Art,  Life,  Moment,  Photoshop,  Portrait

Children Portrait Photography | Expressive Portraiture | I Love Grain

HaiQal

© 2011 Wazari Wazir | Expressive Portrait Photography

I know it is ironic, when camera manufacture strive hard to produce noise free camera sensor so that the picture will be smooth as silk but some photographers choose to add grain to the picture. If you are familiar with one of the world top wedding photographer Jeff Ascough, you will know what I mean. Look at his picture, most of them have grain even though he use top of the line camera equipment which can produce less noticeable noise at high ISO but look at the grain.

Back in the golden film era, people use High ISO film camera which produce lots of grain because they have to, they don’t have much choice, they don’t have the flexibility to change ISO like what we can do with digital camera nowadays. If we have put ISO 100 film cartridge inside the camera, we are stuck with the ISO for the whole film or for the whole 36 frames of exposure, we can’t change the ISO to 100 and then to ISO 1000 easily, in order to do so, we need to change the cartridge and put a new one.

Among the most popular High ISO Film during film era is the legendary Kodak Professional Tri – X 400 which made popular by Sebastião Salgado the legendary photographer. It is the world best selling black and white film at that time. One of the reason why ISO 400 film was popular during digital era is because, it is flexible, you can use it to shoot outdoors or indoors. Just imagine if you are using ISO 100 shooting news outdoors and suddenly you have to rush shooting indoor with the same ISO, you will have a problem with the exposure, you can’t use fast shutter speed with that ISO shooting indoor, even if you have a flash, shooting indoor with ISO 100 will not help much. That’s why most photojournalist at that time use Film ISO 400 as their standard film.

Back to the title of my blog post, Why I Love Grain? It is because I like the film look, especially ISO 400 film look, with newest digital camera nowadays, it is hard to get a nice “grain” using ISO 400 because most digital camera sensors nowadays are so advance, you can barely see the grain or noise at that ISO, so what I can do is to add the grain later on in Photoshop. I like the character that the grain brings to the image. I don’t know why but it is my personal taste, maybe I come from film background and just can’t “leave it”.

Maybe some of you will say, then why I don’t use film? It can be expensive and time consuming and furthermore I hate chemical. I know some of my friends like to processed their own film and make their own printing, I guess they must have a lot of time and money to do so. I do envy them but my film days ore over, I like working in a brightly lit room than in the real “Darkroom,” I’ve been there and done that and I’m not going back into the darkroom.

I love adding grain in my photograph with Photoshop, it is how I express myself with photography, some like super rich vibrant colors, some like black and white, some like to shoot with film more even though they have a digital camera with them. It is personal. Photography can be personal, but in the ned, no matter what medium you choose, no matter whether you like to shoot with film or digital, no mater whether you like super silky smooth image or grain and gritty picture, what matters most is the content of your photograph.

I think the legendary war photographer Eddie Adams said it best, “If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that’s a good picture.” Grain or no grain, it is the content that matters, I love grain and will continue to add grain into my photographs because I like the character that the grain can brings.

HaiQal

I'm a Photographer and Travel Blogger...

One Comment

  • nazrey

    erm….pas bce entry ni bru tau ckit2 psl darkroom..igtkn darkroom tu xde kaitan ngn photographer n sumenye sme je..br tau hasil dlm darkroom tu berbeza….;-)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.