I’ve been claiming for six years that I am an exclusively analog photographer – until I started looking honestly at all the ways I use digital technology to capture negative images on film and turn them into positive ones in the darkroom and on-line. I wrote about that in my last essay.
That made me think of three photographers who explicitly and very consciously integrate digital techniques into their work as commercial and art photographers. One of these is Nick Carver.
Nick was one of the early photography YouTubers, starting in 2014. His channel, Nick Carver, has 116,000 subscribers – in the upper echelon for a channel about film photography! The videos on the channel all have to do with analog photography: on-location shoots, technical tutorials on exposure, composition, scanning, documentation of larger projects like putting up an exhibition, producing a zine.
Nick is one of the lucky ones who can make the larger part of his living directly and indirectly from film photography. Due to his large number of YouTube subscribers, he has a wide customer base for the sale of his prints and his zines. The latest zine (long sold out) documents his invitation by the regional tourism board of Andalusia, Spain, to visit and photograph the area. He was one of ten photography YouTubers invited to make the all-expenses-paid trip to this beautiful part of Spain – another perk from his YouTube channel.
He also offers online courses for analog photographers, one for manual metering for film, as well as an extensive course for large format photography with view cameras.
Nick is also lucky to live near some of North America’s most spectacular natural scenery. In his portfolio, the desert landscapes are a welcome respite from the current trend of oversaturation and overdramatization. Viewing them, one sees the color and light as if standing in the shimmering heat.
We talked about this almost universal drive to oversaturate landscape and travel photos. He said he was very much in that boat when he got started in landscape photography, pushing saturation to 200%, going for deep black shadows, and pushing the clarity slider in Lightroom to bring out every detail. He was able to get away from these bad habits when he realized where the temptation might be coming from.
When standing in a magnificent landscape, one is overwhelmed with awe and amazement at the beauty that can’t be translated into a two-dimensional rectangle, he said. Back home, sitting in front of the computer, you think, “Well, that doesn’t feel anything like I felt.” The only way you see to try and get some of that feeling back is to start changing the little things you didn’t notice, remove the fence, crank the saturation, and make it look dramatic. “Ahh, yes, that’s how I felt when I was there!” So he learned to step back from the emotions a bit and let the beauty of nature itself be its own advocate.
Besides landscapes, his work focuses on architecture, especially nostalgic suburban, commercial buildings from the 1970s to 1990s, fast-food restaurants, strip malls, abandoned storefronts and motels, or deserted office buildings.
He mainly uses color film, often the Kodak Portra range, to accentuate the nostalgia. The suburban store fronts are usually shot in the dreamy time between dusk and dark, the abandoned desert motels and gas stations often in sun-drenched midday light. His go-to format is a view camera and a 6×17 cm roll-film back for extreme panoramic views. He also uses 4×5, 6×6, 6×7, and 6×9 formats.
Nick – like all successful photographers – is an exacting master of the craft. Exposure, lighting, composition are all spot on. His images exude harmony, peace, balance, whether they portray sweeping, majestic mountains, endless desert, or the destitution of deserted and decaying buildings.
After a shoot, he sends his exposed films off to the lab to be processed and looks forward to getting the negatives back.
And that is where the analog process stops for Nick.
In his workflow, the negatives are then scanned. Post-processing is done with Lightroom and Photoshop, and the finished images are printed using pigment, C-type wet process, or 12-ink-jet printing on best quality, archival-grade art papers, or shared as digital files.
Why, I asked him, has he never done his own darkroom enlarging and printing? He responded that it was more out of necessity than anything else. He never had access to a darkroom that would handle his preferred negative format of 6×17 cm. For that, you need an enlarger that can take at least 5×7 negatives, better 8×10. Those aren’t found in the community darkrooms, and he didn’t have the space in his own studio. And as difficult a craft as black and white printing is to master, color printing is many times more complex.
Well, if you are digitizing your images anyway, why start with film at all, I asked. And he told me a story.
“I started on film back around 2000 because it was basically the only option. That’s when I fell in love with photography in the first place. Then, like pretty much everybody, I ended up going fully digital at some point when it just made more sense financially since I was trying to pursue photography as a career.
“It took maybe five or six years, but I started to get pretty burned out on digital. It was missing something that I couldn’t really pinpoint for quite a while. It was just kind of a slow decline of not really enjoying photography anymore. And I was ready to quit photography altogether, still looking for something to bring the spark back. So I went and picked up a film camera again for the first time in probably five to seven years. And the spark came back! I mean, just full force, immediately. That told me that what I had really fallen in love with was film photography, not just photography in general.
“I think that’s still the case today because I don’t get any pleasure out of taking pictures on my iPhone or with digital cameras, even if I sometimes must, out of necessity. The film part of it seems to be intrinsic to the pleasure of photography for me. So, I’ve decided to stick with analog capture.
“But the hybrid workflow… If I have to explain to someone why I shoot film, then I think they wouldn’t understand. I can’t really articulate why it makes sense to me, but it just does. I think not having a screen to look at and see if it’s coming out helps me connect with my subject better. And the high risk, the high stakes, of needing to make sure I do the process exactly right if I want the pictures to come out – I kind of need that.
“With my analog work, there’s still always this element of knowing that there’s a piece of film in there, a physical thing that the image has been exposed on, that I’m gonna need to then remove from the camera, stow in safekeeping and take back home with me to be developed. This changes a lot for me. When I capture an image with a digital camera, it doesn’t feel like I’ve created something real, I guess.”
These sentiments echo those of many other “hybrid” photographers I speak to. They always lament the detachment from physicality they experience with digital photography and are frustrated at being reduced to capturing and modulating light with a miniature computer that does the work for them and requires a fraction of their expertise and craftsmanship.
“I’m the first to admit that most of the look of film can be pretty well imitated with digital now. If you have the right sensor and the right editing, I don’t think most people would be able to see a difference. There are many ways that film is inferior to digital capture, including low light capability, reciprocity failure, etc. And I’m not scanning on the best scanner so I’m probably not even getting the best detail out of everything that’s on the film.
“Sometimes the color rendition of film drives me nuts. Sometimes I love it. I shoot a lot of Kodak Portra, and it can make blues look a little funky and kind of like teal. Then, I end up having to do a fair amount of tedious color correction on the scan. But as frequently as it can be frustrating, just as often, it naturally comes out to a really beautiful look that I wouldn’t have been able to seek out, even if I had known how to imitate it in Photoshop.
“And a propos sharpness and megapixels… I do a lot of large-format photography, and I think many people assume that I’m shooting these larger formats for the high resolution they produce. But there are digital cameras now that’ll blow that out of the water. It’s not really the reason to shoot large format film anymore unless it’s 8×10 or larger, perhaps. High resolution can be achieved much more easily and, in many cases, better with a medium-format digital camera.
“No, It’s not for the resolution. The main reason I shoot larger format film is for the process of it and because of the cameras. Having that primitive box, with bellows connecting a front standard holding a lens and a rear standard holding the film, which you’re manipulating independently, no electronics, just simple mechanics, producing stunning results: that’s really more why I shoot it.”
For Nick, expanding analog techniques over to the printing side is not totally out of the question; just on a back burner. In a recent video on setting up a new inkjet printer, he glanced around the room and muttered an aside that wasn’t overheard by me: “Hmm, maybe there would be space in here for a darkroom.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Smith is a professional choral and orchestral conductor and an amateur photographer and linguist. His photographic interests are in analog medium and large formats. Born and raised in the USA, he has lived as a dual-national in Switzerland for 40 years.
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Paul McCarthy
August 14, 2024 at 16:14
Nick is someone I follow, his work is brilliant and he is a nice human!