Disappointing B&W results with Canon EOS 1V

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nigelbb

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Nigel
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I have been lurking here for a while but this is my first post. I am quite an experienced photographer & have owned a Canon 5D2 for over three years & now a 5D3 which I use mostly for video but do take stills too. I have a good collection of 'L' lenses so decided on a whim to indulge myself by buying a Canon EOS 1V from eBay to play with film photography once again. I wanted to get an EOS to use with my lenses so thought that as the 1V is the best 35mm camera that Canon ever made (& always will be) that this would be the one to get. I paid a little over the odds as it was described as 'almost mint' but turned out to be less than perfect cosmetically but as it had a pretty low film count of 187 & otherwise seemed OK I kept it. I have now had my first set of prints back & am majorly disappointed. I am not sure whether I was expecting too much or that there is a fault with the camera or that the processing was messed up which is why I have come here to ask the experts.

I used FP4 Plus & 24-105mm F/4L USM IS lens. I took shots around the garden in a mixture of sunshine & shade. It was mostly cloudy. I sent the film off for processing at www.ilfordlabdirect.com on the basis that if I was going to use film that I should be as retro as possible as they offer 'Real Silver Gelatin B&W Print'. I also opted for high resolution scans of the negatives on CD.

The 7x5 prints seem flat & lifeless lacking in contrast (I know the weather wasn't great but nonetheless) but most of all lacking in detail. I don't know if I have got too used to over sharpened digital images but these just don't have the resolution or detail that I expect to see from my 5Ds even at this relatively small print size.

The high resolution scans are even more disappointing. When I view them at actual size 4535x3035 they look like a pointillist painting i.e. made up of thousands of little blobs. If I knew how to attach an image to a post on this forum I would crop a portion for viewing.

What's the verdict? Is digital now so much better than 35mm film that I may as well forget about it? or is it my incompetence? or the lab? or...?

Cheers

Nigel
 
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Might be worth setting up a free photobucket account, or similar. Can use
)adddress.jpg
code then :)
 
OK, I have uploaded some of the mid-res scans to photobucket plus a portion of one of the full size scans. Now I look at the scans in more detail they look even crappier than I initially thought.

BW-scan-portion.jpg

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CNV00005.jpg
 
You've obviosuly never used film before

nigelbb said:
The high resolution scans are even more disappointing. When I view them at actual size 4535x3035 they look like a pointillist painting i.e. made up of thousands of little blobs.
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^ This is exactly how film is, the picture is made up of zillions of tiny particles that are not perfectly square and uniform like the pixel output of a digital camera.

As for contrast etc, all down to filters, film, exposure and development. You can alter them all and change the result, you've done the film equivalent of turning a 5d on for the first time leaving it in auto and looked at a plain JPG output. There's a lot more to it than that, stick around, we'll teach you how to do it properly. (y)
 
The scans dont look brilliant at all, but the lack of contrast, flat tones etc is down to the film itself, i always found Ilford FP4 to be a very boring and uninspiring film, good to learn on but not very creative. I would try another similar speed film to see of it is down to the developer or the film itself. Something like Fuji Acros 100 would do the job
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
^ This is exactly how film is, the picture is made up of zillions of tiny particles that are not perfectly square and uniform like the pixel output of a digital camera.
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Thats incorrect i'm afraid in this case, FP4 is a cubic grain film. these just look like naff scans to me
 
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I do know there is grain in film. In the distant past I took plenty of photographs with film even used to do my own D&P but I have never used a top notch SLR before so was expecting something a bit better. I chose FP4 because it's fine grained but these results are very poor compared to what I get with one of my top notch DSLRs.

The medium res scans as displayed in the forum here don't look too bad as they are punchier & more contrasty than the very insipid prints. Perhaps I wouldn't mind that lack of detail so much if they looked a bit more like what I see on my screen now but there is not much detail even in the equivalent of a 7x5 print. If these were 8x10s the lack of detail would be really apparent. Surely a decent 35mm camera with a good lens & fine grain film should be capable of producing decent 8x10 prints?
 
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nigelbb said:
I do know there is grain in film. In the distant past I took plenty of photographs with film even used to do my own D&P but I have never used a top notch SLR before so was expecting something a bit better. I chose FP4 beacuse it's fine grained but these results are very poor compared to what I get with one of my top notch DSLRs.
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I think you are expecting too much from film. And the SLR you use is less important than the film you use.

Just because it's the best 35mm SLR Canon made doesn't mean it'll necessarily match the quality of a 5d2 or whatever.
 
The actual camera itself will make no difference, you will get the same image if you use a 1v or a eos 500 cheapo, its all down to the lens and the film. The camera just holds it. You will need to do some photoshopping to compensate for the scanning, usually need a contrast boost and a sharpen
 
Its probably worth using a yellow filter on front of the lens as well to increase the contrast a bit and make them look less 'flat'. A lot of people shooting B&W (me included) keep a yellow, yellow-green or orange filter on permanently for this reason.
 
I agree that unlike digital that the camera itself won't make so much of a difference but that assumes that it's working correctly e.g. back focus & AF are OK. It's a good lens & a fine grain film so I was expecting better results which is why I wanted to check with those familiar with looking at 35mm negatives. If it's down to the camera then I'll get it serviced. If it's down to poor processing &/or scanning then I'll be complaining & won't use them again. Any suggestions for the best quality D&P & scanning?
 
s162216 said:
Its probably worth using a yellow filter on front of the lens as well to increase the contrast a bit and make them look less 'flat'. A lot of people shooting B&W (me included) keep a yellow, yellow-green or orange filter on permanently for this reason.
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That's a very good suggestion. Thank you.
 
It's mainly the first one that looks really bad to me. It could be the result of interpolation. What do they look like when you scan at a lower setting, say 2400dpi?

Also, how much PP did you do? Some scanners don't deal with B&W very well at all, so the contrast has to be fixed with some quite heavy handed compensation. I had a quick play in gimp myself and it seems there's a lot more detail in the scans that's just washed out by the brightness.
 
I didn't do the scans as I don't have a negative scanner. I had them done by Ilford labs while they did the D&P. The first one is a cropped version of the highest resolution scan as the full sized image was too big to upload to my free photobucket account but is a good representation of what the original looks like viewed at full size on my 30" monitor. The other images are medium resolution scans.

I suppose what I wanted to know is whether it's the processing that has been messed up or the scanning although possibly one cannot tell without scanning the negative again in another scanner. Perhaps someone could point me to a high resolution scan of a 35mm negative so I can see how much grain I should expect.
 
s162216 said:
Its probably worth using a yellow filter on front of the lens as well to increase the contrast a bit and make them look less 'flat'. A lot of people shooting B&W (me included) keep a yellow, yellow-green or orange filter on permanently for this reason.
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nigelbb said:
That's a very good suggestion. Thank you.
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Tthe B+W 77mm Yellow - Orange (040) Filter looks good as apparently it is "a favoured filter for nude photography outdoors, because it raises the contrast between the lighter bodies and darker landscapes":)
 
He didn't scan these himself - Ilford Lab did it for him. I've used them a couple of times and not had a problem, they usually do beautiful prints (one of the few places to do prints on proper B&W paper rather than cheating and using colour) so I'm not sure why their not up to their usual standard.

Try emailing them saying your unsatisfied and ask for them to re-scan the negs, it probably didn't help that it looks like you were shooting on a fairly overcast day, so contrast would be fairly low anyway. To me it looks like they've 'brightened' the scans to try to get detail in underexposed areas (the meter in the camera may have been fooled into underexposure by the bright sky) and as so this has increased the amount of grain and reduced the detail.

Did you definitely meter this at ISO 125? It might be that the camera was set to remember the last used ISO rather than reading it from the DX code so if it was set at 400 for instance then you would get underexposure and subsequently in the scans the image would have to be 'boosted' to correct the exposure.
 
I have had poor scans from Ilford before, they don't look great when enlarged and don't print very well either. I certainly obtained better scans from the negatives scanning on my own scanner. The prints they did came out nicely though.
 
1V always reads the DX code, you can tell it otherwise but it always defaults to the DX code on the can.

what do the negatives look like?

EDIT: I'd try a roll of XP2 or BW400CN next something you can get dev'd cheap on the highstreet, it will cost less and give you a bit more punchy contrast, try some filters if you can as well, a yellow and an orange/red would be a good start IMHO.
 
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I think any B&W photograph of a subject which is nearly all green vegetation without another predominant feature to attract the eye is going to be a bit insipid and lacking contrast. (not a criticism, I know they're only test shots).

Without a yellow/orange filter, the sky is always going to be washed out. FP4 isn't a 'punchy' film anyway; it's a matter of taste I suppose, but I like the contrast from Tri-X.

I have taken one roll on FP4 recently and for what it's worth here are a couple of frames (one resized, one crop) to give you an idea of the tonality and detail I got with a Canon FD 50mm lens, an orange filter, developed in ID-11, scanned on a Minolta 2800dpi scanner. The images are as they came out, unGimped for contrast or anything (excuse the water marks!)

Resized

StPaulsOrigResize.jpg


Crop
StPaulsOrigCropSmall.jpg


I'm not saying these are any good by the way, I'm just offering them for comparison.
 
With all due respect, I think digital has morphed how you view images and image quality to a certain sort of criteria and idea, and how you judge them - which aren't necessarily entirely transplantable to film results.

That said, those scans aren't particularly pleasing. Might be worth sending it to one of the guys on F&C with their own scanner to see what sort of results they could pull from a strip of negatives?

Also, regarding "is digital now so much better than 35mm film" - almost no one on this forum contends that film is 'better' than digital for image quality, because realistically it isn't much of an argument (and it is a very boring argument at that). Almost everyone here shoots film for the fun of it, not to look for a better image quality than digital. And there's more to photography...
 
freecom2 said:
With all due respect, I think digital has morphed how you view images and image quality to a certain sort of criteria and idea, and how you judge them - which aren't necessarily entirely transplantable to film results.

That said, those scans aren't particularly pleasing. Might be worth sending it to one of the guys on F&C with their own scanner to see what sort of results they could pull from a strip of negatives?

Also, regarding "is digital now so much better than 35mm film" - almost no one on this forum contends that film is 'better' than digital for image quality, because realistically it isn't much of an argument (and it is a very boring argument at that). Almost everyone here shoots film for the fun of it, not to look for a better image quality than digital. And there's more to photography...
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My thoughts to a T
 
I definitely agree with Freecom too. I've a decent 35mm scanner (Nikon Coolscan), but "only" get 8Mpix or so from a frame. But it really doesn't matter when I like the results overall. Sometimes I find myself zooming to 100% and seeing nothing but grain, but when that same grain gives such a nice texture to the image at normal viewing sizes, then again it's not a problem. Would I get rid of my digital camera and go fully film? No way, I'd be missing some things that digital just does better. Would I do the other? No, and for exactly the same reasons (though personally I'd also add that film is more fun for me on purely subjective grounds).
 
Thanks for all the advice. I shall buy a selection of different films & try them out plus a yellow/orange filter to bump up the contrast a bit (for nude photography outdoors:).

I didn't mean to offend anyone my choice of words was wrong. Digital is definitely better as regards resolution & ease of use but the rest of it is open to debate. I too want to shoot film for the fun of it. I specifically chose B&W because it's different & in some ways more challenging.

I might have to look at getting my own scanner. The 8Mpixel scans are pretty dreadful & should be better although I had forgotten quite how small a 35mm negative is. Perhaps I should have bought the Mamiya 645 kit that also tempted me on eBay & that sold for less than I paid for the 1V?:)
 
nigelbb said:
Thanks for all the advice. I shall buy a selection of different films & try them out plus a yellow/orange filter to bump up the contrast a bit (for nude photography outdoors:).

I didn't mean to offend anyone my choice of words was wrong. Digital is definitely better as regards resolution & ease of use but the rest of it is open to debate. I too want to shoot film for the fun of it. I specifically chose B&W because it's different & in some ways more challenging.

I might have to look at getting my own scanner. The 8Mpixel scans are pretty dreadful & should be better although I had forgotten quite how small a 35mm negative is. Perhaps I should have bought the Mamiya 645 kit that also tempted me on eBay & that sold for less than I paid for the 1V?:)
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The answer is Adox CMS20, I've been saying a lot recently and soon I will have proof (test strip hanging up in the bathroom as we speak!) Should be able to kick the arse of any DSLR, but we will see.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
The answer is Adox CMS20,Should be able to kick the arse of any DSLR, but we will see.
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Depends how good the lenses are and if you use the proper developer
 
nigelbb said:
I might have to look at getting my own scanner. The 8Mpixel scans are pretty dreadful & should be better although I had forgotten quite how small a 35mm negative is. Perhaps I should have bought the Mamiya 645 kit that also tempted me on eBay & that sold for less than I paid for the 1V?:)
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The publishing industry standard for 35mm scanning is 4000 dpi which equates to about a 22 megapixel image and is usually then downsized so to ensure all the detail is captured (as the scanner usually out resolves the film), most of the recent 'professional' medium speed colour negative/side films and slow/medium B&W ones (with the right developer) can easily resolve about 3200 - 3600 dpi according to lab tests which is still about 15 - 18 megapixels although it does of course depend on the lens, the developer used in the case of B&W and the scanner itself which is usually the weakest link in the chain. A £20,000 drum scanner will always resolve more detail and contrast (so less sharpening is required) than a flatbed for instance. TBH its impossible to put a resolution on film as its inherently 'chemical', and people never used to have a problem blowing negatives/slides up hugh even if the grain got massive.

Alan Clogwyn said:
The answer is Adox CMS20, I've been saying a lot recently and soon I will have proof (test strip hanging up in the bathroom as we speak!) Should be able to kick the arse of any DSLR, but we will see.
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But its a pain in the arse as it requires a special low contrast developer, is even slower than Tech Pan (I've got some of that going off to be developed) and will in every case out-resolve the lens (unless you've got some ultra-expensive rare lens that can resolve that much) so there may not be as much as an increase as you think (although being grainless does help I suppose!) but it will more than likely have more than an average DSLR.
 
Couple that with the fact that most people seem to think that scanning on a flatbed or what ever scanner at 6000DPI and greater is going to give them actual detail, I doubt there will be much visible difference at all. The film will out resolve the optics in anything other than a good drum scanner by a mile. I've used single lenses that cost more than most scanners and yet still had to spend many hours trying to get even within a country mile of the diffraction limit. Scanners may well have sensors in them that have the pixel density to match that of small grain films, but the optics are not only terrible by comparison, but also require precision focusing of the film.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
The answer is Adox CMS20, I've been saying a lot recently and soon I will have proof (test strip hanging up in the bathroom as we speak!) Should be able to kick the arse of any DSLR, but we will see.
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redddraggon said:
Hmm, not in colour, high ISOs, nor speed of output :razz:
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excalibur2 said:
H'mmm :cautious: don't forget the quality/colour from medium format film cameras.
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colour from MF is irrelevant when I was replying directly to Alan and his 35mm Adox B&W film. You've taken my statements out of context.
 
redddraggon said:
colour from MF is irrelevant when I was replying directly to Alan and his 35mm Adox B&W film. You've taken my statements out of context.
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In the film forum we are very defensive (for film of course) ;)
 
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