Years ago when I was shooting as a commercial photographer in Sydney I did a lot of architectural photography. I was hired mainly because of my specialty with low light and available lighting. I loved shooting the visions of architects and interior designers, but most of all I loved the heritage listed and older buildings around Sydney.
My particular obsession was with art deco and gothic theaters. At that time most of them had been torn down or abandoned, the few that remained were so beautiful and many of them had been restored to original specifications.
There is a theater in Cremorne called “The Orpheum”, an art deco theater built in 1935 and fully restored in 1987, reopening in December that year. I used to see any movie that was showing just to experience being there. In the main theater they had an organ that would rise from the ground and would be played before the movie started. Now this was cool as most theaters you are bombarded with Coke ads, boring and I don’t like the taste of the stuff.
I wanted to photograph this place so instead of hoping I would one day be hired to shoot it I just called and asked if I could come in before hours and take the photographs. The manager agreed as long as I let him select a couple of images to use for marketing. A small note on doing this, always get an agreement in writing when doing a trade for prints as he took my images and when they were returned many of them had been “lost”.
For years I would see my photos in magazines and newspapers as well as self promotion. Fortunately I had backups of all my shots as I shot 2 images of each setup using different films. I kept the Fuji Velvia images and they received the Kodak film that was better for low light, but lacked the strong color saturation of Velvia, a film I still use today.
ALWAYS GET SOMETHING IN WRITING WHEN DOING A SHOOT THAT HAS ANOTHER HUMAN INVOLVED!
About 8 months ago I had all of my negatives and slides shipped from Australia and rediscovered the shots of the Orpheum Theater and I loved them even more and wanted them on my web site and portfolio. Only problem, they were color transparency film shots and I needed to digitize them.
I always believed that to obtain professional results from a film scan you had to use a drum scanner or really high end flat bed scanner that cost a lot. I had not kept up with the changes in technology and found that I was able to purchase a flat bed scanner that would scan up for a 6cm x 12cm (panoramic medium format) film image for less than $500.00.
It took a few days for the scanner to arrive after I ordered it and I spent the better part of a week working with the supplied software and 3rd party software to optimize the scans. After a lot of tests on several different types of film ranging from color transparency film and black & white negatives I had the perfect profile saved.
Basically I tossed the supplied software away and used a 3rd party scanning application that did several things that provided me with the quality I wanted.
- It runs several scans over the film strip at different exposure levels and either combined them or saved them as individual images
- This produced in a sense a High Dynamic Range HDR image and when opened in photoshop I am able to combine the images using the HDR feature in PhotoShop to ensure I had detail in the blacks and no blown out highlights
- The scans were raw, no unsharp mask. This allowed me to have control over how much unsharp mask I wanted within PhotoShop
- The software also didn’t add any form of color compensation or balance keeping the images neutral, again allowing me to optimize in photoshop
- No dust removal. Usually with careful cleaning dust spots are minimized and easy to retouch. Some scans actually had no dust spots at all. Now that is a clean workspace justification.
Each image takes a while to get to the final stage and worth every minute. I still have some of the prints that were done chemically from the transparency and I used that print as a base. I printed the digital scan and at the print size of 9.5” x 11” (US letter size) I saw no difference, none at all. This is a huge advantage when I do shoot with film today as getting a print from a transparency is really expensive. Negative film prints are a lot cheaper, but color negative film will never give you the same rich colors and tonal range of transparency film.
Over the last few months I have been scanning in my original film based images and will post some more of them later. In the meantime here are some of the images from the Orpheum Theater in Sydney, Australia.
One image has been posted on this blog, under the entry, My First Portfolio Maker. A wonderfully dark and grim portrait of a friend of mine.
Once you have seen them you will understand why I love the place so much.
Click on the image to launch a slide show
Blake Foss is a San Francisco based photographer, designer, developer, and model-maker. His entries are crossposted with permission from his blog at www.blakefossphotography.com
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