cerealjoe | And with the first artist came the first critic. (Reply)

Everyone is a critic and sometimes some critics make me want to bang my head against a wall. Actually they're not even critics, they're comments that question your work, something along the lines of "are you really sure you're using this camera because everyone else's work is not like that". Today the norm is everything, isn't it? Let me continue this under a cut because it might take a long time...

(this one and the next one become a tad larger when clicked)

That comment I got about my work not looking like "everyone else's" work done with that same camera came for my ADIML/DAD post with the Diana Mini. This person did guess that I had used the half-shot feature of the DM but was perplexed as to why my shots were not as "skinny" as "everyone else's".

First of all, what is "everyone else's"? Everyone who has ever used a DM in half-shot mode and posted photos on the interwebs? Nah. Most likely just a dozen other people's work that person had come across. Even I, as a huge DM fan, can only claim to have seen perhaps the work of two dozen peeps (I mean at least a few rolls, not two photos).

Second, many people who do not shoot film forget that when you shoot film there are post-processing steps. There is the scanning and then there is the photoshopping (alas... the biggest step for most peeps, why, ô, why). If you get your DM half-shot roll scanned at the shop you would be extremely lucky to get good results. Actually that's true for the square format too. Why? Because most of the scanners they use are automatic machines, they get the negatives in, the machine looks at where the film starts with the first dark mark and scans at regular intervals. Works marvelously for normal cameras but the Diana family is so made that when you take a photo you don't have to advance the film completely to take another one. Technically you could shoot a whole roll without have that characteristic dark mark between each photo (kind of like this). It also means that the space between each half-shot is different because the DM is a piece of plastic after all, sometimes the advancing mechanism is not perfectly set (check out the difference between this and this). The machine doesn't care, it will just scan. And it will cut off many parts of photos, it's like that, often these parts are along the width (in a normal photo) hence the "skinny" look.

Now, if you're lucky (and most likely have some money), you can ask the photo store peeps to do a manual scan but there are 72 photos! If you do know a store that will perfectly keep everything, do call me. Fotoyks were rather good with this if there were always at least some black lines between photos (but they couldn't take off the equalizer so the photos always looked overphotoshopped). But hey, there are awesome photo shops out there, if you're lucky enough to find one, give them birthday and christmas presents because they deserve it.

But back to our story. So with the automatic scanning you often get the "skinny" half-shot look because the scanner just scans, takes off any extra black marks there might be and that's it. I scan my photos at home and my scanner has a 3:2 output, it crops along the height of the photos a tad and a half-shot looks like this:

Yes, that's a half-shot, the ratio of the half-shot is about 0.75:1. I've compared the scans from my scanner to the one I had done with a pro scanner without the black marks (1), they're 0.71:1 so 5% "skinnier". The ones done with a pro scanner with the middle black (2) marks are at 0.73:1.

In the end I think I've understood what was the biggest "unusual" thing about my scans compared to others. I leave the black marks not only in the middle but also some on the sides. Why? I don't know, I just like it... but it's true that it makes my photos look fatter a bit.

So there, basically with film cameras, everyone should remember that the scanning is also very important.

Did any of the stuff above make sense? I don't know but at least now if anyone asks again why the half-shot photos I post are not 100% like the "norm", I can just point them to this entry.