Film Photography
Earlier this week in my Wednesday Thoughts post, I mentioned that I'm interested in trying to mimic a "film" look using the settings on my cameras (Sony A5000, and also my Samsung Galaxy S21+ smartphone). In the process I discovered, unsurprisingly, that smartphone photos will need to rely heavily on post-processing in Snapseed, Lightroom, VSCO, etc. You can make some initial changes to reduce the amount of work needed, but the phones just don't have robust enough settings to do the job.
Also, my Sony A5000 is limited compared to my inspiration - FujiFilm - in that I can change some settings, but I don't have any way to save them as a template or profile or what-have-you. Apparently some other Sony cameras have something called Profile Pictures or Picture Profile, something like that; but alas mine does not have this ability. The perils of buying second-hand without knowing exactly what you want in a camera.
But I did find some methods in replicating the 'film' look off-the-camera, and I think the results are good. I'm not interested in adding film grain (although that is something the FujiFilm camera "recipes" do, my cameras aren't able to add grain from the settings, so that would have to be a post-processing element if I want to add it), but getting photos mostly as-shot off the camera is my main goal. I did some initial playing around Friday morning and I'm encouraged by the results. I decided to create an album on Flickr to show off "auto" vs. "film" looks.
(I'll mention here that I would place the photos within the blog post, but even though I can style them to show up smaller on my blog posts, they would show up super huge on RSS readers; I also can't embed the album because I need to pay for a 'premium' Bear account, so I can't use <script> which the embed code requires.)
The very first test was of some trees poking through the side of a wooden fence in my front yard. I first took the "film" look photo, and then switched to Sony's Intelligent Auto setting. The results are stunning: the auto mode highlights all of the sun shining onto the tree, whereas the "film" photo looks more natural to me and a little understated. I tried a few other tests with this camera indoors, but I didn't like the way they treated my subject (my dog). I think these particular settings are best suited for outdoors, in decent lighting.
Later I took my dog for a walk and turned on my Samsung's pro mode and made what settings changes I could to mimic the settings on the Sony: ISO 400, -0.3 exposure, and 5500k white balance. I left the shutter speed and focus mode as auto, as that's what I did for the camera. I took some shots of a few colourful things, and then took matching shots in Samsung's auto mode. Holy crap, the difference is stunning! I found that 4 out of 5 times I found the auto mode to blow out the colours to try to get a really vivid shot. The 4th time my lighting was a little darker and the subject (a tire swing) was already slightly darker, so I preferred the more vivid shot.
It was eye-opening. How many shots have I "messed up" because of how the camera blows out the bright colours? And this is just based on initial photo settings - I hadn't even gone in and made some adjustments in Lightroom or Snapseed to match the Sony's other settings I couldn't change on my phone (contrast, saturation, sharpness1).
Looking at my photo settings, I have something called Scene optimizer on. The description:
Automatically optimize the colour and contrast of pictures to make dark scenes look brighter, food look tastier, and landscapes look more vivid.
No wonder everything seems so bright! I will probably leave it on, because I like the idea of brightening darker scenes and making landscapes pop, but the pictures I took as a test today were not good things to brighten. Those are all in the album. I see now also that Auto HDR is enabled; I now wonder how some of these pictures might turn out with it turned off. I'll have to give that a try.
But - so far, so good. I'm having fun with these experiments. Let me know which pictures you like the best in my album! Whether it's the auto or manual shots, or which subject in particular.
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Although, I don't believe I can turn sharpness down to -1 in any app - I seem to only be able to start at 0 and increase. Perhaps this is different on the desktop applications.↩