Support

Bulb is a free field log for film photographers on iOS. Something not working, or a stock Bulb does not know? Write to me directly.

How do I contact support?

hello@bulb.film. I read everything and I answer.

Why can Bulb not hear me?

Bulb needs Speech Recognition and Microphone permission, which it asks for the first time you tap the mic. If you said no, switch them on in Settings › Bulb. Out of the box Bulb hears on the device, so on a phone that cannot do that locally it will tell you and let you type instead.

What do I do if Bulb mishears an f-stop?

Tap that frame on the strip at the top of the screen and say it again. The strip is the control: every frame on it is a target, so sheet three is one tap away. The key reads SAVE instead of LOG while you are on a frame you have already shot, and tapping the same frame again returns you to the next unshot one. On a long roll, where the frames are too narrow to hit, the strip opens a grid instead. You can also open the frame from the list below and type over it. Anything you type by hand wins over the words.

How does it hear f-stops right?

The phone's own recogniser listens while you talk, and on its own it is the one that turns "f eight" into "if ate". So when there is signal, the few seconds of you saying the frame go to Bulb's own server to be read by a larger model, along with the film and camera you are using, and the sentence appears once you let go, with the words right. It uses a little data each time. The audio is dropped once it is read and nothing is kept. With no signal the phone reads it alone, and the roll menu offers a second on-device model, about 217 MB, fetched once, that corrects the vocabulary without a connection.

My note gets cut off halfway through. What do I do?

Tap the key and Bulb settles the frame after a beat of quiet, which is what you want with the camera still at your eye. If the note runs longer than that, or you stop in the middle to look at the scene again, hold the key down instead. It listens for as long as your thumb is on it and settles the moment you let go.

Does anything rewrite what I said?

No. The sentence you see is the sentence that was heard, word for word, and it is what the log keeps. The parser reads the aperture, the shutter speed and the rest out of it without altering it, and whatever it does not recognise stays as your note. An earlier version ran the sentence through a language model to tidy it, which quietly removed ordinary words on the way past. That is gone.

Why is there no position on my scans?

Bulb takes one location fix per frame, and it asks for permission the first time you log a frame rather than when the app opens. If you said no, switch Location on in Settings › Bulb. A frame logged indoors or under cloud may simply not have got a fix, in which case it is written without one rather than holding up the log.

How do I log 4x5 or 8x10 sheet film?

Load the box the same way you load a roll and pick the sheet format. Sheet film is not a roll of ten: you log one sheet at a time and the box is never full, so nothing tells you to wind off. Close the box when you are done, and reopen it if you shoot more.

I logged a frame by mistake. Can I delete it?

Open the frame and delete it. Every frame after it moves down a number, so the log still matches the film and the scans still line up when they come back.

The scans are back. What do I do now?

Three things. On the phone, open the roll, tap Match the scans, then Send the roll file and send it to the computer the scans are on, by AirDrop, Mail or whatever you use. On that computer open bulb.film/desk. Drop the roll file and the scans on it, or the folder with both in. The desk sets each scan beside the photograph you took of that frame, you glance down the rows, and you press write. In Chrome it writes into the scans in the folder; in Safari you get a zip of tagged copies. Then import in Lightroom.

Why do the frame numbers not line up with my scans?

Labs sometimes drop a blank frame, which shifts everything after it. The desk matches by order rather than by filename, lines the roll up from the reference photographs, and shows you every pairing before it writes anything. Move a scan up or down until the notes sit against the right pictures.

What if Bulb has no reciprocity data for my film stock?

Tell me which one. Bulb only carries figures it can attribute, so if a manufacturer has not published any, it will say so rather than invent one.