Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

When I had just started photography I was down in Rock, Cornwall and bought a copy of ‘End of the Land’ by Andrew Nadolski. Many things impressed me about this book (I’ll try to review it soon) but one of the things that continued to impress me with this and a few other books since is the rendering of the film used. I had no idea at the time but since then I’ve discovered that it is probably Kodak Portra 160NC or 160VC. More recently, just as I was starting large format photography, I saw the Harry Cory Wright book, which despite my confusion as to what it was trying to be, I was again captivated buy the quality of colour. As I have used Provia and Velvia since and understood it’s behaviours, I’ve realised that in certain circumstances the muted, warm colours of Portra can allow the subject matter to shine through (especially when there is already significant colour in the picture or a wish to create more muted colours).

If you’ve been following my journey into film, you’ll have also noticed me using Fuji Astia, which has a similar colour response to negative film but which has the benefit of being easy to interpret wheras with colour negative film you need to remove the orange cast, which is pretty much impossible to do in a way that is repeatable. This means that with negative film, you never quite know whether your conversion is accurate or not. I’ve also played with Fuji 160S for quite a while and have never been really happy with it; the results have always tended to a strange green or magenta tinge which I have never managed to remove.

I finally decided it would be a good idea to try out some Portra after all I had heard and, as you can’t buy it in quickload format, I had to decide how to use it which really means either double dark slides or the ‘mythical’ graflex grafmatic film holders; A beast that is rumoured to eat film stock raw and spit out the results in a hail of celluloid confetti. Fortunatley I had a friend who was a well know grafmatic tamer who had managed to build up a coterie of over ten of the beasties and had yet to be bitten by one. So when I saw a couple of mint condition ones come up on ebay for £50 each, I crossed my fingers and pressed the ‘buy it now’ button.

For those of you who don’t know what a grafmatic really is, I’ll try to give a quick review. Each grafmatic has six ‘septums’ within, each of which is a flat peice of light metal the same size as a sheet of 4×5 film with a lip folde at the top and sides to keep a sheet of film in. Once a film is slipped into this sheet, simple tension (and I think a slight curve of the crease at the bottom) holds the sheets in. The container for these septums is a sprung container that when operated (lifted up fully and reinserted) moves a septum to the front of the cue, and then the darkslide reveals the film. The next operation moves this sheet to the back of the container, increments a mechanical counter and the whole unit is then ready for the next shot. For a better guide to what is going on, have a look here and

So, combined with the purchase of 50 sheets of Kodak Portra 160VC and a Harrison film changing tent, I was ready to go. I took a few shots in Scotland (as I’ve shown in my previous post here ). The results were initially dissapointing when I use Silverfast to scan the film. Silverfast’s NegaFix has a couple of problems as far as I’m concerned. The main problem is that it just doesn’t do a great job (in my opinion). The second is that, if you don’t get a a good result, you have to rescan the film. What a pain! The revelation was when I found ColorNeg, a Photoshop plugin by CF-Systems. The key to ColorNeg is that you make a ‘linear scan’, which is basically as close to a scan raw file as you can manage (instructions for the v750 using Epson software are here) then you take the 16bit scan you have produced (which look a loveley orange colour) and firstly process it using Scantique (comes with ColorNeg) which removes the gamma curve from the film to finally produce a ‘flat/raw scan’.

The ColorNeg plugin itself is fairly complicated and not the most user friendly but the default settings produce results that are miles better than Silverfast. I’ve also processed 160S which, despite the scans being a lot better than those using Silverfast, the results are nowhere near as nice as Portra (at the moment I hasten to add – I’ll still carry on with it as I would like to make an A/B comparison). The colours with Portra appear more ‘stable’ and respond well to adjustment in photoshop.

This post is about the film holders though. Grafmatics, if in reasonable condition, don’t eat filml They’ve been simple to use and the only problem so far has been keeping a track of which exposures are which (not too much of an issue as the film stays in the same order and as long as you try loading and unloading in the light – with ‘used’ film obviously – keep a few of those quickloads where you forget to close the lens first. I you’re like me you should get 6 of these fairly quickly )

Next time I take a shot with my grafmatics, I’ll make a little video to show it off. Hopefully that will be this weekend as I’m up in the Peak District with Dav Thomas to research a location for a weekend large format introduction course we’re planning (well everyone else is so why not – so if you are interested in learning a little from a certified large format geek, just let me know).