Project Educate: Photography ABCs [Part Two]

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Expired Film

I bet you thought I was going to say exposure!

Expired film is a photographer's best friend for certain things, and worst enemy for others. It is embraced by many for its artistic value - it has skews in colour and is often more grainy than unexpired film, but also does strange things with contrast, and is very unpredictable. One roll might give you high-contrast reddish images with a whole lot of grain, and another roll could give you blue low-contrast images with no more grain than usual; it depends greatly on the brand of film and how it was stored, and it also comes down to a mixture of luck and prayer. It's for these reasons that expired film isn't so loved for professional applications, though: it is too unreliable to depend on for the majority of commercial work.

Of course, a lot of the expired film you see around dA is Polaroid, because all of the Polaroid-brand integral films still in existence are expired now, and a lot of people want to capture the vintage look of the brand. It's not uncommon to see a pack of Polaroid film - especially Time Zero Artistic film - sell for upward of $50 on eBay. As a sort of trickle-down effect, other expired films have caught on in popularity too, so the prices for expired 120 film especially tend to run a bit higher than brand-new films of the same type. My recommendation, if you want to shoot expired film for the first time, is buy some cheap drug store film, let it go bad in your fridge, and don't shoot anything too serious with it in case every shot turns out looking like orange construction paper.

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Filters

Filters are glass or plastic accessories that go in front (or, in less common cases, behind) your lens that alter the light before it hits your sensor. They have a variety of uses - in black and white landscape photography, red filters are used to darken skies; other coloured filters can be used to change or correct the colour balance of your shots, like a warming filter to add orange-red tones; neutral density filters reduce the intensity of light passing through a lens; UV filters cut out UV haze, while polarizing filters filter out light by its polarity to reduce glares and darken skies, and infrared filters cut most or all visible light when shooting infrared photography; and diopter filters allow you to focus closer to an object than your lens would usually be able to, and are often used in macro photography.

That list was by no means comprehensive, though, and there are also filters for special effects with lighting (like that often-seen starburst effect) and focus (like softening the focus around a sweet spot), multiple images in single frames, and a multitude of other modifications to the end image.

Filters come in a variety of sizes, and with SLR cameras usually screw into the lens.

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Grain

Grain is a term used frequently when referring to film photography, to describe the static-like look that happens when the chemicals of the film's emulsion form crystals. It is more noticeable in film exposed with less light, namely higher-ISO films and underexposed films. Professional-grade film is often marketed as having finer grain; this means that the finished image's grain might not look like granulated sugar but more like powdered sugar, because while the grain might be smaller it's impossible to completely eliminate it - it's a byproduct of film chemistry. It's kind of the film equivalent of pixels in digital photography.

Grain is embraced by some film photographers, though, because it is a hallmark of the "filmy" look.

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Hand Colouring

Back in the day before colour photography, if someone wanted to show the lovely pink cheeks of their daughter to all of their friends at work, they'd have a black-and-white photo hand coloured. This was a long, painstaking process where they'd basically paint over the photo with high-transparency pigments, and the end result would look like a quirky hybrid of a painted portrait and a photograph. The colours generally had a surreal, kind of flat look because of the limited palette used. While many genres of photograph were hand-painted, portraits were by far the most common, with landscapes coming in a distant second.

In contemporary photography, while some people still hand colour monochrome images the traditional way it has become more common to do it in the digital darkroom. Programs such as Photoshop, where layers of individual colours can be built up as overlays on a monochrome original, have made it a less expensive if no less time-consuming hobby.