An Experiment in Pushing Boundaries

There are several guides on Analog.Cafe, yet this month’s “How to Make Sharper Photos on Film” has the most lessons I wish I’d learned earlier. In fact, there are 23. That’s a lot — good thing they’re ranked by importance. I explain how I did that below.

This year’s last newsletter also covers a few blog updates and an Easter egg that’s a clue to the next month’s film experiment. In this newsletter: Sharper photos on film: priorities. Correct exposures with Nikon F2. This month’s website updates. An experiment in pushing boundaries (Easter egg 🪺). Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships!

Sharper photos on film: priorities.

Sharpness isn’t the sole aspect of photography, though I feel it can sometimes make images more compelling.

I’ve been looking for ways to accomplish that “pop” on film as long as I’ve used it. There are obvious ones, like using a larger format or a better lens — but there are many others too, some of which don’t involve spending money. Certain tools can make a huge difference to the quality and fidelity of your images, while others are subtle.

Unfortunately, it’s not obvious what’s the best way to improve an image — there are many things to try, with just one being universally toutted as paramount: lens quality. But is a good lens the most important component of sharpness, given that it’s not even required to make an image? It’s up there — yet a $1,000 glass isn’t likely to improve image quality as much as a $1,000 scanner.

I used this logic to rank the guide’s remaining 21 tools and techniques: their relative influence on image quality vs. costs (money or effort).

Interestingly, scanning film “wrong side up” got ranked as the least consequential. Note that this isn’t the same as getting a different scanner — it’s simply a choice between facing the film’s emulsion side toward vs. away from the scanner lens.

Correct exposures with Nikon F2.

Ensuring a perfect exposure is another way to improve images — but that could be hard if your meter is broken. And if you’re using Nikon F2, chances are your Photomic finder could be off by a few stops.

This month’s other premium guide lays out a relatively simple way and all the materials needed to calibrate it properly at home.

This month’s website updates.

Not all writing this month was in English. Some of it was code.

It’s the end of the year, which is the time for Spotify Wrapped and other, perhaps less famous, lists and light-hearted data summaries. A few photographers shared their number of rolls developed in 2024, which made me want to do that, too. Since all that info is already (privately) stored in the Film Log database, I decided to spend a few afternoons shaping it into a graphic.

If you use Film Log to track your film across cameras, you’ll see that graphic as well (it’ll be personalized to your usage, of course).

You may’ve noticed that I’ve also made slight updates to this blog’s top and bottom navigation bars: I’ve added new icons and a submenu for easy access to more website sections. The News page has also got a bit of a brush-up. Lastly, I made a few design changes to the Best Film Camera Finder app.

An experiment in pushing boundaries (Easter egg 🪺).

This month’s Analog.Cafe newsletter featured a header image with a clue to an experiment I’ve been working on for the past few days. It’s subtle: