This month’s photo is of personal interest to me for two reasons. Firstly it is the view that my wife and I had of downtown San Francisco from the rear of our initial temporary accommodation when we arrived in the city at the start of our first overseas posting with BP in February, 1986, less than a year after we had got married. Secondly, it is a scanned image of a Kodacolour100 colour film negative, digitally scanned using my current camera and the polarity reversed using the camera’s in-built Firmware.
In November 1985, having been with BP Exploration in London for less than a year, I was summoned to the Assistant Chief Geophysicist’s office at about 4:30 on a quiet Friday afternoon. Being somewhat nervous as to what serious offence I may have committed, it was with some trepidation that I entered his office to await my fate, only to be greeted with the question, “How would you feel about going to live in San Francisco next February?”.
So come early February, after the customary ‘leaving do’ of some minor heavy drinking with colleagues and bosses in the D’Arcy Arms on my last Friday night in London – a pub in the basement of BP’s HQ – my wife and I found ourselves in San Francisco, having pulled off the No1 dream posting only 9 months after having got married the previous April. T the time, Britain was in recession, and unbeknownst to us oil was about to crash from $32 per barrel to less than $10, but we were being paid to live the ‘Good Life’ in California, on a healthy overseas salary, grossed up to be equivalent to a tax free UK overseas salary, (i.e., not subject to UK taxation under HMRC non-residency rules, despite being subject to IRS taxation in the US).
This was the view that we had from Crystal Towers, a residential block of furnished rental apartments on Taylor Street in the North Beach district, a couple of hundred yards from Fisherman’s Wharf and a short cable car ride into the downtown district where BP’s office was situated on floors 30-32 at 100 Pine Street. Every morning we would wake at around 6:30 with the ‘singing’ of the underground cables as the cable car system powered up on Columbus Avenue below, with the first cable car passing by just before 7:00. We really couldn’t believe how lucky we were – paid to live (and work) in California, temporarily living in the heart of the City of San Francisco.
We were in the rental apartment for just under a month until our furniture arrived by seafreight from England, when we moved to an apartment in the ‘City’ of Orinda in the East Bay area, in Contra Costa county, where we had a very enjoyable 21 months until BP closed the office and we were posted on to Cairo, Egypt, but that is another story.
This photograph was the view from the walkway at the back of our apartment, and both my wife and I were fascinated by all the colours and the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of residential buildings so close in to the city centre, especially with all their rooftops and rear stairways. Our view from the front was over Fisherman’s Wharf, Alcatraz, the Coit Tower and the northern Bay Area – and watching the fog roll in every afternoon around 4:00pm from under the Golden Gate Bridge and over Alcatraz was always a spectacle (and although I was at work during the week, my office window had a similar view).
The way the light played at dawn and dusk was also quite entrancing but difficult to capture on film, besides I always felt a bit weird hanging out with my camera at the end of the walkway by the rubbish chute! But I hadn’t bought any Kodachrome that first week or so, and instead was using Kodacolour100 print film, and Ilford FP4 B&W film which I developed myself.
Of course in the days of film, one tried to set exposure correctly but would then have a wait of days or even weeks before seeing the results, plus film was not cheap, and with only 36 exposures per roll one was fairly frugal with how many images one took of a particular scene. One could get the Kodacolour film easily processed and printed at any one of a number of places – local pharmacies, local film developing shops, or mail order companies – all relatively cheaply, and receive your pack of 6″x4″ prints within days or even a few hours later if you paid enough.
At 6″x4″ everything generally looked great to ok, although usually there would be a few failures in terms of focus or exposure, but of course by then it was too late to correct it. Until now, when with digital one sees an instant result, and when scanning an old slide or negative the colour cast can be improved to some extent by digitally scanning. BUT then when one examines the digitally scanned image on a large colour PC monitor, the true grainy quality of the original film becomes apparent!
The image above was scanned by my camera, a Nikon D850. For details of my scanning set-up, please refer to my webpage on technical details where I explain briefly the method I use. The D850 has in-built firmware that enables a colour negative to automatically be saved as a positive colour image in JPG format.
This image was created by saving as a positive JPG image, which I then edited using Nikon’s NX Studio software and outputting as a TIF format image, which I then tweaked further – especially the colour balance – in Photoshop.
Getting the colour balance right is not an accurate science! It takes several passes, and it is always best to come back to refine the image another day, and it is of course somewhat subjective, especially if as in this case it is almost some 40 years since the photograph was originally taken! It is quite important though to distinguish between an image with colour tones that are aesthetically pleasing, and one that is supposed to be a faithful reproduction, such as a wildlife image or one that is to be used for documentary evidence, where the colours must be as faithful as possible to the real subject.
The one thing that shocked me about all my Kodacolour negatives is the poor quality of the film – it is so grainy! Whether that is because we are all so used now to digital images viewed on a small phone or tablet scree, or it was sloppy developing with past the ‘sell by’ chemicals at the Photo Lab who did the original work I don’t honestly know, but so often the film is just very grainy. So much for budget film processing in the 1980s and 1990s!
I definitely prefer high quality digital images over film from 20+ years ago!