Film photography, especially underwater film photography, will always hold a special place in my heart
I’ve started re-editing and posting some of my older film images. There’s a lot I find attractive about film photography, apart from the fact that I learned my skills working with film. I liked the fact that the technological aids were fewer, and the equipment simpler, so the final image was – arguably – more a product of your understanding of the medium and the environment than the bits of equipment you had bought. The end product was a physical entity, a 35mm slide that contained the chemically etched likeness of the scene I had witnessed a few weeks earlier. A slide created through through a series of chemical baths on my kitchen table, developing and fixing the image – layers of yellow, magenta and cyan, dyes embedded in gelatin – is to me something of permanence and quite magical. It is quite different to the billions of ephemeral images that fill our ‘phones and computer screens. This shot is from La Jolla Canyon, near San Diego, California. One of the amazing things about this site is you can dive it as a shore dive. After a twenty minute or so swim across sand, the seabed angle abruptly changes; you start to descend a steep sediment slope. As one descends the life changes too, and I began to see parallels with the many gloomy, muddy dives I had done in Scottish sea lochs. I have not attempted to remove the backscatter from this image, because that is what it is like there. The water column is full of suspended sediment, that reflects and glistens in the glow from your torch. Simply because – through the wonders of Photoshop we can – there is a tendency to ‘clean up’ every underwater image to make it look like crystal clear tropical oceans. While that may look more attractive, that does not represent reality, anymore than if one were to photoshop a great white into a photo of your garden pond. Of course there is no rule that says photographs must accurately represent reality (unless you are, say, a war photographer) but I think there are good arguments for consciously choosing what you are trying to do: is my aim here to create a beautiful, artistic image, or do I want to recreate what this scene looks like as accurately as possible? Photography can be a creative artform, or it can be a powerful medium for informing people about things they cannot see directly. Blurring the lines between the two is often a bad idea.
The above picture shows a cluster of tube anemones, Pachycerianthis fimbriatus, forming a canopy, rather like a miniature woodland, at around 30 metres depth. Divers familiar with Scottish sea lochs or Norwegian fjords will immediately recognise the similarity to our own fireworks anemone, Pachycerianthus multiplicatus. Scavenging bat stars (Patiria miniata, formerly Asterias miniata) meander between anemone columns. I took this photograph almost two decades ago (end of 2001) using a Nikonos V 35mm film camera, 15mm lens and single Nikonos SB102 flash on manual, with homemade diffuser. The film was Fuji Velvia 50 slide, which I then developed at home on my kitchen table. The slide was scanned, using a dedicated Minolta slide scanner, to produce a 35.5 megapixel image. The image may lack the crispness of modern high-end digital cameras, but photography is not simply about sharpness. There is a quality to film images that is hard to define, but almost everyone who has taken film photographs will recognise it. The grain in the image is a product of the silver halide grains embedded in the original slide film. The rich colour saturation that Velvia film was famous for comes through clearly in the scanned image. There is also the process. Like painting, taking film photographs, especially underwater film photographs, was not simply a question of pressing a button and letting the camera’s computing power make the decisions. Everything about this photograph was done manually, based on understanding underwater optics, rough mental calculations of flash to subject to film distance, and strobe output power, right through to the mixing of chemicals in warmed water baths to develop and fix the film images. Despite all the technological advances of digital photography (or perhaps because of them) film photography will always would a special place in my heart.
Fine Art Prints and ready to hang Canvas Gallery Wrap prints
I’ve just added this photograph to my collection of canvas gallery wrap prints for sale. Canvas wrap prints, also known as ‘gallery wrap’ are where the canvas is stretched over a wooden frame (known as stretcher bars) and wraps around. Thus the image goes all the way to the edge. They arrive ready to hang, with no additional framing required. My canvas prints are archival quality (not to be confused with cheap, mass produced canvas prints) using state of the art pigment ink technology. Tests indicate such prints are fade free for 100+ years out of direct sunlight. Here you are buying direct from the photographer (that’s me). The link below will allow you to order directly through my website. alternatively, you can browse this, or my other wildlife and landscape prints here www.colinmunrophotography.com