Twenty years of chasing the “film-look”
I’ve been working with black-and-white almost exclusively since I started shooting in 1988. After fifteen years of analogue/film photography, including several years operating a professional darkroom, I moved to digital capture. I hated it. I kept going back to film and then to digital and back to film again. Shooting film didn’t make any sense commercially, but digital capture looked like crap. Especially black-and-white. So one day in 2004, I opened up Photoshop and decided to work out how to get the film look I liked from a digital file. I sat at my desk with film scans and digital files and got to work. That soon became an obsession.
Four years later, I was invited to submit some digital images for a sponsored group exhibition at the Getty Image Gallery in London. These had to be taken on the sponsor’s digital cameras. After submitting the files, the printers at Getty asked me to resubmit some new images because they thought I had sent them medium format film scans. I was very happy!!
In March 2012, I began to use Lightroom 4 as my primary tool for black-and-white conversion. Photoshop was fantastic, but Lightroom offered a simple, non-destructive workflow. So, I set to work on developing a way of getting the film look that I wanted using Lightroom’s tools and without resorting to third-party plug-ins.
A decade later, I have a mature set of presets and profiles that are used for all of my black-and-white work.Taken directly from my copy of Lightroom, this pack is the culmination of everything I have learned about black-and-white photography, both analogue and digital, over the past three decades. Every black-and-white photograph on this website, Sarah’s website, Instagram, and YouTube has been processed using this pack.
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