National Geograhic / Film?

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mw_uio

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Is National Geographic still using chrome [Velvia/Ektachrome/Kodachrome] or are they now 100% digital for their print magazines? If you have insight, please tell!


Mark
Quito, EC
 
David, are all of the photographers are freelance, thus when a assignment comes up, they NG call on who they want?

Mark
Quito, EC
 
I recently saw a PBS special hilighting Joel Sartore. He said that for his latest shoot he shot over 300 ROLLS of film for the assignment. Funny thing is that in a recent Shutterbug Joel was in an ad for Nikon talking about using the D2X for his work. Go figure, however I know that through a friend of my folks who is a staff photographer for NG that they still use film for the majority of the shoots because of the archival quality.

Hope this helps a little

Scott
 
At least NG is concerned about archival, and are still using FILM. They must get their film direct from Fuji and Kodak and others, thus no middle men, and a good price.

MArk
UIO, EC
 
I don't think all the shooters are using film.... alot have switched over. Plus with the lead time the magazine uses they could be running stories that were shot on film 18 months ago and the photographers could have since switched to digital but it hasn't worked through the pipeline yet.
-Rob Skeoch
bigcameraworkshops.com
 
It would be nice to think that a major publication was still using film, but I suspect the bean counters would be controling production cost very tightly!!! Never mind the quality, that`ll be good enough,Look how quick it is!!!
 
From what I understand Steve McCurry is still using slide film and Nikon F-100s for NaGeo

Though I know he will use Digital the last interview I saw from him this summer he still preferred slides
 
Dfin said:
It would be nice to think that a major publication was still using film, but I suspect the bean counters would be controling production cost very tightly!!! Never mind the quality, that`ll be good enough,Look how quick it is!!!
Click to expand...


The quality is most certainly good enough, NG is printed with ink on paper and the pictures have to be digitized and colour matched to get printed.
Given enough pixels and a good photographer and competent people in prepress there should be no visible difference in the end result.

E_A_Bilder-0009.jpg


That's my grandfather at work in 1949, he was a retoucher and Linotype still produced hot metal typesetters then.
 
I just finished reading the NG Field Guide for B&W Digital Photography. The author, Richard Olsenius, said that even NG is going digital. It is just a matter of time. Digital is much more practical for this kind of work. Buying a laptop and a bunch of memory for their photogs will be cheaper than 300 rolls of film. Not to mention more portable.

NG uses a mixture of photographers. They have a regular staff of photographers, but also accept freelance, if it is good enough. (a big if!)

Also from comments in this book, Mr. Olsenius makes it clear that NG has rules/preferences, and if the photographer wants to shoot it some other way, he has to convince the boss that is the best way. Mr. Olsenius also talked about an assignment where he convinced his boss that 4x5 B&W negs would be better than 35mm slides. It sounded like it was more the exception than the norm.

I bet they're about 90% digital by now. These are pro photographers, who don't have any romance for carrying all this film around. They're just trying to get the job done.

It also helps that if they shoot in RAW, SOOOOOO many shots that would formerly be not-quite-good-enough would be save-able.

In recent years, it seems to me their stuff has been VERY grainy; not just the low light stuff either. I don't know if the photographers are trying to be artsy or if they're taking crops from fast slide film.

Again, if it were digital, they could fix the grain easily enough.
 
I shot a couple of episodes of a show for the Nat Geo Channel a few years ago, and the NG photographer assigned to do the stills for the magazine was a really great guy named Jeff Hutchens. At that time (around 2000), he was shooting a combination of film and digital. He had an M6 that he used quite a bit in addition to a 35mm SLR and a DSLR. We were in Mongolia, and he carried a medium sized Sealine clear bag with a couple hundred rolls of film in it.
 
I know three photographers who shoot regularly for NG.
One is still film/RF [kodachrome!] the other two digital/SLR [both used to be film/RFs, both currently playing with M8s]
If you go to the NGS website, go to feature, go to photo gallery you can get the tech details on each story.

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0703/feature4/gallery2.html

shows that in the current issue David Burnett [none of the above] has been shooting Orlando on a 5x4 speed graphic, now there's REAL photography!
The current editor of NG , Chris Johns, IS a photographer...........
Clive
 
Last edited:
anglophone1 said:
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0703/feature4/gallery2.html

shows that in the current issue David Burnett [none of the above] has been shooting Orlando on a 5x4 speed graphic, now there's REAL photography!
The current editor of NG , Chris Johns, IS a photographer...........
Clive
Click to expand...

Great shots! I love the cool micro-shallow dof effects a 4x5 with a shiftable film/lens plane can produce.

Ron
 
From the Nat. Geo. FAQ, which sounds like it's out of date (due to the 1995 reference):

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/qanda/index.html

"Nearly all use 35mm transparency film, such as Fuji Provia 100, Fuji Velvia 50, Kodachrome 64, and Kodachrome 200. Brand and type are up to the photographer, but most use three or four different emulsions, depending on the situation. They also use small amounts of other 35mm transparency emulsions as well as some 35mm color negative and larger format films. In 1995 they shot 32,000 rolls of film on magazine assignments."
 
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