Just before Thanksgiving, I posted a picture taken a few years ago in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood with a Pentax P3, a film camera that suffered a terminal failure a few rolls of film later (an issue with the film advance mechanism like most of the P3s, of course). The lens – the Pentax A 35-70 f/3.5-4.5 – was so bad I got rid of it (my copy was faulty – the lens has a decent reputation otherwise). The image was not that great either but was made more interesting in post-processing with Lightroom, and in a few weeks, it has become my most appreciated image of the year in Flickr.
I even received a request to use it from a pro-bicycle user group…. Go figure.
I’ve been traveling recently, and will be on the road again during the holiday season. I’m not forgetting this blog, in fact I’m harvesting more images for later use, but it’s very likely that this post will be the last one before Christmas.
Happy Holidays to you and to your families.
Atlanta Little Five Points. Pentax P3/P30 – Pentax A 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 – the wall has been repainted since, and is far less interesting…
Trying to save a compromised image in Lightroom.
More of the same series….Same camera, same lens, same roll of film.
Another image from the same roll of film – Atlanta, Inman Park.
Ford Bronco II – Inman Park Neighborhood, Atlanta.
Flickr is a 20 year old photo hosting and sharing on-line service, functioning as a community for photographers. It is the home to approximately 110 million photographers, 55 million of them being regular users. I had been a Flickr early adopter back in the days, but had let my account go stale a long time ago (I felt that Flickr had lost their way after being acquired by a succession of poor suitors). The current owner of Flickr seems to have done a decent job at making it relevant again. I opened a new account in February and have been posting one or two images a day since then.
In the world of social media, Flickr is different:
Although Flickr offers free accounts, it only lets you post a maximum of 1,000 images for free, and I assume that most serious users pay for the so-called “Pro” subscription. The “Pro” subscribers are spared the ads that the “free” users have to endure.
Flickr offers very little for photographers who would like to directly monetize their images (or anything else for that matter) – Pro subscribers can include links to external (commercial) websites in the description of their images (the URL of their own storefront, for instance) but to a large extend Flickr is a commerce-free zone.
Lastly, even if there is a curated “Explore feed” (a gallery of photos which is regularly refreshed by an algorithm), Flickr subscribers are directed by default to their own “Activity feed”. The images which are proposed to you every day in your “activity feed” come exclusively from photographers you follow and groups you have subscribed to. As a Flickr user, you don’t feel you’re a captive audience; you have much more control on what reaches your “feed” than the average Facebook or Instagram user.
Financed to a large extent by the subscriptions of its “Pro” members, offering very few opportunities of monetization, and only marginally driven by algorithms, Flickr is a bad place for marketers, influencers, advertisers and click-bait hunters, which is pretty refreshing in the world of social media today.
I did not have a tele-photo lens I could mount on my Fujifilm mirrorless camera, so I brought an old Tamron Adaptall lens back in service, and mounted it on a Nikon D700. My highest view count on Flickr.US Grand Prix 2022, Austin, TX
How is Flickr measuring your audience: views and favorites
As a member of Flickr, you can not only look at the pictures posted by fellow photographers, but you are encouraged to also submit your own. Your contributions will be added to the “activity feed” of your followers, and, if you have submitted your image to a “group”, to the “activity feed” of all the members of that group. If they’re active on Flickr that day, there is a chance they will “view” the image you’ve posted.
Flickr do not encourage competition and won’t publish an official ranking of photographers, but, as a “Pro” member of Flickr, you are offered some statistics about your own audience, over a specific day, over a week, a month, or over the life of your account.
Flickr – the daily stats – here, the views
“Views” are a very flattering metric – is counted as a “view” any download of a specific image, irrespective of the time spent looking at it by the “viewer”.
Whether the image is closely examined by a fellow photographer interested in your creation process, or just browsed in one tenth of a second by a distracted scroller does not matter – “Views” are simply a reflection of the number of file downloads to the browser or the app of all end users.
The size of the image is not taken into consideration either: a thumbnail included in an email sent by Flickr to a distribution list will also count as a “View”, as long as the email has been opened.
In such an environment, a photographer with a large number of active followers will necessarily get more “Views” than another one with a smaller (or less engaged) follower population. And an image submitted to a multitude of groups will also have more chances to be “viewed” (that’s where an algorithm kicks in to prevent photographers from gaming the system by submitting a picture to hundreds of groups).
Flickr – the images with the most views
“Favorites”, on the other hand, counts the number of “Likes” a picture receives – it’s a humbling figure – an image can be viewed thousands of times (if submitted in enough active groups by a popular photographer), but only collect a few likes, or none at all.
I take pictures for pleasure, but I’m nonetheless interested in the feed-back of my peers – being able to see what clicks and what does not is one of the reasons to join a photographer community such as Flickr.
What makes an image “popular”? The subject and the groups to which the image is submitted are important, obviously, but does the equipment itself play a role? In other words, will my fellow photographers favor pictures taken with modern or expensive cameras, considering that they don’t know upfront what type of equipment was used? Is there a camera or a class of cameras that will harvest the most views and the most likes?
Ranked #1 in “Favorites” (tied with three other pictures) – Pinup, a French Bulldog Photo taken in 2005 with a Pentax *ist DS and its 18-55 kit lens.
Ranking by Views
I like to shoot with a bit of everything (like old cameras I buy on eBay or Shopgoodwill), but I have always had a recent “serious camera” for the important occasions, currently it’s a Fujifilm X-T4. Before the X-T4, I was shooting with a X-T1, and before that with a Nikon D80, which had replaced a Pentax *ist DS. I also shoot with a Nikon D700 from time to time (when I want to play with old Nikkor lenses), and with film cameras when I feel like it.
Now, the rankings…
Ranking by Views – the camera used to take my 10 most viewed pictures:
Image #1: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #2: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #3: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #4: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #5: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #6: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #7: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #8: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #9: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #10: shot with a Nikon D80
Surprising – it makes you wonder if I really needed to spend all that money upgrading to Fujifilm mirrorless cameras and lenses…
Views are a function of your number of followers, and to a certain extent to the groups you publish the picture to. If you publish an image to the “Nikon D700” or “Nikon D80″ group, you will reach more committed enthusiasts ready to look at images taken with the camera they love, than if you publish it to…”Industrial ruins of the Rust Belt” – and the view count will reflect that. Of course the subject matters – I had brought the D700 to a Formula One Grand Prix and to a trip to Istanbul, and I had spent a few weeks in Venice and Marrakech with the D80 – a glamorous sport and three exceptional cities are definitely attracting lots of viewers.
Ranked #1 (it was a tie) for favorites, and #3 for views – Venice, on Dec 25th 2010 – Shot with a Nikon D80 and a Sigma 18-125 lens.
Ranking by “Favorite” (top 10)
But the ranking of the number of “Favorites” shows a different … picture.
Images with the most favorites:
Tied for Rank #1, Image #1: shot with a Pentax *ist DS, Image #2: shot with a Nikon D80, Image #3: shot with a Nikon FE2 on color Film and Image #4: shot with a Holga on color film
then, tied for Rank #5, an image taken with a Canon Photura loaded with Ilford B&W film, another taken with an iPhone 15 Pro, an image shot with the Fujifilm X-T1, another by a Pentax K5 Mk2, a snapshot from a Nikon F3 loaded with B&W film, and last but not least a picture taken with the Fujifilm X-T4. All get the same number of “favorites”.
Film or digital, Nikon, Pentax or Fujifilm, recent or old, none of this seems to matter. A picture taken with a “Holga” ranks #1, while a photo taken by a very good “modern” dSLR (a Nikon D750 that I used for a few weeks) is #27. And the Nikon D700, which attracted so many viewers, could only convince very few of them to tag its images as “favorites” (its most favored image ranks at #63).
In a way, it is comforting. At least for an amateur photographer like me, gear does not matter that much. Or let’s say, the absolute performance of the camera – as measured in tests and discussed ad nauseam on Youtube or in specialized forums – is not that important.
I like it, but it ranked low in views and likes – Petra, Jordan – June 2018 – Fujifilm X-T1
If the camera does not really matter as far as the Flickr Views and Favorites are concerned, what does?
The subject? The user base of Flickr and the groups are so diverse that there is no specific subject that automatically brings views or favorites, like the videos of kittens on other social media platforms. No magic bullet to expect here.
Technically, and to a certain extent, the views and the favorites are dependent on how many people are scrolling their activity feed that day – you can have a superb picture and not garner many views or favorites, and because you’ve posted it on a slow day, or at the wrong time of day, or in groups with low or inconsistent attendance, it won’t have the viewers it deserves. You only learn with experience.
But then, assuming experienced Flickr users all have their personal little tricks to optimize their audience, what really makes the difference?
If you look at Flickr’s “Explore feed” and at what the photographers you follow are regularly posting in your “Activity Feed”, there are some really stunning images. Not necessarily perfect, technically. But different. Original, reflecting the vision and the personality of the photographer who created them. They make you stop, look at them, and say “wow!”
Invariably, these stunning images get lots of “Views” and lots of “Favorites”.
Because ultimately, it’s the eye and the heart of the photographer that make the difference.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Pictures taken with a modern camera get some love, too. Tied for #5 on the favorites ranking, this picture taken in Piedmont Park, Atlanta with a Fujifilm X-T4 and a 55-230mm lens.
A few weeks ago I tested a Pentax *ist DS, and I was not thrilled with the experience. Another *ist DS had been my first dSLR in 2005, and at the time, I had been pretty satisfied with my purchase. But if I was disappointed by the *ist, what would I think of its predecessor in my equipment bag, a 4 Megapixel Canon digital point and shoot camera, if I tried to use it now?
Canon Powershot S400 – the finish is impeccable and resisted the test of time
I finally located my old Powershot S400 last week. The camera was in a very good shape, but the battery was definitely dead. It was to be expected – it was a 22 years old item, and it had probably not been recharged since 2010. I ordered a new compatible one on Amazon, and just received it. Under its newfound power, the camera started immediately, ready for new adventures.
Back then
The Canon PowerShot S400 Digital Elph (sold in Europe as the Ixus 400), was launched at the beginning of 2003. The review DPReview published in April of that year was very positive (with a “Highly recommended” rating) and I followed DPR’s advice and bought one for Christmas 2003. At $500, it was as expensive as a middle of the range film SLR, but offered a convenience that a film camera could not beat.
Shot in Miami Beach in 2004 – Canon Powershot S400 – it almost looks like the stage of a movie – where are Barbie and Ken?
With a ceramic coated metal body, a 36-108 (full frame equivalent) zoom opening at f/2.8, an optical viewfinder and a 1.5in color display, it was very well spec’d. It captured images with a four megapixel 1/1.8in CCD sensor (and produced only JPEGs, not RAW files), that it stored on a CF card. Very compact, beautifully built and finished, and delivering best in class pictures, it was flying off the shelves.
There are approximately 350 pictures shot with the S400 in my Lightroom library (in the early days of digital, we were still remembering the cost of film processing and we were shooting with restraint) – and I’m still impressed by how nice some of them looked.
Canon Powershot S400 ready to shoot – the Coca-Cola can is one of the “mini” 7.5 FL OZ cans – the camera is really compact.
We never took the conscious decision to “decommission” the S400, we just used it less and less (as our phones were getting better at taking pictures with every new version) and we finally forgot about it. The last time we moved, I had packed it under bubble wrap with a much larger film camera, and found it by chance while de-cluttering a closet a few days ago.
Rediscovering the Powershot S400
What’s immediately surprising with this camera is the quality of the finish – it looks like a luxury object – and its small size, it’s not really bigger than a pack of cigarettes. One of the selling points back in the days was the “Cerabrite” coating of its metal body, and the truth is that it shows no scratch and no stain.
Atlanta Aquarium – Canon Powershot S400 (summer 2008)
Contrarily to more modern cameras, there is a physical switch on the back of the S400 to set it in “shooting” mode (the other position is for image playback), in addition to the traditional on-off button. But apart from that, the camera’s commands are more or less identical to what we would find today in an entry level camera. There is also an optical viewfinder, but I surprised myself by framing most of the pictures on the small color display at the back of the camera – it’s smaller than the display of a smart watch but it’s responsive and its resolution is pretty high (relative to its diminutive size), and it’s good enough as long as the sun is not too bright.
Miata is always the answer… the interior of this MX-5 was fairly cramped – not enough room to store a dSLR – and the Powershot saw service as the onboard camera for the trips to the beach
The default sensitivity is 50 ISO, and it can peak at 200 ISO, at the cost of some noise, of course.
It’s a camera designed by photographers for photographers, who can chose between three metering modes (spot, average and matrix), and can memorize the focus or the exposure with AE and AF lock capabilities for situations when the automatism can not be trusted. A very limited movie mode has been implemented (at best, 320×240 pts at 15 frames per second for 3 minutes).
Canon Powershot S400 – the rear display is quite small but very legible.
Contrarily to what we find on current point and shoot camera, there is no image stabilization, no scene mode and of course no subject or face recognition. Let’s not forget that this camera was launched in 2003.
Image quality
Many photographers are nostalgic of the look of pictures shot by early digital cameras – they don’t like the surgical precision of the images taken with today’s high resolution CMOS sensors, and prefer images captured by the relatively low-res CCD sensors found in the compact cameras of the first decade of the 21st century.
Self portrait. Summer 2007.
I’m not sure that CCDs on their own were so great (the *ist DS also had a CCD sensor and did not deliver images that nice out of the box). A lot must have been related to the settings of the image processing engine. And to Canon’s magic touch.
And today?
This camera is surprising. Shooting JPEGs at 50 ISO with a 4 Megapixel camera launched in 2003 would have seemed like a punishment. But the Powershot S400 is surprisingly pleasant to use – it’s very reactive, and leaves some control to the photographer (simply press the shutter release button half way to memorize the exposure). I suspected that the dynamic range would be very limited, and it is, but if you set the exposure on the highlights, high contrast images can be saved in an image editing application like Lightroom.
Atlanta – Halloween decorations – Canon Powershot S400. (Oct 2025)
DPReview testers had been impressed in 2003 by the quality of the JPEGs (not excessively sharpened, and preserving a lot of details), and even in 2025 you can’t help being pleasantly surprised – I took a series of pictures of the Halloween decorations in my neighborhood without paying too much attention to the settings of the camera (shooting with the sensitivity set to 50 ISO was probably a bit over optimistic, it forced the camera to operate at relatively low shutter speeds and wide aperture) – but the images required little work in Lightroom to be good enough to be shared here.
Testing the dynamic range – if you set the exposure on the back-lit flag, you can somehow save some details in the shadows in post-processing.
As a conclusion
Two things are very clear regarding this Powershot S400 Digital Elph:
Canon was obviously intending on solidifying its position as the market leader in an early digital photography world, and had spared no effort to be the top dog. They had put all their considerable know-how in designing and manufacturing a camera which was impressively good at delivering pictures, solidly built and esthetically beautiful.
When I look today at pictures taken during the same period with other digital cameras (even early dSLRs), I can’t help being impressed by the Digital Elph’s JPEGs: color balance, control of highlights, skin tones – they had nailed it – no need to shoot RAW and spend hours fixing imperfections on Photoshop – the images were great out of the camera.
The S400 is only a 4 Megapixel camera, best used at 50 ISO (flash mandatory inside, and even outside under overcast weather). A recent smartphone will outperform it (but it would also outperform any recent point and shoot camera, except maybe in the long telephoto range). This Canon Powershot S400 is a small and beautiful object that can still take good pictures, and as a whole, it definitely shoots far above its weight. Old, beautiful, and still usable.
Atlanta – Halloween decorations – Canon Powershot S400. (Oct 2025)
Atlanta – Halloween decorations – Canon Powershot S400. (Oct 2025)
Atlanta – Halloween decorations – Canon Powershot S400. (Oct 2025)
Atlanta – Halloween decorations – Canon Powershot S400. (Oct 2025)
Why use a digital compact camera (aka point and shoot) when traveling, rather than a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (ILC) or a smartphone?
I can see two reasons:
a better size-reach combination – only a point and shoot like this Sony HX-60 can offer a 720mm full-frame equivalent focal length at the long end and still be pocketable;
a unique size-ruggedness combination – only a rugged compact point and shoot like an Olympus Tough TG can be carried around all the time, without fear of dust, sand, water. If it gets drowned, crushed or falls in a crevasse, it’s not so much of a big deal. You don’t need it to authenticate to your employer’s VPN, and you don’t store your electronic plane tickets on it. And if you have to replace it, a similar camera will only cost you a fraction of the cost of an ILC or a smartphone on the second hand market.
The 30x zoom has no equivalent in APS-C or full frame camera systems
Conventional, long zoom (non-rugged) point and shoot sometimes have relatively large sensors (up to 1in) and a well designed telescopic lens; they offer an impressive image quality, but their motorized telescopic zooms with their retracting lens cap won’t take sand, rain or a fall to the floor lightly.
On long zoom compact cameras, the lens is protected by a group of retracting blades. You don’t want a grain of sand or a few drops of water to make a mess of it.
What constraints Image Quality on the Olympus TG-5?
High level, the Olympus TG-5 and its close derivatives the TG-6 and TG-7 deliver a pretty good Image Quality (IQ) for rugged cameras, but are limited by the small size and resolution of their sensor (1/2.3in and 12 Megapixel respectively), and the design and implementation of the lens, a folding internal optic.
That being said, if you’re intended to extract the maximum image quality from the TG-5, it’s important to understand how the camera controls the exposure parameters, and aperture in particular.
On the Olympus TG, the lens is hidden behind this blade of glass (a decorative bezel normally hides the bayonet over which accessories can be mounted)
Very few compact cameras (and it was also true at the time of film) use a conventional iris for a linear control of the aperture, with the well known sequence of stops (f/2.0; f/2.8; f/4, f/5.6, f/8, … and so on). In a typical compact camera, aperture control is often performed by the shutter. This design comes with its own set of limitations: only a few aperture values can be selected, and they’re not available with all shutter speeds.
On the TG-5, the maximum aperture of the 25-100mm zoom (full frame equivalent) varies between 2.0 at the widest angle and f/4.9 at the longest focal length (it’s a sliding aperture lens). In order to limit diffraction, the camera only offers two “real” aperture settings (f/2.0 and f/2.8 at 25mm), with higher values (up to f/8 at 25mm) being simply simulated by a Neutral Density (ND) filter. Therefore, image quality will peak at f/2.8, and stopping down beyond won’t improve it (IQ could even be marginally worse because of the ND filter) .
The lens, now protected by the UV filter and the lens hood.
If you decide like me to travel with a Olympus Tough TG-5 (or TG-6 or 7), how to extract the best Image Quality from the camera?
IQ is all relative. If pictures are to be viewed on a social media app installed on a smartphone, the TG-5’s Image Quality is more than adequate. Color balance, exposure, focus, dynamic range are spot-on. Images uploaded to social networks are generally downsampled to a resolution of 3 to 4 million points, a far cry from the 12 Mpix of the Olympus sensor, and not enough to start making the performance limitations of the lens and the heavy hand of the JPEG rendering engine noticeable.
But if the final destination of your image is a 8x11in print, or an 8k monitor, the weaknesses of the lens and the aggressiveness of the sharpening algorithm will become visible, unless you follow a series of steps to ensure the camera always delivers its best.
Olympus Tough TG-5 – how to get the highest quality images:
The Tough TGs are all available in black and in red. TG-4 on the left, TG-5 on the right (with a JJC UV filter mounted on the accessory adapter).
Read the manual – The Olympus TG-5 may be a point and shoot, but it’s a highly configurable, and therefore relatively complex camera. Settings are dispersed across multiple menus, and navigating them is unfortunately less than intuitive. In your quest for the best IQ, you’ll have to understand how to save your images as RAW files, how exposure memorization and correction work and after the picture has been shot, how to review and adjust some of the technical parameters. So, read the manual.
If you don’t want to read the dreaded user manual (who does?), ask precise questions to your favorite AI chat application. AI is getting very good at answering questions about cameras and photography, most of the time. ChatGPT 5, for example, combines the information and the test results it gets from DPR, Imaging Resource and Photographyblog with customer feedback collected on forums to provide detailed and mostly exact answers.
Shoot RAW. If you’re really interested in maximizing IQ, it’s definitely much better to shoot RAW and fine tune Clarity, Dehaze and Sharpening in a dedicated image editing app.
Use the sensor where it’s at its best, at 100 ISO, taking advantage of Olympus’ image stabilization capabilities to operate at low shutter speeds.
ChatGPT 5 recommends shooting in A mode (Aperture Priority) and selecting an aperture of one stop above full aperture (that would be f/2.8 at 25mm, which slides to f/6.3 at 100mm) for best performance. That’s the aperture where the lens is the best, but in A mode you are in charge and have to keep an eye on everything (on the shutter speed in particular).
In the real world, the Program P mode does more or less the same job as the A mode – at 100 ISO, for instance, the program sets the aperture at f/2.0 as long as the shutter speed has not reached 1/100s, then steps up to f/2.8 and remains there if possible.
The camera comes with a long list of scene modes – the Scenery/ Landscape scene works well with static subjects when traveling, and I use it often – and it appears to keep the aperture at f/2.8 as much as possible. There are other interesting scene modes – use them if they get you the result you want. Just be aware that Scene modes don’t let you chose the sensitivity or correct the exposure values.
Finally, the obvious – protect the lens from fingers prints and smudges with an easy to clean UV filter, and from incident light with a lens hood.
Of course, you can’t always work with low shutter speeds at 100 ISO. If your idea of a good vacation is to visit ball parks around the country and shoot the players in action at dusk, maybe the TG-5 is not the camera you need.
Why you should shoot RAW with the Olympus TG-5: an example.
Calvi, Pointe de la Revellata – enlarged section of a JPEG (straight out of the camera) – screenshot taken on Adobe Lightroom Classic
Calvi, Pointe de la Revellata – enlarged section of a RAW file, (moderately adjusted in Adobe Lightroom Classic).
The TG-5 can be setup to save an image as a RAW file and as a JPEG simultaneously. The images shown above are two screenshots of “La Pointe de la Revellata” in the bay of Calvi, Corsica, taken while editing in Lightroom Classic.
WordPress is downsampling the images massively, but click on each picture and you will see the screenshots at full resolution. And you will really see a difference between the JPEG and the ORF file. The JPEG (the first of the two) shows a much more pronounced accentuation, which translates into an almost cubist representation of the mountain in the backgroud. The RAW file, below, is more subdued. The full image (exported from RAW) is shown at the end of this blog post.
Will all the Olympus Tough TG cameras offer the same Image Quality?
In the heyday of compact digital cameras, Olympus was proposing three different lines of Tough cameras, with multiple variants in each line. This blog entry only covers the “one digit” Tough TGs, and specifically the TG-5 and its close derivatives, the TG-6 and the TG-7.
I don’t think there is much of a difference between the TG-5, TG-6 and TG-7 – mainly progressive improvements on the video capture side (the photo section is identical). The TG-3 and TG-4 have a different sensor (16 Mpix, with a lower dynamic range and more noise), but only the TG-4 can save RAW files. And all models before the TG-5 have an Olympus proprietary USB port, which will force you to carry around an easy to lose proprietary USB cord to recharge the battery of the camera. To me, a used TG-5 is a very good compromise – they abound on the second hand market (eBay, Shopgoodwill) and can be found for less than $200.00.
As a conclusion
A camera is always a compromise between conflicting design goals, and a compact, rugged, water-resistant point and shoot camera can’t be expected to beat a 60 mpix full frame ILC when it comes to image quality.
From an IQ point of view, the TG-5 is probably the rugged compact camera with the highest potential, and if the photographer shoots RAW and pays attention to the exposure parameters (exposure modes, aperture, ISO), the output will reach a much higher level than what could be expected from a compact camera with such a small sensor.
All pictures of Calvi shot last summer with an Olympus TG-5 set at 100 ISO – and saved as RAW files – Clarity, Dehaze and Sharpening applied with moderation in Adobe Lightroom.
Calvi (Corsica) Pointe de la Revellata – Olympus TG-5 Calvi, Corsica – from Notre Dame de la Serra. Calvi, Corsica. The flag of the region at the city hall. Calvi, la citadelle (and two exhausted tourists)Calvi (Corsica). “Chez Tao” is a famous piano bar, where music lovers and night owls congregate.
We’ve already discussed in those pages the complexity of the range of the Adobe Lightroom products, and the fact that some versions of Lightroom are only available in the Apple and Google app stores, while others are to be procured directly on Adobe’s Web store.
In the mobile app stores, there is a free version of Lightroom Mobile which does not offer much more than what the native (and very good) photo apps that Apple and Google propose. If you’re serious about cataloging and photo-editing, you’ll have to subscribe to “Photoshop Lightroom Mobile with Premium Features” for $49.99 (one year, pre-paid) in Apple’s or Google’s mobile app stores. It gives you access to an enhanced set of features on the phone, tablet and web browser versions of Adobe Lightroom, as well as an allocation of 100 GB of storage in Adobe’s Creative Cloud (Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom Web keep a few Gigabytes worth of picture replicas in a local cache, but the full size original pictures are stored in the Adobe Cloud, and the application can’t operate if the cloud storage is full).
Lightroom Mobile on the iPhone – “please start deleting unneeded items” – not much of an upgrade path if you believe the message on this iPhone. Wrong. There is an upgrade path. But not in the Apple App Store.
If you reach the limit and need more storage (I reached the ceiling with approximately 15,000 pictures), there is no way to only buy more storage capacity from Apple, Google or Adobe. To get more storage space in the Adobe Creative Cloud, you have to subscribe to an Adobe Lightroom or Photography Plan directly on Adobe’s online store, and there is no refund for what’s left of your subscription in the app stores of Apple and Google. Ideally you should wait until you get very close to the expiration date of the mobile subscription before you switch to Adobe’s.
It looks bad enough on paper. How is it in the real life?
Lightroom for Web – same Mobile Premium subscription as above, but here Adobe lets you know that there is an “upgrade” option. It brings you to Adobe’s store where you can only subscribe to Adobe’s Lightroom or Photography Plans.
Upgrading from a mobile version of Lightroom
The upgrade is seamless. If you use Lightroom Mobile, you already have an Adobe ID (distinct from your Apple or Google app store IDs). Simply connect to the Adobe store, sign in with your Adobe ID, pick the photography plan you need, flash your credit card (it’s costing $119.99 if you pre-pay one year in advance), and you’re done. There is nothing to reinstall, nothing to configure. Within a few seconds, you will see your storage limit raised by an increment of 1TB in your mobile or Web apps.
The Mobile Premium subscription was just upgraded to the Adobe Lightroom plan. There are still a few weeks left in Apple’s Lightroom Mobile Premium annual subscription and the total cloud storage subscribed is 1.1 TB (100 GB from Mobile Premium, 1TB from the Lightroom Plan).
The upgrade to a Lightroom Plan also gives you an entitlement to two extra laptop/desktop versions of Lightroom, “Lightroom” (a thin client version of Lightroom formerly known as Lightroom CC), and “Lightroom Classic”, the current iteration of the “fat client” Lightroom application that Adobe has been selling since 2007. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic can both be installed on the same Windows or MacOS machine, and will take advantage of Adobe’s Creative Cloud to keep their respective libraries in sync.
“Lightroom” (represented in the dock of a Mac by the “Lr” icon) is similar in principle to Lightroom Mobile or Web, except it doesn’t run from an App or a Web browser, but from a local client installed on your machine. Its library of images is stored in Adobe’s Creative Cloud, not on local storage, but it benefits from more local image caching options, including the ability to replicate folders and albums locally, in which case it operates even without an Internet connection.
LR Classic (represented by the “LrC” icon) is the successor of Lightroom 6. It’s a large (fat-client) application installed on the local disk of a Windows or MacOS machine, which relies on local storage (directly attached or network attached drives) to store as many Lightroom libraries as needed. The storage is under the photographer’s responsibility, who has to manage, backup and protect what could amount to terabytes of data.
In summary, Lightroom Mobile (with Premium features) and Lightroom Web are products relying primarily on cloud storage, with limited local caching capabilities. Lightroom is also primarily relying on cloud storage, but has more manageable replication capabilities. Lightroom Classic, on the other hand, is designed as a stand alone product relying on local storage, which can, on demand, keep folders and albums in sync with the Adobe Creative Cloud – so that they can also be accessed from mobile devices.
One consequence is that you may have up to three versions of the same Lightroom album on a PC or a Mac: one created in Lightroom’s local cache, one in Lightroom’s local replica, and one in a Lightroom Classic library.
Lightroom Classic (on the left) and Lightroom (thin client) running here simultaneously on the same Mac. Lightroom Classic works with a local library, Lightroom from images stored in the Adobe Creative Cloud.
A surprise: the images don’t look the same when you are editingthem in Lightroom Web and Lightroom Classic
All versions of Lightroom always preserve the original image uploaded by the photographer, and the edits are saved as instructions (metadata) in some sort of log. When time comes to export the final image as a JPEG or a TIFF file or to print it, Lightroom starts from the original image at its full resolution and re-applies the changes and transformations described in its log.
However, Lightroom Mobile, Web and PC/Mac are primarily cloud based products, and – by default – only keep a small subset of the photographer’s library in a local cache, where “smart-previews” are stored at a reduced resolution (up to 2640 points on the longest edge). You can force the system to download a full size version of the image, but if you don’t, the edits will be performed on a “smart-preview” at the reduced resolution. Lightroom Classic, on the other hand, relies on local storage (and is not bandwidth constrained) and always shows you the image at full resolution.
Calvi (Corsica) Pointe de la Revellata – Olympus TG-5 – the image looks great on Lightroom for Web (2640 pts on the longest edge for the smart-preview), but at full resolution in Lightroom Classic, it does not seem that sharp anymore.
You don’t really see the difference between a smart-preview and the full resolution of an image on a smartphone or even a tablet (the screen is too small), but when you start using Lightroom Classic on a PC or a Mac where you only had used Lightroom Web before, the difference can be striking – an image that looked sharp enough as a smart preview on Lightroom Web may suddenly look much too soft when shown at full resolution by Lightroom Classic on a 8k monitor.
Not really a surprise … but
The smartphone and tablet versions of Lightroom have more or less similar capabilities, and they’re not very different from Lightroom Web. Lightroom (the laptop/desktop thing client) sits somewhere between Lightroom Web and Lightroom Classic.
Its feature set is close to the mobile and Web versions, but, being written for desktop and laptops machines, its UI is menu driven and more similar to Classic. Its photo-editing capabilities are more elaborate than Mobile or Web, and because PCs and Macs generally support larger monitors than tablets, the images can be shown at a higher resolution.
Lightroom Classic is also menu driven, but is a totally different animal altogether. As mentioned above, it stores everything in local libraries (catalogs in Adobe parlance), and can, if requested, sync its local libraries with the Creative Cloud, one at a time or as a group. But it’s a partial, asynchronous replication, that the photographer has to manage. Classic also offers features which are completely missing on the other versions of Lightroom, like the ability to run all sorts of plug-ins, interface with Google Maps, or create photo-albums and slideshows.
Troyes, France – the cathedral – iPhone 15 Pro – edited in Lightroom
Is the upgrade to an Adobe Lightroom plan worth it?
if you need more than 100 GB of cloud storage, and want to keep on using Lightroom for Mobile, you don’t really have a choice. If you don’t plan on using Lightroom on a PC or a Mac, you end up paying an extra $70/year for 900 extra gigabytes of storage. Not exactly a bargain.
if you have a desktop or a laptop, you get everything you had bought for $49/year in the mobile App Store (phone, tablet and web apps, with 100 GB storage), plus Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, plus 900 GB of extra storage, for “only” $70 more per year. A much better deal.
whether you install Lightroom Classic on your PC or not is another story – it’s a complex product, and the integration with the rest of the Adobe Lightroom family not that straightforward.
but Lightroom (for PC or Mac) is very pleasant to use, fully integrated with Creative Cloud, and a perfect companion for the Mobile versions of Lightroom. I strongly recommend you use it.
Lastly, once you’re in the Adobe world, you are not limited to 1TB of Creative Cloud storage. You can further increase your allocation up to 10 TB by increments of a few terabytes at a cost of approximately $10.00 /Terabyte/month.
The ideal use case – the one that will maximize the benefits of an Adobe Lightroom or Photography Plan – is that of photographers who need to store huge volumes of pictures in multiple libraries (catalogs) in their home or office IT infrastructure, but want at the same time the ability to work with a limited subset of their images while traveling – adding or editing pictures from a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop. They will take advantage of all the versions of Lightroom, and of the synchronization capabilities between them that Creative Cloud brings.
Troyes, France – the center of the city has been totally restored recently. Worth a visit.
If you don’t need or don’t want to manage multiple local photo libraries, you can still rely primarily on Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom for PC or Mac, that work very well together, and only fire up Lightroom Classic occasionally to use a specific plug-in or create a photo-album.
One last word: Adobe photography plans are available through subscriptions, that bundle multiple products and services. The content and price of those subscriptions have been known to change frequently over the recent years. I believe that my description of the bundles and the cost of the subscriptions are accurate when I write these lines at the end of September 2025. But it may change without notice in a few months, and will most probably be different in the years to come. If you’re considering spending your hard earned money on Lightroom, do your due diligence before committing to a one year plan.
The price of a digital camera on the second hand market is more or less proportional to the number of pixels of its image sensor – interchangeable lens cameras (dSLRs and mirrorless) with anything between 24 and 50 Megapixel (Mpix) sensors are considered current and command big bucks, while models with less than 10 Mpix are deemed virtually worthless.
Case in point – I bought a Pentax *ist DS (a 6 Mpix dSLR from 2004), a bit scruffy but in working order, for less then $35.00.
For comparison – same lens, same ISO settings, same hour of the day – Pentax K-5 – minor adjustments in Lightroom. Click on the image to see it at full resolution – you will see the difference.
Why the Pentax *ist DS back then?
At the turn of the century, the photography market was different from what it was to become a few years later – there were only four companies in the world selling digital SLRs (Canon, Fuji, Kodak and Nikon). And those cameras were very expensive, and primarily bought by news agencies and well heeled pros.
2002 saw a first wave of more affordable digital SLRs reach the market (Canon, Fuji and Nikon all launched models in the $2000 price range). Pentax and Olympus joined the fray in 2003 with the *ist D and the E-1. At the end of 2003 Canon made digital SLRs affordable for amateurs with the Rebel 300D, the first dSLR to sell for less than $1000.00.
Nikon and Pentax followed rapidly with two models priced around $1000, the D70 and the *ist DS. Like millions of amateurs, I was looking for my first digital SLR in those days, and the *ist DS was my pick. Its specs were not that different from the D70 or the Rebel. What made the difference for me was its small size, its large viewfinder, and the good reviews of its kit lens.
Of course, I sold it after a few years to upgrade to a 10 Mpix camera, which itself was sold a few years later to fund the next upgrade, and so on.
Family Reunion – the *ist DS (left) looks serious in black, the K-r (right) was available in fancy colors.
Why a *ist DS now?
A few months ago, I bought a colorful Pentax K-r (a 12 Mpix camera from 2010) and was surprised by the quality of the RAW files it delivered. You pay a bit more for the colored body of a K-r, but all white and all black models can be found for less than $100.00. In my recollections, the *ist DS was a good little camera, and I was wondering what it would be like to shoot with a 6 MPIX dSLR now. I started checking the usual auction sites, and $34.00 made me the proud new owner of another Pentax camera.
Pentax *ist DS – Pentax 18-55 Kit Lens – Vinings Jubilee (Atlanta) – adjusted to taste in Lightroom
For comparison – same lens, same ISO settings, same hour of the day – Pentax K-5 – minor adjustments in Lightroom. Click on the image to see it at full resolution – you will see the difference.
First impressions
I had shot a few thousand of pictures with my *ist DS in the early 2000s, so this “new” *ist DS is not really a total unknown for me.
What struck me immediately when I received my $35.00 *ist DS is how similar it looked to the K-r; as if Pentax had kept the same moulds over the 7 years that separate the two cameras. The *ist DS is smaller than Nikon’s mid-range APS-C of the same vintage, but the general organization of the commands is strikingly similar to what current Pentax and Nikon APS-C dSLRs look like – to a large extent the dSLR camera had already found its final form in 2004.
Pentax *ist DS (left) and Pentax K-5 (right) – the layout of the commands is very similar – the most striking difference is the rear LCD display – a huge progress in the space of a few years.
Visually, the biggest difference is the rear LCD display – the DS’ is very small (2in diagonal, some smart-watches have larger displays), and its dynamic range very limited.
Pentax *ist DS – this picture was in the performance envelope of the camera.
My $34.00 camera is old, and definitely not in tip-top shape (the mode selector is stuck in the Auto-Pict position, the integrated pop-up flash seems to be dead), but it still works well enough to get an opinion about this generation of 6 Mpix cameras.
Back in 2005, DPReview was very happy with the responsiveness of the camera, but concerned with the quality of its JPEGs. Today, the standards are different, but the responsiveness is still OKay-ish – when there is enough light for the autofocus to operate – otherwise it hunts desperately.
As for the image quality, even in RAW, it’s often disappointing.
Pentax *ist DS – even in Lightroom and starting from RAW, I could not get the sky, the church and flower bed to be exposed correctly at the same time.
Pentax *ist DS – another image (taken at around 11am) where the limited dynamic range of the sensor is clearly visible.
For comparison – same lens, same ISO settings, same hour of the day – Pentax K-5 – minor adjustments in Lightroom. The difference is striking.
The camera is twenty years old, may have been treated badly by some of its owners, and may not perform as well as when it was new, but, in any case,
the dynamic range of the sensor is limited (DXO evaluates it at 10 EVs, as opposed to 14 EVs for the sensor of a more recent Pentax K-5 for instance). If the scene is lit evenly, the results are correct, but even Lightroom can’t save RAW images like the picture of this old church or that plant on my deck.
I’ve been used to shooting with cameras and lenses equipped with image stabilization mechanisms, which this *ist DS is deprived of. Images which would have been technically good with a camera from the 2010s are blurry because of camera shake,
the autofocus is a hit or miss – it works fine on static scenes, not so well if the subject is moving or the scene too dark.
Pentax *ist DS (left) and Pentax K-r (right) – even an entry level model like the K-r has a much better rear LCD display (and a Live View button). And it will perform much better.
Conclusion
Obviously, this camera works, and in ideal circumstances, will deliver usable images. But even if the images are saved as RAW files, the highlights are often desperately burnt, and the shadows too dark. The autofocus struggles with moving subjects, in particular if they’re not perfectly centered, and because this model is deprived from image stabilization, images will be blurry if the photographer does not pay close attention to the shutter speed. Very clearly, there is a huge image quality and usability gap between this *ist DS and cameras launched six to seven years later.
In the days of $5.00 Starbucks Lattes and $10.00 McDonalds Value Meals, $34.00 is not a huge sum to spend on a digital camera. But if you put the equivalent of six more Value Meals on the table, you’ll get a much more usable Pentax K-r (or any equivalent 12 Mpix dSLR from the early 2010s). Add another five will get you a really nice 16 Mpix dSLR like a Pentax K-5, or an already modern mirrorless camera such as the Panasonic G2 (12 Mpix) or the Sony Nex 3 (14 Mpix).
Pentax K-r – Centennial Park – Atlanta – the K-r only has a 12 Mpix sensor but behaves like a modern camera.
I’m not necessarily attracted to the latest and greatest features of the newest cameras (I also shoot film with cameras from the 1980s…), and will be happy to shoot with a digital camera deprived of movie mode or of wifi/bluetooth connectivity, if it still delivers images of good quality, most of the time.
But if the performance of a camera (by modern standards) is so limited that I start missing too many potentially good pictures, the quest for minimalism goes too far to my taste.
Pentax *ist DS – still powered by conventional AA batteries – no need for a charger (and the battery life is surprisingly good)
It is true that when cameras like the Pentax *ist DS (and its Canon, Konica-Minolta or Nikon 6 Mpix competitors) were launched in 2004, we were impressed by the huge step they represented over the digital point and shoot digicams we’d been using for a few years, and even today, we’re still proud to share the best images we got from those early dSLRs. If I set it up carefully, and use it within the limits of its performance envelope, I’m sure that even my scruffy *ist DS will get me decent pictures.
But today, I see the Pentax *ist DS more as an interesting curiosity, than as a camera I could use day to day. In the six years that separate a Pentax *ist DS from a Pentax K-5 (or a Nikon D70 from a D7000), there has been a huge step forward in reactivity, resolution, dynamic range and low light image quality, a step so large, that if I had to chose, I would spend a bit more on a dSLR or a mirrorless camera of the early 2010s, and forget about the *ist DS.
There is a store named Bellows in Little Five Points (a neighborhood in Atlanta) where they still sell a wide selection of 35mm and 120 film. I stopped by yesterday and bought film from Kodak, Harman and Fujifilm.
Back home, I looked at the box of Fujifilm Acros 100 II that I had just bought. It clearly mentions it’s made in the United Kingdom. Fujifilm? In England? A quick research confirms it: the Acros 100 II film is made by Harman Technologies Ltd, the British company that manufactures its own Ilford and Kentmere Black & White film, and also supplies B&W film for brands such as Agfa, Rollei, Oriental Seagull and … now Fujifilm. No wonder that Harman can boast of a 80% market share in the segment of B&W photo film.
Made in Mobberley (UK) with pride.
The company currently known as Harman Technologies Ltd is the result of a management buy out of Ilford Imaging UK Ltd, after it went under in 2004. Founded in 1879 by a Mr Harman, the manufacturer of photographic material we know as “Ilford” still operate from their historical facilities in Mobberley, near Manchester, and have added color film to the well known range of B&W film stock (Ilford FP4 Plus, HP5 Plus, XP2, Kentmere) they produce in their plant.
Over its 146 years of operations, Ilford went through an incredible number of acquisitions, mergers, rebrands, splits, receiverships and buy-outs, and as a result Harman Technologies does not even own the “Ilford” brand.
Eastman Kodak, Fujifilm, Harman Technologies – the volume leaders of what remains of the photographic film industry. But who manufactures what, and for whom?
The “Ilford” brand currently belongs to Ilford Imaging Europe GmbH, which inherited it along with the Swiss side of the old Ilford business (which used to manufacture Cibachrome and later Ilfochrome photographic papers). That side of the Ilford historical business went through its own series of plant closures, acquisitions and bankruptcies, and does not produce film or photographic paper anymore. It licenses the use of the “Ilford” brand to Harman Technologies for its B&W products, and simply distributes a range of color photographic products under the Ilford brand.
As a consequence, the current Ilford Ilfocolor film and the Ilford Ilfocolor single use cameras have nothing to do with Harman Technologies or the Mobberley plant (Harman’s own color film is sold as the “Harman Phoenix”), and are probably made by one of the companies that picked up the pieces after the East German (ORWO) and West German (Agfa) film manufacturing giants went under.
I can’t describe how this whole constellation of remote descendants of Agfa and ORWO is organized, as the situation still seems very murky, with insolvencies and lawsuits left and right. The German side of Agfa is long gone, and I don’t know if the current reincarnation of ORWO is still in operation. If they are, it (probably) makes them one of the only four companies in the world still in the color film manufacturing business, alongside Eastman Kodak and Fujifim – the heavyweights, and Harman – the new entrant (*)
At least one small (and reputable) company, ADOX, could salvage some of the industrial assets of the fallen giants (as well as some of the machines of the Swiss side of Ilford), and operates a B&W film plant in Germany.
After this detour through Switzerland and Germany, let’s go back to Fujifilm. Do you know that the Fujicolor 200 film sold over here in the US is manufactured by… Eastman Kodak. Which may not be the case in other parts of the world – Fujicolor 200 film is also packaged in China through a partnership with a local company, presumably to serve the Asian markets.
Made in the US by Eastman Kodak, distributed by Kodak Alaris.
In addition to Eastman Kodak, Harman, Fujifilm and the remnants of the German photographic film industry, a few players still manufacture film: in Belgium, Agfa-Gevaert produce specialty B&W film for aerial photography, Foma Bohemia make B&W film in the Czech Republic, and Ferrania are trying to restart a B&W film factory in Italy.
Photographic film is definitely manufactured in China and possibly in the Ukraine (by China Lucky and Svema respectively) but those brands are not distributed in the US and I have no precise information about them.
American Petit LeMans (2009 edition). Yellow and American. Like Kodak. Shot on film in 2009 with a Nikon camera.
The rest of the brands (Arista, Cinestill, KONO Manufactur, Leica, Lomography, Rollei, …) may commission the manufacturing of limited batches of their own proprietary film from one of the player listed above, or create their own “experimental” film by altering cinematographic film they buy mainly from Kodak, or simply re-label film produced by Harman, Foma, Adox and a few others.
As for the Instax instant film (one of the fattest cash cows of Fujifilm – $1Billion revenue with a 20% margin in 2024), it’s still made in Japan. Polaroid’s manufacturing operations are split between a main plant in the Netherlands and a smaller unit in Germany (one of the Agfa offshoots) which supplies the negative layer of the instant film. An exception in this industry, Polaroid has reunited under the same owner the brand and the plants, and manufactures and distributes its own products.
Green boxes do not necessarily come from Japan anymore.
There are no reliable statistics about the total value of the photography film market in the world – I’m reading anything between $500 million to $2.5 Billion a year – a fraction of what the market was as its peak in 1999 (Kodak’s revenue alone that year was $17Billion, which would equate to $32Billion in today’s US dollar).
American Petit LeMans – Braselton (GA) – another Japan-England cooperation: the Mazda-Judd – Shot on film with a Nikon Camera in 2009
With the exception of Fujifilm, all the big players of the twentieth century (Kodak, Ilford, Agfa, Orwo, Polaroid) have been dismantled, with the ownership of the brands often decoupled from the ownership of the remnants of the manufacturing assets, and the actual manufacturing and distribution activities under the responsibility of new actors. It explains the proliferation of new or resuscitated brands such as ADOX, Harman, Harman Phoenix, Kentmere, Original Wolfen or Rollei.
Does it matter? Not to me – as long as I can find good film to feed my cameras.
(*) Why is Harman entering the color film business, by the way ? They see a strategic opportunity in color film, obviously, and they’re also uniquely placed to take advantage of it because of their experience with chromogenic film.
Harman (as the successor of the pre-receivership British side of Ilford) has been manufacturing monochrome chromogenic film since 1981 (the XP, XP2 and now the XP2 Plus). The XP2 Plus (like the defunct Kodak BW400CN) is conceptually a simplified version of the typical chromogenic negative color film (think Kodacolor or Fujicolor), with only one layer of neutral color dyes as opposed to three layers of colored dyes in the negative color films.
In the heydays of film photography, the benefit of chromogenic monochrome film was primarily that it could be processed with negative color film, in the same machines using the same baths – the photo processing labs and the minilabs did not have to dedicate equipment and chemicals to the XP2 or BW400CN film like they would have had to do with “true” B&W film.
Two good sources of information about film photography:
At-home film processing – and at-home black and white film processing in particular, is not that hard. Once the film has been loaded in the developing tank, it’s very simple, and it can be done in full daylight.
The perceived difficulty, the step that scares the beginners, is loading the developing tank.
An overwhelming majority of amateur photographers develop their films in Paterson, Jobo, Arista (or similar) tanks, that can be operated in broad daylight, but must be loaded in the dark. In a dark room, or in a changing bag. Dark room film loading, daylight processing.
Paterson tank, cartridge opener and charging bag
Not everybody is comfortable with opening a film cassette and loading the film on the spiral of a reel without seeing anything – it takes a few dry runs and some practice before it becomes second nature.
The idea of daylight film loading, without a dark room or a charging bag, is extremely attractive to beginners, and to old farts like me going back to at-home film processing after a very long interruption. A daylight loading tank system is what is needed.
A few systems are available new (starting with the Lomo Daylight tested in those pages a few months ago), and more defunct products can be found on eBay.
The promise is always the same: you will drop the film cassette in the daylight loading tank, turn a crank to load the film on a reel hidden at the core of the system, and remove the (now empty) film cassette from the tank. At this point, you’ll be ready to go, and the development process will not be different from the routine followed with a conventional Paterson tank.
The Lomo Daylight : place the film cartridge in the loader and drop the loader in the development tank. Turn the crank to load the film on the spool inside the tank.
Of course it’s not exactly that simple. For the magic to take place, you need to prepare your film in a very specific way, and after you’re done with processing the film, you need to be able to clean all the parts and reassemble them correctly.
Agfa Rondinax (from an eBay listing)
l recently bought a Lomo Daylight Developing tank, and found out even more recently that an Italian company named Ars-Imago had launched its own daylight loading tank a few years before. Ars-Imago’s “Lab-Box” is not a 100% original design- it’s a modern re-interpretation of the Rondinax, a model launched by Agfa in the late nineteen thirties (an Agfa Rondinax was tested by the Casual Photophile five years ago).
As far as I know, the Lomo Daylight and the Lab-Box are the only two daylight-loading/daylight development systems currently manufactured and distributed.
On auction sites, you can sometimes find, and not necessarily for cheap, different versions of the original Agfa Rondinax, as well as many rebrands (the Rondinax was also sold by Leitz, of Leica fame) and a few shameless copies of Soviet origin.
Kodak’s Day-Load Tank was launched approximately at the same time as the Agfa Rondinax. Both the Day-Load and the Rondinax are now very old pieces of equipment (eighty to seventy years old), made of materials that have not necessarily aged well, and with multiple small parts that may have been damaged or lost over the years. Assuming you can find one at a reasonable price (by that, I mean cheaper than the $89.00 of a new Lomo Daylight Tank), I’m not sure I would trust them with my film.
Kodak Day-Load (from an eBay Listing)
Over the years, Jobo, a direct competitor of Paterson, have tried their luck at making daylight loading tanks multiple times, with models like the Automat 35, and more recently with the Jobo 2400 Daylight Loading tank shown below, which is conceptually close to the Lomo Daylight.
High level, the Jobo 2400 looks like a conventional Paterson or Jobo tank, except that the reel rotates around a rather large black cylinder, which includes the film loading mechanism. It makes for a rather large tank, which will require more chemicals than a conventional tank.
The Lomo Daylight Developing Tank was reviewed in those pages recently. The film cartridge is positioned in the film loader, the film loader is dropped at the center of the tank, the operator turns a crank to push the film on the spiral reel hidden inside the tank, and when the film is fully loaded on the reel, the film is separated from the cartridge by a built-in steel cutter and the loader is removed from the tank.
The Lab-Box is clearly inspired by the Agfa Rondinax, but Ars-Imago have improved on the original design in a few ways: contrarily to the original Rondinax, the Lab-Box is modular and can accommodate either one of two film receptacles, one for a 35mm cartridge, and one for 120 roll film. Ars-Image are also selling a replacement lid for their Lab-Box, that integrates an electronic timer and thermometer, to create an all-in-one device.
In the Lab-box (as in the original Rondinax), the film leader has to be clipped to a ribbon attached to the center of the reel. When the operator has closed the lid of the box, turning the knob on the side of the Lab-Box will pull the film out of the cassette and load it on the reel.
Lomo and Lab-Box: design – similarities
They can be loaded and operated in full daylight,
They’re relatively low-tech – no motor, no battery – they’re operated by a big knob or a small crank.
Both need the film leader to be accessible – you have to extract it if your camera is motorized and rewinds the film completely in the cartridge.
They can only process one roll of film at a time.
They are more difficult to reassemble than a conventional tank after cleaning, which offers a few opportunities to goof-up.
Big differences:
The “film pull” method of the Lab-Box seems gentler than the Lomo’s “film push” design, where the crank activates two sprockets that engage in the film perforations, and push the film (through a narrow guillotine) to the reel where the film will sit.
I’ve experienced multiple difficulties with the Lomo’s loader sprockets (they tend to tear the perforations of the film if they meet any resistance) and with the very narrow slit that controls the entry of the film in the chamber where the reel sits:
When you’re finished pushing the film to the reel, it’s still attached to the cartridge, from which you need to separate it in order to start the development process. You have to turn a knob vigorously to cut the film, and if the action is not decisive, debris of film get stuck in the slit, and have to be removed to great pains when cleaning the tank before the tank can be reused.
On the Lab-Box, agitation is performed by turning the crank (you don’t flip the tank regularly like you would do on a Paterson tank or the Lomo). Agitation can be continuous or intermittent. Ars-Imago recommend the continuous agitation, because it uses half the quantity of chemicals of the intermittent process, but you have to be prepared to turn the crank continuously for the whole duration of the development phase. It’s not motorized, remember.
The Lomo only processes 35mm film, the Lab-Box is modular. A 120 roll film loader can be purchased separately.
According to Ars-Imago, the Lab-Box is not compatible with PET based films (not that many on their list). I’ve not read about such restrictions on the Lomo.
In summary –
The Lab-Box is twice as expensive as the Lomo Daylight. It’s also larger.
To its advantage,
the Lab-Box should be gentler with film than the Lomo (the film is pulled, not pushed)
It only needs 300ml (10 fl oz) of products if you opt for the continuous agitation. On the other hand, if you prefer to spare your arms and opt for the intermittent agitation, you’ll need 500 ml (17 fl oz) per film. For reference, the Lomo needs 350ml of chemicals, and a Paterson tank will need 300ml for a single film, and 500 ml if loaded with two films.
it’s more flexible than Lomo (120 roll film and “intelligent lid” options)
On the Lab-Box, continuous agitation implies that the photographer turns a knob or an optional crank continuously (of course) for the duration of the development phase. Imagine you’re pushing a film and use a developer at high dilution – do you feel like turning a crank continuously for 10 minutes?
On the Lomo, you can stick to the same intermittent agitation process (Paterson calls that “inversion”) you would follow with a more conventional tank.
The Lomo Daylight Developing Tank – the film loader – notice the sprockets pushing the film to the reel.
How the Lomo Daylight Tank compares with a conventional Paterson (or Jobo) tank system?
Let’s answer a few questions…
How long does it take and how difficult is it?
to extract the film leader
this step is only needed with the Lomo, and only if you’ve let the camera fully rewind the film in the cassette. In the end, I’ve always succeeded in extracting the film leader from a cartridge where the film had been fully rewound, but it’s always a frustrating exercise, even with a good film extractor (the Lomo’s is a pretty good one). It almost never works on the first attempt (my average number of attempts must be around four per cartridge). So, a few frustrating minutes to be expected.
to load the film in the tank.
Lomo: it’s easy. Cut the film leader as directed by Lomo in their videos, place the cartridge in the loader, the loader in the tank, lock it… and here you go. Most of the time, it will work perfectly. And it takes a couple of minutes at the most.
Paterson – I’m using a brand new Paterson Universal System 4 tank, that came with a so called “auto-loader” reel. It’s a plastic reel, equipped with a ratchet system. Once you’ve disassembled the tank and placed it in the charging bag with the film cassette and scissors, it’s easy to find the starting point of the reel’s spiral and turn the left and right parts of the wheel in opposite directions to move the film from the cassette to the reel. All in all it does not take longer than loading the Lomo.
to clean and re-assemble the tank?
Lomo: a benefit of the Lomo’s design is that the film loader is removed from the tank before the developer can be poured in the tank. So that part remains dry and does not need to be cleaned. A total of six parts are in contact with the chemistry and have to be cleaned, and reassembled once they’re dry. The photographer is guided by red arrows and grooves of different sizes that make the whole re-assembly process idiot proof. It does not take more than one or two minutes.
Paterson: the Paterson system is even simpler. If using one reel, it’s composed of only five parts, which are extremely easy to clean and re-assemble.
Disassembling the Lomo Daylight – the film loader (bottom of the image) and the crank (of course) don’t need to be cleaned. Reassembly is guided by red arrows and keys.
As a conclusion
It came as a surprise to me. I did not remember that loading a developing tank like the Paterson Universal System 4 was so easy. All right, you need a charging bag – which is one more piece of equipment to buy and store, but it does not take much space, and could be useful in other circumstances.
So…The Lomo Daylight is easy to load, and not difficult to clean and reassemble. But after a very limited practice (one or two dry runs), the Paterson tank is as easy to load as the Lomo, and even easier to clean and reassemble.
Disassembling the Paterson tank – it could not be simpler.
The Paterson (or a system of equivalent quality) has the additional advantages of being more flexible (the reels can be configured for one or two 35mm films or one 120 film), easier to maintain at a specific temperature in a sous vide if inserted in a color process workflow, and less finicky than the Lomo, which can be a bit temperamental in my experience.
The real difference? this pesky film leader extractor. Extracting the film leader from a fully rewound cassette of 35mm film is a royal pain. You may have to do it before you can load the film in a Lomo, but never on a Paterson tank.
Two film leader extractors – the tool provided by Lomo (top) and my old and trusted Hama extractor. The Lomo is probably less of a pain, but still a pain.
Minolta, once a major camera maker – second only to Canon in terms of volume – was absorbed by Konica in the late nineties (correction: I was a few years off – the merger was announced in Jan 2003).
The newly formed Konica-Minolta entity left the photography market in 2006 – with Sony inheriting some of their camera and lens designs when they entered the dSLR market.
For the anecdote, the Minolta name is now used under license by a company distributing (very) entry level digital cameras, that – based on the horrendous reviews they get on Amazon – I won’t bother testing.
Sic transit…
The Minolta case – the AF-C was presented like a precious object.
In 1983 though , Minolta were at their peak. In addition to their bread and butter point and shoot cameras, they had decided to go after the market of photographers looking for an ultra compact camera of quality, and proposed a Minolta alternative to the Olympus XA, the Minox 35 EL and Cosina’s CX-2.
The “shield” is up and the camera powered off.
Like its competitors, the AF-C was extremely compact – it integrated a rather fast wide angle lens – a 35mm opening at f/2.8, and was devoid of an electronic flash (it was sold as a separate unit, to be attached to the left of the camera) or from any motorized film advance system. The AF-C’s unique selling proposition was its autofocus – all their competitors relied on zone focus (Minox, Cosina) or on a small rangefinder (Olympus) for focusing.
The AF-C’s unique selling proposition was its autofocus
On all those ultra-compact cameras the lens and the viewfinder are protected when the camera is not in use. In the case of the AF-C, a “sliding shield” protects the lens and the viewfinder when the camera is not in use, and has to be moved down to unlock the camera. Simple, and it works.
Minolta AF-C – the “shield” is open and the camera ready to shoot.
Today, the AF-C is not as sought after as the XA or the CX-2 (if eBay prices are an indication). And a derivative of the Cosina CX-2, the Lomo LC-A, reaches much higher prices. Why is it so? Probably because the AF-C is a totally automatic camera, with no ability for the photographer to adjust the settings. You’ll have to trust the performance of its autofocus – there is an AF lock feature to help with off-center subjects, but that’s all. A green LED is lit when the camera has set the focus on “something”, but you will only know what it was after you examine the prints, a few days (or weeks) later.
Minimalist top plate – exposure and focus are automatic
Similarly you’ll have to trust the CdS meter – a program controls the combination aperture-shutter speed, with no indication of what the camera has decided to do, and no manual override. In fact, the only thing that the photographer can set is the film speed – between 25 and 400 ISO. Considering that the meter operates between IL6 to IL17 – (1/8s at f/2.8 to 1/430s at f/17)- I would probably use 200 ISO film to cover my bases without risking reaching the limits of the shutter on very bright subjects.
Two ways to shoot 35mm film with a 35mm lens. The AF-C is remarkably compact
Another reason the demand for the AF-C is pretty low nowadays is that it does not operate without batteries (4×1.5v silver oxide batteries). None of its competitors does – all have electronic shutters – but in the case of the AF-C, even the non-motorized film advance is inoperative in the absence of batteries (the film advance wheel is locked). Which leads people to believe that the camera is dead, when it’s just asking for fresh batteries.
Atlanta, Inman Park Festival – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMax
Shooting with the AF-C
Film loading is easy, if you are used to operating a fully manual 35mm camera.
As for shooting, there’s not much to say. You point the camera towards the subject, you press the shutter release button, and you expect that the AF-C will do the rest. Because you don’t have much to do beyond that.
a young lady seating at the table next to ours asked us whether I was shooting with a disposable camera
Oh yes, film advance is not automated, and the camera is too small for a conventional film advance lever: you have to turn the film advance wheel, like you would do on an old Instamatic. It’s making the same noise – and it’s intriguing for people who are not in the know: I was taking a few casual snapshots of my wife at the terrace of a cafe, and a young lady seating at the table next to ours asked us whether I was shooting with a disposable camera.
Atlanta, Inman Park Festival – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMax
Fresh from the lab
I had this little camera with me when walking in the streets of Atlanta for the Inman Park festival a few weeks ago. It was loaded with Kodak UltraMax 400, not my preferred stock, but I thought it would be a better fit for the camera than my usual Ektar 100.
I was impressed by the sharpness and the contrast of the pictures
When I received the scans, I was impressed by the sharpness and the contrast of the pictures – which points to a good lens. I also liked the camera’s ability to freeze movement – the program controlling the exposure parameters seems to have its priorities in order.
As long as the subject is a street scene or the portrait of a human being, the focus is tack on. But if the subject is not at the center of the frame, or moving too rapidly inside the frame, or too small, the camera can not get the focus right. You should not use the AF-C to take pictures of pets (and of children who can’t stay in place).
I was not overly impressed by the colors though. It could come from the scanner of the lab, but I suspect that the camera had under-exposed most of the pictures. I used Lightroom’s “modern” Profiles to bring the tones to my taste, and the final results are not bad at all for a 40 year old ultra-compact camera. They have the 1980s minilab look that people seem to like at the moment.
Atlanta, Inman Park Festival – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMax
As a conclusion
The Minolta AF-C is a nice little camera, very compact, and delivering good pictures if you keep it in its zone of comfort. The copy I was using was probably under exposing, and I would need to test it more thoroughly to find by how much.
But I’m afraid I won’t do it. Because I’m not really interested in spending more time with this camera.
We all shoot film for different reasons.
For me, the end result matters, of course, but the quality of the interaction with the camera is also an important factor – and shooting with this auto-everything little camera does not cut it for me.
The AF-C does the job but its approach to photography is ultimately frustrating – you know its automatic exposure and autofocus systems are relatively primitive, but there’s no way of knowing what they’re doing, let alone overriding them. And the long travel shutter release, the click of the shutter, the ratcheted film advance wheel, all give you the feeling of shooting with a cheap entry level camera.
the feeling of shooting with a cheap entry level camera
Shooting film has become seriously expensive – in the region of $1.00 per scanned image once you’ve factored the cost of film and processing by a lab. You can reduce the cost per picture if you process and scan the film yourself, but in this case you’ll be paying with your own time.
For that amount of money or personal time, I want the process of creating pictures to be enjoyable. Even if the pictures it captures are of good quality – the 35mm f/2.8 lens lives up to Minolta’s reputation – the AF-C feels too much like an Instamatic to my taste.
Atlanta, Inman Park Festival – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMaxAtlanta, Inman Park Festival – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMaxAtlanta – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMaxMarietta, Sope Creek Ruins – Minolta AF-C – Kodak UltraMax
Not everybody has the luxury of dedicating a room – or even a large cabinet – to use as a home photo lab.
If you still enlarge and process your prints at home, you need a dark room, and plenty of space for the enlarger and the developing trays – but if you only process film, and immediately digitize it, you simply need a few square feet on the countertop of your kitchen. Once you’ve cleaned your equipment, it will fit in a 20x15x10in plastic bin, chemicals included.
Everything can fit in a 20x15x10in plastic bin, including the chemicals
A 20x15x10in plastic bin is still rather large object to carry around (and I can’t imagine people traveling with their diluted chemicals and processing film in their hotel room), but it’s easy to find it a storage place at home, even in a small apartment.
the 12 gallon bin with enough room for two tanks (one Lomo, one Paterson), bottles and even chemicals (the Tetenal tabs).
I started processing film again a few months ago, and I’m still re-discovering the secrets of the trade. I still make mistakes and I’m not ready to develop color film at home yet, but it’s one of my mid-term goals. I’m trying to keep the whole process simple and low cost, and I’m sharing here what I’ve learned, so far.
A smaller storage bin to use as a sous vide if needed
Preparing the chemicals
Preparing and storing the chemicals is the thorniest issue, in particular if you only process one or two rolls of film per month. Products (developer, fixer) are always delivered as liquid concentrate or powder, and need to be diluted before use.
Tetenal – the developer and the fixer come is two easy to store bottles.
Ilford sells a beginners starter kit (the Simplicity Starter Pack) with enough product to process two cartridges of 35mm film, but it’s horrendously expensive at almost $35.00 once you have included the cost of shipping (that’s $17.00 per roll of film… ouch!).
Tetenal has run out of business, but Freestyle Photo (and a few other retailers) still have a some of their products in store – I bought a bottle of Tetenal Parvofin tabs (the developer) , and a bottle of Tetenal Superfix tabs (the fixer). The products are packaged as tablets (like an Alka Seltzer effervescent tab), don’t take much space, and can be stored for a long time (four years). Each tablet is good for one roll of film: you just dilute what you need a few hours before use (you have to let it cool down). It looks like a good solution if you don’t process huge volumes of film, and don’t want to store chemicals in liquid form. The Tetenal tablets are still expensive (approximately $5.00 per processed roll of film) but they’re convenient.
Tetenal: the Parvofin tablets. The developer solution is obtained by placing the two tabs (Part A, Part B) in hot water.
Processing the film
Amateurs typically process roll film (135 or 120) in developing tanks.
Maintaining the developer and the fixer at 22 degrees c. (It’s Atlanta in July, you have to cool the B&W baths).
Paterson, Jobo (and all sort of copycats) manufacture developing tanks that have to be loaded in the dark. I’ve never trusted a dark room to be dark enough to load film, and I’ve always used a charging bag.
You slide your hands in the two sleeves, load the film on the reel, place the reel in the tank, and close the tank. Without seeing what you’re doing – of course.
Intimidating, but not that difficult after one or two dry runs.
Lomo and Lab-Box have been promoting an easier way to process film, with tanks that can be loaded in full daylight – no charging bag needed. You simply place the film cartridge in a receptacle, turn a crank, and the film is loaded. I’ve been using the Lomo Daylight Developing Tank for a few months. Yes, it works, but I’m not totally sold on it – I may even return to a conventional Paterson tank (there was a promo recently and I bought one for cheap).
Lomo Daylight imposes a trade-off between simplicity and convenience, on the one hand, and reliability and flexibility, on the other hand
The Lomo Daylight teared the peforations of the film. If it happens, the cartridge has to be removed from the loader, and the damaged section cut off before another attempt at loading the film can be made.
I’ve never seen or tested the Lab-box, but the Lomo Daylight imposes a trade-off between simplicity and convenience, on the one hand, and reliability and flexibility, on the other hand.
Reliability because to push the film on the reel hidden inside the tank, Lomo relies on a pair of sprockets (that engage in the film perforations) – and will tear those perforations if there is any resistance. If it happens in the middle of the film loading process, you have to turn the red button to cut the film, remove the film receptacle from the tank, develop the film which is already inside the tank, clean and dry the whole thing, then return to your film cartridge, cut the section where the perforations were teared down, resume film loading, and start a new film processing cycle. Of course, you lose a few pictures in the process, and a few hours of your time. Not great.
Flexibility, because the Lomo only works with one roll of 35mm film at a time, as opposed to a conventional developing tank that will offer the flexibility of developing one or two 35mm film cartridges or a single 120 film roll in one run. Also, the Lomo tends to require more product per cycle than a conventional tank, and because of its shape, may (I’ve not tested) be more difficult to use when processing color film.
Film scanning or digitizing
I don’t own a dedicated film scanner. I simply mount a macro lens (an old 55mm Nikkor) on my current digital camera, screw the JJC Film Digitizing adapter on the front of the lens, and digitize a full roll of film in a few minutes. I have absolutely no reservation about that part of the work flow. It’s quick, easy, and it simply works.
JJC Digitizing kit: the film strip holder
In action – Fujifilm X-T4, Fotasy Nikon F to Fujifilm X Adapter, Nikon Micro-Nikkor 55mm, JJC kit. The lightbox is included in the JJC solution, a big advantage over a similar product offered by Nikon.
Editing and sharing your images
The rest of the process takes place on a “computer” (PC, Mac or iPad). I simply connect a SD card reader to my iPad or to my PC, and upload the images to Lightroom Mobile or Lightroom Web. Even the junior versions of Lightroom will let you invert the negative (by flipping the two ends of the Point Curve), and finalize the image by playing with the exposure, contrast and while balance sliders.
If correctly exposed, processed and digitized, black and white film will require very little work in a photo editing tool like Lightroom Mobile. Color film requires more effort – but so far, I’ve not felt the need to upgrade to Lightroom Classic and to a dedicated Negative Film Processing plug-in.
Step 1 – import the digitized negative Step 2: invert the image (moving the point curve)Step 3: play with the white balance and the color mixer (the difficult part)
The final result: Peñíscola(Spain) – a few episodes of Game of Thrones were shot in the citadel. It explains the dragon. Digitized from film, inverted and adjusted in LightRoom Web.
As a conclusion: what’s in my plastic bin?
Developer, fixer, bottles, tank, thermometer, beakers, samigons, squeegee, weighted clips – everything fits in my 12 gallon plastic bin. Color processing would require an extra device to maintain the temperature of the baths and the tank at 38 degrees C, but I don’t need one for B&W film (in the Atlanta summers, the difficulty is to keep the temperature of the B&W baths low enough).
I included in my kit a smaller bin to use as a sous-vide, to keep the chemicals at a controlled temperature while processing the film. It also fits in the larger bin.
Digitizing adapter, macro lens and digital camera are stored separately, of course.
Sloss Furnaces – Birmingham, AL Pentax Program-A – Ilford FP4
Sloss Furnaces – Birmingham, AL Pentax Program-A – Ilford FP4
Sloss Furnaces – Birmingham, AL Pentax Program-A – Ilford FP4
Sports car at the Sloss Furnaces. I found the contrast between the modern white car and the dark industrial ruins interesting. All pictures of the furnaces were shot on Ilford FP4 – Developed at 22 degrees C in Tetenal PARVOFIN. Negative shot with the JJC Film Digitizing adapter and inverted in Lightroom Mobile.
CamerAgX - a new life for old gear 