Unexpected Complexity of Using Film for Wedding Photos

Well, not unexpected if you ever did it, or know anybody who did it. But quick searches don’t find any discussion of it online, including in modern blogs by people who say they shoot weddings on film all the time.

I’m sure the exact details varied by photographer; in fact they would have had to, to take full advantage of their equipment. My knowledge comes from the late 60s and early 70s, mostly (I knew people doing weddings professionally then). Anybody serious used medium format, Hasselblad if they could possibly afford it (one friend started with a pair of Mamiya 124Gs, and upgraded to Hasselblads while I knew him; I bought one of his Mamiyas).

There are a few photos you just absolutely had to get. Specific portraits and group shots, the ring exchange, kissing the bride, feeding each other cake, the first dance; things like that. Of course you wanted good shots of all of those, and you wanted lots of other good shots as well, but if you didn’t manage to get those basic shots, it was going down on your permanent karmic record. No five star ratings for you!

There are two big areas where film was more uncertain while shooting the wedding, and the complex scheme I’m going to describe was carefully designed to protect you so far as possible from both of them.

First of all, you didn’t know if your camera was actually working. You could tell if the flash went off, and you could tell if it made the right noises, but that level of observation wouldn’t detect most problems below “camera is locked up”. You couldn’t, of course, just check the images on the LCD on the back!

Second, when you sent your film to the lab, you didn’t know whether they were going to screw it up. All the film sent in at once was very likely to go into the machine all at once, and if the chemistry was borked that afternoon, too bad!

What to do?

Well, what you do is exactly what you do for pretty much every problem of unpredictable failure. You employ redundancy!

Specifically, you make sure that you take each absolutely necessary shot multiple times, using different cameras and on different rolls of film. And you then carefully manage the rolls of film to be sure they don’t all go to the lab in the same batch.

In fact, you need four copies to be really sure, you might have one bad camera and the lab ruins a batch, so you need two copies on different rolls from each camera to be really safe. This is much easier if your cameras have interchangeable film backs (one more reason Hasselblad dominated wedding photography for so long).

I suspect people used their own made-up terminology, but I learned this as “A rolls” and “B rolls”, and the rule was that A rolls went to the lab in a different batch, on a different day, from B rolls, so they couldn’t both be ruined in the same accident. Similarly with an “A camera” and a “B camera” (no doubt some high-end wedding photographers, especially those using a second shooter, had more than two cameras, but 2 Hasselblads with some duplicate lenses and flashes was a stretch for most photographers).

So you had to keep track, in your head or on paper, of which of the required shots you had in AA, AB, BA, and BB forms. And the rest of the time, you needed to use both cameras a lot, not just using one and having a backup.

While at the same time doing your actual job as a photographer superbly; this added complexity saves you from some lab and camera failures, but doesn’t protect you from your own errors.

Most of the time, that’ll give you 4 versions of the key pictures to pick the best from, which is nice. But what’s vital is to protect yourself from having no versions of one of the key pictures.

I do hope the people shooting weddings on film today remember this. I can’t believe that labs are so much more reliable today that lab failure is now off the table, and the film cameras are decades older which isn’t likely to make them more reliable either.

Useless Film Developing Trivia

I would occasionally, back in the day, require extremely fast film. I encountered a recommendation for processing TRI-X exposed at EI 4000, tried it, and found that it produced very useful results. (Contrast was high, shadow-detail was low, but grain was startling small, and if properly exposed it lead to a very satisfying rendition of the scene for late-night convention parties and music sessions. The film had a strong curl, and a high level of base fog.)

I just ran across a pointer to the details of the process, which I hadn’t quite remembered, and a citation to where it originally from. I don’t expect to ever use it again (though the materials are still available!), but I’ve been unhappy not remembering the details, so I’m documenting them here, as well as where a re-discovered them.

Michael G. Slack (in Darkroom Photography, July/August 1979, p. 13) reports pushing Kodak Tri-X Pan to EI 4000 (with extreme contrast increase) by developing for 5 minutes at 75 F in HC-110 replenisher diluted 1:15 (like Dilution A, but starting with replenisher rather than syrup).

Michael Covington, https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/hc110/

A Few Confusing Photo Terms

Photography has been around for quite a while at this point, since perhaps 1835 (images had been recorded photo-chemically before that). Recently, we’ve undergone major upheavals as the commonly-used photographic technology changed from chemical to digital.

The accumulated terminology from this time, and from related fields, ends up being something of a mess.

Edit

When newspapers and magazines started using photos, the people who chose the photos were fairly quickly labeled as “editors”, in parallel with the people who chose the stories to be published.

When photography went digital, the computer term “editor,” for a program used to change text documents (including computer programs) was borrowed for programs that manipulated digital images, like Adobe Photoshop.

So now, “editing” photos can refer either to choosing photos from a set to use for some purpose, or to adjusting the appearance of photos while getting them ready for use.

Print

With daguerrotypes, the original material from the camera was exhibited (after processing), but most other chemical photographic methods produced a negative image, and an additional processing step was needed to produce a positive image for display. This also made it possible to produce multiple display images from the same photograph. Later, methods of enlarging from the negative to produce larger positive prints were invented (and better negative materials, so that the images could tolerate being enlarged).

So, a “print” was a positive copy of the original negative photo, or as a verb, the act of producing such copies.

Photographs were also widely used in publications, where “printing” meant using printing presses to produce many copies of the publication.

Today, many more photographs are looked at electronically than as physical prints, but sometimes, for lack of other terminology, photographers, especially old-school ones like me that still remember using a darkroom, might use “printing” to describe the process of manipulating a digital image file to get it to the form I want to present. (The other obvious terms are “edit”, see above, and “manipulate”, which suggests rather too strongly changing the photo to show things other than as they actually appeared.)

“Digital printing” is sometimes used (in contrast to “darkroom printing”) to emphasize that computer tools are being used.

Ansel Adams is frequently quoted saying something like “The negative is the score; the print is the performance” (Adams initially trained as a pianist). In an interview by David Sheff published in Playboy magazine (1-May-1983), on page 226, Adams actually said “Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance.” Less pithy, but about the same meaning.

Particularly when talking about making prints for exhibition, there is a large range of things that a first-rate printer will consider doing. These fall in the general categories of color adjustments, density and contrast adjustments, and local adjustments (of those types, but applied to only parts of the photo).

We are sadly lacking any commonly-understood term for preparing the best version of an image.

Manipulate

In the darkroom days, “photo manipulation” meant changing a photo to show things other than as they actually were. As with movie special effects, the purpose was to entertain, usually (of course on some occasions people also altered photos as part of frauds; the Soviet Union was famous for editing people out of historical photos as they gradually became unpopular).

Greater changes were possible in the darkroom than many people today understand, especially if you used advanced techniques like dye-transfer printing. Commercial portrait studios routinely did major retouching to the faces in the photos of their clients even in black-and-white, and of course Hollywood publicity photos took that to whole new levels.

However, today, using digital tools like Photoshop, any 10-year-old with a little experience can accomplish those same effects, in less time.

The distinction between “printing” a photo and “manipulating” it was clear to most people (especially to people who never did actually manipulate photos; the line is fuzzier than one might think, and of course simply choosing camera position, direction you’re looking, and exact moment of exposure already hugely abstracts the complexity of reality into the clarity of your photograph). But taking a mole off a person’s face in a portrait, or smoothing down creases and lines, were common, nobody thought of them as unusual in commercial portraiture (most amateurs didn’t take the time to learn how to do such things).

Anyway, many of us aren’t comfortable using the term “manipulation” for ordinary preparation of a photo for display that doesn’t alter the scene shown.

“Retouching” is often used for small adjustments that aren’t thought of as changing the photo significantly, especially cleaning up people’s faces.

Lensman Universe Drop Shafts

There’s an interesting worldbuilding detail in Edward E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. They’ve got this technology of “inertialessness”, which is what allows them to go faster than light, but it also has domestic uses—elevators have been replaced by open drop shafts that you fall down, inertialess, very quickly and completely safely (because “inertialess collisions cannot even be felt”). (He doesn’t say how the UP shafts work, but I’m guessing artificial gravity pointing up, since they have artificial gravity in other contexts.)

I’m not going to try to explain “inertialessness”. He’s fairly specific about how it behaves, and of course it’s not how the real universe behaves. But he’s pretty good about having the defined behavior remain consistent and control what can and can’t be done in various situations.

Most of the information on drop shafts is in two books, the actual first book and the second later prequel. (No, I don’t really expect that to make sense to anybody not already familiar with the series. But I don’t expect this article to be of any interest to people not already familiar with the series, either.)

I don’t think Smith ever actually calls them “drop shafts”, that’s a later term used in the field, but just “shaft” is rather too broad so I’m using the later term. Also I’m applying it to the ones going UP as well as those going DOWN.

Samms cut off; and, after a brief exchange of thought with Kinnison, went out into the hall and along it to the “DOWN” shaft. There going free, he stepped through a doorless, unguarded archway into over a thousand feet of air. Although it was long after conventional office hours the shaft was still fairly busy, but that made no difference—inertialess collisions cannot even be felt. He bulleted downward to the sixth floor, where he brought himself to an instantaneous halt.

First Lensman, chapter 4

So; we know there are separate “DOWN” and “UP” shafts. We know that there is no door or other guard across the archway to the shaft, which is over 1000 feet tall. We know that when Samms reaches his destination (the 6th floor) he brings himself to an instantaneous halt.

Clearly this shaft is not regarded as any danger to anybody; it has no door, no guards of any kind. (Presumably the safety issues are things like backup power for the Bergenholm that keeps the interior of the shaft inertialess, which are not visible in descriptions of using the shafts. Plus making sure the Bergenholm field and the gravity don’t reach outside the shaft.)

I’m a little unclear about the phrase “There going free”. That seems to suggests that it’s something Samms does, rather than something that happens to anybody who steps through that archway. It could be that everybody wears portable neutralizers (as Lensmen do in their armor, as described multiple places in Galactic Patrol), but it seems to me unwise to count on people not walking into the shaft without their neutralizer, plus there could be issues with people panicking and failing to turn theirs on. Also, this scene can’t be that long after Civilization first gets the Bergenholm working at all; it’s still a new technology in this scene (no precise time since the Nevian incident is given, but as I read the text a few years seems like a reasonable estimate).

It seems like the failure possibilities would be far fewer if inertia is neutralized within the shaft by mechanisms in the building, rather than by something each user has to carry and control. The phrase bothering me isn’t utterly incompatible with that, I don’t think.

Now, how fast would people be moving in these shafts? The DOWN shaft could simply work by gravity; in the free state, any object instantaneously acquires the speed that balances the forces on it against the resistance it encounters (air resistance in the shaft in this case).

The next paragraph of the book has another useful tidbit. It says “skirts went out, as office dress, when up-and-down open-shaft velocities of a hundred or so miles per hour replaced elevators”. That gives us a rough minimum speed of 100 miles per hour, and tells us the up and down shafts run at about the same speeds. (There’s a nasty question here. Is the air in the shaft free? If so, does it not resist the falling bodies at all? If that is the case at what velocity do the bodies then fall? But clearly, the air molecules push dresses around, so they’re not free, for whatever reason, so the velocity is limited. But in that case, hair as well as skirts should be subjected to 100 mile per hour winds, so styles there might also change.)

That’s in the ballpark for the terminal velocity of a human falling through atmosphere, which ought to be the speed that a free human in a 1 gee field in normal atmosphere would instantly achieve.

Now, I’m not clear how reliably I could spot the 6th floor coming a few feet from my face when I was moving at 100 miles per hour, or how reliably I could grab something to brake myself at just the right moment. But if there are many vertical rails around the edges of the shaft, say, one could grab one early and slow without stopping by gripping it lightly.

The UP shaft can’t of course work by gravity. I would argue that it would be highly advantageous for it to have the same upward force on users that the DOWN shaft has downward force, since otherwise you’d have to develop different sets of habits for the up and down shafts, which seems undesirable. (Not a safety issue though; if the space inside the shaft is all free, there’s nothing any user can do to cause accidental injury in the shaft. It might be embarrassing to miss your floor and end up at the bottom, but it won’t injure you or anyone else). So, since we know they have artificial gravity, let’s presume that the UP shaft has a 1 gee upward force, or at least that it matches the downward force in the DOWN shaft.

There’s some more information in Galactic Patrol. There’s a detailed description of the graduating class of Lensmen marching into the shaft and hitting bottom precisely on a beat of the march and continuing to march out of the shaft.

In perfect alignment and cadence the little column marched down the hall. In their path yawned the shaft—a vertical pit some twenty feet square extending from main floor to roof of the Hall, more than a thousand sheer feet of unobstructed air, cleared now of all traffic by flaring red lights. Five left heels clicked sharply, simultaneously upon the lip of the stupendous abyss. Five right legs swept out into emptiness. Five right hands snapped to belts and five bodies, rigidly erect, arrowed downward at such an appalling velocity that to unpractised vision they simply vanished.

Six-tenths of a second later, precisely upon a beat of the stirring march, those ten heels struck the main floor of Wentworth Hall, but not with a click. Dropping with a velocity of almost two thousand feet per second though they were at the instant of impact, yet those five husky bodies came from full speed to an instantaneous, shockless, effortless halt at contact, for the drop had been made under complete neutralization of inertia—“free,” in space parlance. Inertia restored, the march was resumed—or rather continued—in perfect time with the band.

Galactic Patrol, chapter 1

(2000 feet per second is 1364 miles per hour.)

This, of course, is not ordinary civilian use of the drop shaft. Note that for this ceremony it was cleared of all other traffic.

The detail of the cadets’ right hands snapping to their belts is interesting. Is that supposed to indicate they are manipulating some control that relates to the shaft? Of course, since this is not the ordinary use of that shaft, they may be doing something special that isn’t part of normal use.

We don’t know how long after First Lensman this book is set, but probably hundreds of years, so the “normal” configuration of drop shafts may well be different now than it was back then.

Either the artificial gravity in the shaft is set to a much higher setting than 1 gee for this ceremony, or perhaps the cadets are using thrusters or something to force themselves down, triggering them with their right hands at their belts. Maybe they are using thrusters to force themselves down because the DOWN shaft doesn’t have artificial gravity, only the UP shaft?

At least they don’t have to see their floor coming and stop themselves, since they’re going to the bottom. Even Lensmen might have trouble reacting fast enough to something going over 1000 miles per hour just a few feet from their face!

As usual, when one keeps poking at world-building, little issues turn up here and there.

Regretting Photographs not Taken

Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer (a site I’ve followed for years) has lately acquired a side gig writing occasional articles about photography for The New Yorker. The latest one, The Secret Art of the Family Photo, has sparked interesting conversation both at TOP and at Ann Althouse’s blog.

The questions of what a good family photo is, what purposes it serves, and how that changes as the photo ages, are interesting (or at least should be) to nearly all photographers and many families, it seems to me.

One way I approach thinking about what personal photos I should take is to look back at my old photos and see what I especially value, and what I miss (I have my own photos going back to 1962, and my mother’s further yet). (Note that this is about “family” photos, snapshots for the photographer or the immediate family; art, or documentary work for a larger audience, is another barrel of fish entirely.)

Places I Lived

Specific regrets in this area include the two places we lived in Zurich in 1966-67 (I have some interiors from one of them, as background to photographing us there), college dorms and dorm rooms, the interior of my Bozo Bus apartment, and my first apartment in St. Paul.

I do have some good pictures of the house my parents were in from 1963 until the 21st century, many of them from when Barbara was preparing to sell it, but some earlier too. I have at least a few before the wood siding was replaced, too.

I even have a couple of old pictures (plus modern ones I went back for) showing the house we rented from the college our first 3 years in town (across from the Junior High, a corner duplex we shared with the Jenkins).

Places I Spent Time

I’d like more from the Carleton computer center, though I have a few. The Highschool computer center I have more of, because I hung out there most of my free periods for 3 years.

I did a fair amount of photography around Northfield and around the Carleton Campus, which is nice to have.

Places I Worked

This is a subset of “Places I Spent Time,” of course.

I’d like photos of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, and the DEC office in Bloomington. I’ve got some of Dec’s Marlborough facility where I worked (MRO1), including some interiors (cameras were banned, but I got authorized to bring mine in to take some photos for a presentation to salesmen).

I’d like photos of the various desks I had, at various jobs, with my stuff.

I can often find modern, or even period, photos of the buildings for these categories. Sometimes they’re annoyingly different from what I remember. I always prefer photos from the time I was there.

Schools

I mostly don’t have pictures of schools. I found a picture of the high-school the other day, while scanning for our 50th class reunion, and din’t much care for it. The building is very flat and not interesting, is part of it, and nothing important happened outside it for me. But the old building at Washington school has been torn down, and I regret not having a picture of it (I was there for 1st and 2nd grade plus one summer, not sure which, for a science summer program).

No pictures at all of Longfellow, where I was bussed across town to do 3rd grade.

I did a bit better at college, partly because I was shooting for the Alumni Publications Office, and partly just because I was shooting a lot while I was there. I have pictures of the brand new Music and Drama center that they just now tearing down, which I really need to get scanned.

I don’t have much for photos from the Kung Fu class I was in (a roll or two of an aborted project towards a book on Southern Praying Mantis Kung Fu that I was going to illustrate; mostly details). No shots of the other students there or the instructors I worked with. Again, I was busy doing other stuff, not really free to take photos. (I do have the people who got me into the class, and others they got into the class, from social photos outside the studio).

Places I Visited

For big trips, I have done fairly well here. Early on I couldn’t afford enough film and processing, so everything is a bit thin, but from 9th grade on that wasn’t a useful excuse any more. (B&W film that I processed myself was about a penny a frame then; the paper for big prints cost enough to notice, but little snapshot prints didn’t use up that much.)

When I knew I was passing through a place because it was interesting, I took pictures to remember, but when it was my ordinary place to be, I often didn’t (and have pictures mostly by luck, interiors as background to something involving people).

People

I’ve generally done fairly well on documenting people that I saw much of. Same for pets, who are not precisely people, but in terms of photographic regret act about the same.

Things

My particular areas of interest, computers and photography, lead to my working with or owning some interesting equipment.

I don’t have pictures of the IBM !401 I was first paid for programming, or the PDP-8/L that Jeff Hoskins and I wrote the ultimate version of the “Target” game for (which contributed to many breakages of the joystick), or the PDP-11/20 that was my first PDP-11.

I do have some shots of the PDP-8/I, the first non-decimal computer I programmed (I was never paid for programming that one). My first exposure to octal, and to using the actual bit patterns; the IBM 1620 and 1401 were of course binary at the hardware level, but memory was organized in decimal digits (or full characters), and you never really needed to look beneath that to understand what you were doing; decoding the console lights digit by digit was easy.

I don’t have pictures of my Miranda Sensorex, or my mother’s Bolsey 35, or the Leica M3 I owned in college, or the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic system that I traded the Miranda for.

I have pictures of many later cameras, from when I sold them on eBay.

For cameras in particular (more than computers), I want photos of my camera; good photos of that exact model are much better than nothing, but are not entirely satisfactory.

I don’t particularly regret not having photos of bottles of particularly good wine (or cognac). It might be useful to have better written notes, but the field has changed so much that what I learned back when wouldn’t be much use now anyway (or, as at the time, it would be stuff I couldn’t afford; I’ve tasted pre-phyloxera port).

Events

I’ve done pretty well with documenting SF conventions I was at. But I have no photos from things like the Dragaera gaming sessions I was at, or Mike Ford’s magical 17th century gaming group. I was doing that thing where I was present in the moment (and, to be fair, also worrying about disrupting or delaying the games), and I definitely regret it.

I don’t miss snapshots from the Yes or Emerson Lake and Palmer concerts I was at early on. I did get photos from the 1991 Cropredy Festival we were at (with backstage passes), and I don’t find myself going back to them very often. Of course finding good photos of those groups performing is easy, but I don’t go around collecting them or even looking at them much, except by chance.

Transportation

I mostly don’t regret not having photos of my cars (or I have one where it’s the background for some people).

I don’t have photos from the 1958 Atlantic crossing (by ship), or the 1966 or 1967 crossings (on the SS France). I may have Mary’s photos in a box I haven’t looked at yet, I should check; hadn’t thought of that before. I do have pictures of the VC-10 we flew to Entebbe on, but no pictures of the other interesting airplanes I’ve been on (Caravelle, Comet, DC-3, Constellation, plus “ordinary” things like the 707 and DC-8). I dig out and even post the VC-10 photo periodically, so the others would probably mean something to me also.

I took photos at the shuttle launch we saw (from public access, so far away). Don’t think I’ve scanned or made any prints of them, but they weren’t much good, we were too far away for photography really. I’m glad I was there, and maybe should check the photos again but I don’t think they matter much.