Last summer, I jumped on the digital bandwagon and purchased a DSLR. So far, I enjoy the *utter* clarity of it immensely. (My 105 micro has never made such sharp photos and I had never seen chromatic aberration until I started using it.)
It took me a couple of months until I had the color profiling down for daylight balanced images. I started off using the default import settings in Photoshop and Lightroom, but the general flatness of the images turned me off. I’ve been using Fujichrome Velvia regularly for around 18-19 years, and I’m pretty well addicted to the relatively high local contrast and saturation that it offers. I’ve always loved how Velvia could really bring out the natural color contrast in a subject that looked virtually neutral.
After many, many (casual) test frames, both digital and chemical, I finally got the DSLR to where my default settings in Lightroom would give me results similar to Velvia when making images under daylight conditions (with a color temperature somewhere around 5000K). However, artificial light is a different story.
The two images included in this post were made over a year apart, which explains the difference in perspective (and the difference in the geometry of the doorway). Otherwise, they were made from the same location, at night, under the same lighting conditions. The orange-gold light is from an incandescent light, in the other room, with the brightness turned down as far as it will go and the blue light is from the blue screen of a TV behind the camera. The film version, on the left, renders the scene pretty close to how it appears, but emphasizes the gold of the incandescent light. The digital frame is a Disney-fied version of the scene (arghh!). It looks as if I used colored gels over strobe to light the different areas of the image. (The door frame is white and the walls are a very pale beige so they have very little effect on the color balance of the scene.)
The digital frame seems like it might be a more technically accurate blending of the lights. Colorwise, the door frame shows orange and blue mixing to create a magenta-ish mixture. The blue in the shadows is incredibly intense due to the dark values and purity of the light in those areas, but that probably will never print with that sort of intensity. The clarity is exceptional, but it almost looks as if it was rendered in Maya.
I’ve really taken for granted the subtlety of Velvia’s rendering of artificial light. To me, there’s a gracefulness to its color that doesn’t shout at the viewer. You know it’s not natural color, but it’s not cartoonish either (again, to me).
Over time, I might be able to create different groups of settings in Lightroom that allow me to adjust the image based on the main light source that it was shot under, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I prefer to just let the medium interpret the scene however it’s going to do it, and if it works, fine. For the time being, I reckon that I’ll stick with film when photographing under blended light sources.
This
