't have time to sit down and develop and the chemicals give me headaches so I don't tend to the cost of me taking it to the lab dropping it off then going back to the lab and picking it up then coming back then scanning it the all of the time that for the return I'm getting is very little and I'm also finding that with a new process I'm doing it's very very hard to tell the difference between me shooting with film or digital now because I found tricks around it my biggest problems with film is the cost and the old cameras especially like hassleblad 503 the M RB 67 the Leica M3 is as you get older eyes aren't as good and trying to focus I'm never 100% happy that I'm getting the focus I'm which means it makes me reluctant I'm a bit nervous when I'm shooting even though I'm not one of these people need to have to have things razor sharp when you're sitting behind a camera and you're going oh I'm not sure I can't tell if this is in Focus or not then I spent like $500 on a special split screen for my hassleblad and still found that I really Str struggled to get focused which mean now the model had to be fixed to one position and I don't like working that way that's not how I work so another one of the biggest differences shooting between digital and film I'm in a shitty Air B&B at the moment with really crappy light really crappy backgrounds and just shooting digital I can get all of these images we shot about I think about 100 I know about 250 frames look at these images like because because I can work quick I can see Beck's expressions and just grab them as I see them and seriously I don't even think about focus when I'm shooting with digital cameras and I'm manual focusing but with focus peaking and all the AIDS we get with the modern digital cameras it allows me to have this confidence to wait for Beck to give me this beautiful pose and then just click and that's the biggest difference with digital and film is the confidence of I see the picture click whereas film I'm telling the model hold hold well I'm not actually saying that but hold hold hold Now give me something don't move how am I supposed to create images like this so just these couple images I'm putting up now are just some of the film shots I've taken and yes all of these I've got the focus good enough to get myself happy but out of 2,000 odd pictures I just found that I wasn't getting the pictures I want it was a lot of time a lot of money and not getting the pictures I want what I decided to do was look at the reason why I wanted to shoot film and it was more because I find digital to digital film is more like vinyl or tape and digital is just digital it's missing a noise and an emotion and the antique lenses and things like that but was not a problem because I have my like with nice antiques 75 on this love it my hassleblad with the 80 mil uh fully wide open it it's just like shooting with n the lens it's a bit soft and I really enjoy the look that I get off those so now I can replicate any lens on Malica so the only difference is now the film I decided to play around and try some stuff so I shot all of these 18% gray walls with all different films all different cameras with all different lenses came up with a way to make my digital take that edge off it that I don't like so just to give you an example there's two pictures here that I've got so I've got that one and I've got that one these are zoomed in at 100% one of these images is shot on my hassleblad uh H6 and the other picture is shot on my M rb67 and seriously the differences tiny the I can see a big difference when I zoom out a bit because the Fallout on my mam was a little bit quicker than the Fallout on my hassle blad but that was the only difference so just so you know this is the Mia rb67 and this is my hassle blood and to go through again I'll do another thing and sorry I had to edit this for YouTube so there's three images here see how if I put any of these three images up they've all got exactly the same feel they all feel like my work very very hard for you to tell which is which the only reason only way I can really easily tell is if I zoom in 100% I can come up and I will see that this feels a little bit sharper than what I would get off a film camera if I flick between those two you'll see the difference that's about it the feel she softer the skin the Fallout was a bit quicker on this camera because I was shooting one one uh 27 M lens I think it's something like that but at the end of the day when you look at these at the size they supposed to be seen which is not zoomed in printed big you really can't see the difference between these pictures so I'm just going to very quickly break down to what I have done so this image here was shot many many years ago and this was shot on digital and I'm going to zoom in at 100% on this and show you why I like the change so this is the digital image and if I now drop in my film grain you'll see this has just completely Chang his picture if any of my film gra might be a Touch Too sharpen I might just soften this down a little bit but by doing this I've now I feel I've put a sole into this picture and if I go back to full size you'll see all also we're going to get the vignetting shape off it you'll see I've run it slightly bit brighter than what we had before but you'll see there is now a lens effect happening to that onto the film onto the film grain so you know what the process is but turn this off I'll turn all of these off and I might put a more a stronger grain over the top of this so you can see what I'm talking about so I have a grain fold of these are all pictures they photographed and scanned and then I've made sure that the size is going to be appropriate to the images I'm using this folder full is full of clean scan so where I've gone through and taken out dust and pops and crackles the other folder there's all you'll see the scan and you'll see there's some light edges so I haven't cleaned any of that out it's exactly what was scanned so what I might do is I might do a really a strong example of what this is so I'm going to drag a Trix so this is Trix 400 I've scanned this in if I drag it straight on top of the picture it's going to load on top of the picture I just want to zoom in this has been scanned to fit my full hassleblad sensor so I'm not stretching pixels now I'm that is a size that was scanned to fit now I've still left all the pops and crackles and all little marks on this picture so once I drop let's just move it to where I need to have it so once I've dropped this in you'll see up here on my histogram this is not sitting at 18% gray and for me to blend this without changing the underneath pitch by much I do need to have this sitting at 18% gray so I'm just going to drop over the top of this levels layer and I'm going to clip it which means it will only affect this layer and it's a smart object now still so it means I can resize this a bit without doing any damage but now if I come up to here and just use my Center area I can now bring and all I'm watching is this I'm bringing this now back more to the 18% gray area so this under a blending mode that I'm going to use shouldn't make the picture lighter or darker so now if I come to the Trix I can now come in and change my blending mode to Overlay well that is darkening it now so what I can do now is just come back to my levels and move my levels back so I can still keep the same exposure so that's slightly lightening it now it's actually quite nice lightened take it down to about there right that's sitting about nice on there so you'll see that all the little pops and crackles are now still sitting on there just like film see how it's added this beautiful film ulion over the top of Shay slightly softened it off and I've got all of these little imperfections that were on the scan now the one thing if I did think this film just felt a little bit too sharp a too digital because this is a smart object now I can come up to my filter and just put on a blur I'll just go Gorge and blur all I'm going to do is look at how soft that grain has gone so I'm only blurring the grain layer I think 0.9 has done a really good job of this I hit okay I can now change this anytime see it's sitting in there as a smart object so I can when I come to print if I got oh that grain is a bit muddy now I can just lift that slightly and then reest my print and get the grain to how I like it if I just come back to this picture here you'll see that again if I turn this on and off right now you'll see this feels digital this has added such a beautiful emotion and that's what I'm looking out out for in film is that emotion I'm not looking for the process of getting there I'm commercial photographer time is money like spending all that time slowing my shoot down slowing the model down I get the pictures I get because I want to be able to second I see it take it on film I can't I just cannot get the focus as quick as I want to get on the film cameras I'm just not comfortable getting the focus and I'm also not enjoying the process of taking the film into a lab getting it processed bring it back out scanning it all putting in the computer convert it all it's just all so time consuming I just got better things I'd rather do with my life if you like this I'm just going to put up a couple more related tutorials