Connor Bevans

In the digital age traditional 35mm film has almost completely died out, and we’ve lost an incredible format. This summer I took a two week program on black and white film photography. While I already knew all about camera stuff and how incredible photography was, I had never experimented with film. I was born in the digital age, I hadn’t even loaded a roll into a camera until the program. In the digital age everything goes quickly, and we spend a lot of our time staring at an LCD screen until our eyes hurt. Film just doesn’t work like that. Getting one good print takes a lot more skill and a lot more time, but I also enjoy it more.

What makes it more fun? The physicality of it. Picking up the undeveloped photo paper in a darkroom with only an orange safety light and carrying it over to the chemistry and watching your photo magically appear out of nowhere. Little things that in Photoshop may have been instant or not even done at all become so much more incredible to perform. For instance, when you make a print you load your neg into an enlarger, which uses a lens to project the image onto photo paper. There’s a special tool for focusing this lens called the “Grain Focuser”. What this tool does is it reflects the light into your eye, basically making you see a super zoomed in version of the print. It was tricky at first to get it right, but once I got it, there was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, and it was worth it.

Black and white is also amazing, often we rely on great colours to make a fantastic photograph, by removing this part of our photos, we need to compensate with the other half to make a great photo. I ended up focusing a lot more on composition than anything else. Contrast in black and white film is also fantastic, and crisp, though beginner’s prints often turn out muddy due to their poor exposures. Black and white gave me great detail when I got my exposure right, and ended up just being an awesome format to work with.

There’s definite downsides to film, and for me, it’s really a bit of a novelty, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great format to work in, so, every once in awhile, I’ll probably be posting a few shots in Black and White film to my Flickr, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Nokia, I was able to get my hands on their latest Nokia N95 8GB smartphone. Let’s get down to this thing they call, um, what is it again? Oh yeah, a review.

Media and Look

Well, I’m sure you’ve seen a few shots of the phone before, but it comes in Silver and Black and is about 4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and insanely thick. Like, literal Candy Bar thick, not Candy Bar phone thick, approximately .82 inches thick. That’s no joke, people. The phone’s a slider, which takes a bit off the length, but the huge phone is made up for by a nice 2.5 inch screen.The built-in speakers are quite impressive for a phone, but still aren’t anything amazing. It works in landscape and portrait mode, but you have to actually have to slide the slider one of it’s two ways to make it change mode. For landscape, slide out the multimedia tab which includes basic media controls, and for portrait, slide out the keypad tab. It includes two cameras, a 5 megapixel camera with flash which takes great pictures which are generally the quality of a point and shoot camera from a few years back. There’s also a front-facing camera which is about 2 megapixels. Another nice thing is the face that it actually has a 3.5 mm stereo jack included right on the side.

Feel, Operating System, and Technical Specs

The N95 runs Symbian OS, and can use great apps like Qik for live video from your phone, twibble for mobile twitter, or Fring for all of your IM and VOIP on the go. However, I’ve experienced a few problems with the phone. For one, it locks up occasionally. It will freeze and sometimes it just needs to load something, and other times it entirely stops working and forces me to pull out the battery. Overall, the OS looks and feels nice though, and the apps are welcome and work great. The system has a great big 128MB of ram, which definitely packs a punch and aids in it’s impressive gaming section. It comes with integrated GPS, however I haven’t been able to connect to it, because of Rogers’ network. It uses 3G, which definitely makes a huge difference in speed.

Conclusion and the (Inevitable) Comparison to the iPhone

So, where do we go from here. We’ve found out it’s a nice phone. We’ve found out it has 3G, GPS, multimedia, and downloadable apps. Sounds like a product that’s recently been announced? Yes, as expected, I’ve come to the comparison between it and the iPhone. The iPhone 2 has all of the features and more that the N95 has, and more, at a lower price. The only real reason to get an N95 over the iPhone is if you really care about the camera in your phone, and have some sort of love for really thick objects. I have a digital SLR, if I use the camera in my phone, it’s for quick little action shots at times where I wasn’t carrying around my camera, or was really bored. The N95 isn’t next generation for mobile phones other than the fact that it’s got good specs, 3G, GPS, and a great camera. It doesn’t have something comparable to multi-touch or the amazing web browser  of the iPhone. It doesn’t step up it’s game. And now, there’s been rumored replacements for great camera phones, for instance Sony’s apparent 8 megapixel camera. It’s got custom apps, the iPhone has the App Store, a single place to get all of these apps. It’s got multimedia, the iPhone has the classic and loved iPod interface. It’s got 3G and GPS, so does the iPhone. The iPhone has twice the RAM the N95 has. The iPhone is better in almost every aspect. The iPhone, unfortunately, leaves the N95 in the dust. However, I’m excited to see what Nokia pulls out their sleeves to try and compete with the iPhone now.

Over the past year few months I’ve improved as a photographer immensely. Though not only in my actual image capturing, in my editing abilities as well. Aperture and Photoshop help, but many of the adjustments I make could be done in GIMP, just not as easily or as quickly. Example  of a shot I would have taken a few months ago. Example of a shot I’ve taken within the last week or so. Clearly, there’s been a lot of improvement. I’ve begun to take more time into framing, and choosing a specific ISO. I still generally use AF, just because most of the time it’s correct, but at least when it’s wrong I’m fast enough at MF that I can get it focused in a few seconds. Overall, I can gladly and truthfully say, I am a much better photographer than I used to be.

PS - I’d like to thank Michael for letting me use his D40x at podcamp, there was only a 50mm prime lens on it, which made me have to really think about how I’m going to take a shot.  

Well, a few days ago I decided I wanted to learn about High Dynamic Range (or HDR), which basically enables a higher contrast between the light and dark in an image. So, I took it upon myself to find out how to do it, and I found out that it was easier than I had thought. All you have to do is set your digital SLR (not sure how to do it on a point and shoot) to “Auto Bracketing” which takes a number of pictures with different exposure times, take the pictures, open them in Photoshop, and go to File>Automate>Merge to HDR. Not only can you use HDR to make images have better contrast, you can use them to make cool effects, like this:

HDR Mac Keyboard 

Well, if you’re like me, you shoot a lot of stuff at high ISO because you don’t want to use flash as it will give you too much specular light (making things look super glossy), and want to be able to get more natural lighting. The problem with a high ISO is it gives you a lot of noise and grain, and trying to remove it with Photoshops built in tool is terribly inefficient, but I’ve got a GREAT plugin for Photoshop, which patches it right up. Noise Ninja sells for $44.95 for the home version, and 79.95 for the pro version. 

Click To Play