The grain! It’s all about the grain! How many times have you heard film photography sing this chorus?
How often do you look at a picture and zoom in to see the detail? Ofcourse, in the grander scheme of things, it's not the most important thing in the world but it’s significant enough to get you thinking about the importance of details.
Take a look at this image, it's full of medium format detail. It looks tack sharp but take a closer look and you'll see the sharpness falling off around the hair, the hands, and shoulders.
For any portrait shot, the eyes are the most important focus, as the detail really shows the best. Of course to get the most incredible detail you would have to shoot with a Large Format camera such as a 4x5 or even an 8x10 but for most hobbyist photographers it is a very expensive venture! Medium Format is the next best thing followed by 35mm.
This is not to knock the smaller formats, medium format and 35mm are great yet there is no comparison with large format as it is significantly larger.
I often hear film photographers talking about grain. But what is it? If you took a magnifying loupe to your negative and you could see the image becoming fuzzier with all the dots, zoom in any further all you will see is an ocean of dots. All images are just a combination of dots or grain put together to form an image and if you can understand their relationship you will better understand grains ability to hold detail.
In art getting detail in everything is not always everything. Take for example, artists working with paint or oil, their work is not necessarily fine because detail can be rendered in different ways. With film photography detail can be used to impose texture as if you can feel being in the image or place within the image itself.
Therefore, detail and grain are linked to each other very closely just as detail, depth and negative size are too. Now there is another factor to consider in this relationship. This is of the silver halide particles which are critical to film emulsions. Faster films such as Portra 400 or Fuji Pro400H start off with larger silver halide particles than does slower film such as Portra 160 or say CineStill 50D.
Why does this matter, you may ask? Large Format film such as 8x10 is 50 times larger than a 35mm negative. Medium Format film can range from two to six times larger. Regardless, proportionality means that there will be considerably more silver halide crystals in medium and large format film.
When the film is exposed to light and then in development, the particles turn to black metallic silver. It’s important to note that it turns to black and not gray. There will be a greater proportion of black metallic silver wherever the light has fallen on the film with fewer where less light has fallen. That's why when you look at a negative it is a reversed version of what you captured on camera.
For those of you with enlargers at home and are printing your image on to photographic paper, the process begins all over again. Where less light fell on the negative, the enlarger light will pass through and will heavily impact the photographic paper creating a larger area of blackened particles. Those darker areas will be recreated larger on print.
You can see this in action in your daily newspaper, if you are analogue in all aspects in your life! The detail of the images being created by the lack of density with which all the blackened particles are joined together. In large white areas will have few particles: in dense black areas, for example, a person's hair, there will be a greater density of particles joined together.
What does this all mean? Does this mean you should stop shooting 35mm? Absolutely not! Large Format is still a very expensive venture. Here’s how you get the maximum quality from your 35mm camera. Instead of using faster films such as Portra 800 or Cinestill 800T use films which are much slower such as CineStill 50D or Portra 160, if shooting black and white shoot with Fuji Acros 100. The silver halide particles in slower films are smaller and can capture significantly more detail.
What are you thoughts on grain and details in film photography? Do you love it or avoid it like the plague? I would love to hear your thoughts this!
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