Harvesting Grain

One of the greatest ironies of modern technology is how it almost immediately becomes cool to imitate the old technology that has been replaced. This happens in music, it's cool to have vinyl albums now that shiny discs are everywhere. Stone washed jeans, fake antique furniture, we all crave authenticity. And of course, this pervades art, including digital photography.

Now that we have replaced the darkroom with Lightroom, and the stinking chemicals with Photoshop, it is fashionable to make our "digital captures" look as much as possible like the old-timey photos be they silver gelatin, bromide, or tintype. That means basically two things: 1) remove any trace of "digitalness" from the capture, and 2) add in adjustments to mimic the old processes.

Modern digital SLRs are pretty good at capturing images accurately, and that is part of the problem. They are often too in-focus, over too much of the field, and they have high sensitivities that freeze action, something that was difficult to do with the chemistry of the past. Color is captured more realistically now too, and often appears almost flat next to an old Kodachrome slide or Velvia print, which burst with ultra-saturated colors. New sources of noise in the image from the digital nature of the capture must be removed to leave no trace of the photographs origin. These show up as chroma (color) or luminance (black and white) noise from the sensor, and lens defects that digital cameras are great at amplifying. It can be a real pain to remove these things but since they do not appear in old photos, they must go.

Now the fun part: adding in the quirks of the past. Volumes have been written and many opinions traded on how best to add fake "film grain" to a digital capture. I myself often use a high-resolution scan of an actual medium format grain field lifted from a pushed, high ISO blank Hasselblad 120 frame, applied to the image in Photoshop as an overlay. The result is an amazing replication of film grain, something that we used to celebrate the death of when digital cameras first came out.

Color tints made by exotic metals like platinum and gold, focus defects, exposure irregularities, lens vignetting, blurriness, and contrast shifts can all be faked, and to pretty good effect. It is interesting that we spend as much time trying to put these things into photos now as the old-timers used to spend trying to get rid of them. Perhaps more.

"In a world of post modern fad, what was good now is bad" - Jewel