As a 'millennial' hobby photographer that enjoys working with film cameras this is great news! However I find some of these comments disheartening.
There is a lot of discussion of the merits of film versus digital capture which really isn't the point or why someone would necessarily choose to shoot film today. Much like how a better camera doesn't automatically take better photos the same goes with the film vs digital debate. A camera, and film/digital sensor, is a tool that is used accomplish an ends (capturing an image). One tool might be easier to use or have more control or some other quality of preference. Similarly, a given film might subjectively have a preferred color palette or a sensor have more flexibility. I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot; I can't fallback on "guess and check" for exposure or composition.
Another thing to note is that much of the film market (both pro and consumer) have stabilized in recent years. Kodak (also Kodak Alaris) and the other manufacturers have adapted to be able to meet the lower demand of a niche market. A great example of this is Ilford.
Anyway, I am just excited to have an excuse to shoot some slides this year!
The fallacy is in the belief that "photography" is solely defined by the simple act of capturing an accurate representation of reality.
Optimizing for just this aspect ignores the fact that perhaps i don't want to use photoshop to manip an image because i can get more desirable results organically using chemicals and my hands rather than a mouse. Photography is an art for many. It may be easy to mimic the results with digital editing, but it is much more difficult to discover new and unique things.
>The fallacy is in the belief that "photography" is solely defined by the simple act of capturing an accurate representation of reality.
I wish I could upvote you twice. I never understand this mentality. And then on the same side people love the ultra-generic over-saturated tone-mapped HDR with 10-stop ND filter of a creek stuff you see on the explore page of Flickr every day. It's probably too much to ask of people who aren't photographers though. I can't blame people for thinking this way when the entire camera upgrade cycle is based on always more resolution and color accuracy. It's easier for companies to sell cameras this way.
One thing that film gives me is a physical representation of reality as light bounced off of it at the time of me pressing the shutter.
This, for me, is an act of alchemy, a bit of magic, which brings a special kind of awe and changes my attitude to the scene, to the moment I am taking the photo, and thus changes the outcome.
I rarely shoot film, but when I do, it feels special.
it's funny that that has become more special than transmogrifying reality into an ethereal form represented by numbers, stored by manipulating electricity, and recreated anywhere in the world by transforming electricity into light
I agree. And yet, the molecules in the film emulsion get reconfigured directly by the light emitted by reality and focused by the lens. It's direct, physical, embedded in the material structure, testimony of what once was. A physical manifestation of one's experience.
Light-sensitive transistors to electricity to software to memory feels much more ephemeral. Not less magic, but less al-chemical.
>I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot; I can't fallback on "guess and check" for exposure or composition.
If this is a common sentiment then here's an idea for a product: a digital camera that donates $1 to the red cross for every picture you take, charged to your bank account. Not only would it restore this "restraint", it would help people in need while also removing the usage of chemicals that are bad for health and environment.
It would need to also not let you see your photos for somewhere between 1 and 7 days, take SD cards no larger than 64 Mb, and break when X-rayed in airport security.
What can never be represented digitally is that intense feeling, when you see your picture come to life in the developer fluid in a lab. It's the feeling of controlling the whole process from taking the picture, developing the film, creating the prints and see the final represenation developing itself on baryte paper. For me that's still pretty intistinguishable from magic.
I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot
On a related note: I think there's actually a huge advantage to fixed focal lenses. They slow you down!
They force you to really engage with the picture you intend to take. You can't just zoom in on your motive and snap away and I always thought that's a good thing.
Take comfort in the fact that most of the people poo-pooing film here aren't actually serious photographers and have little or no experience with the nature of film photography.
I managed a full-service film lab back in the early 90s. C-41 neg, E-6 chrome, enlargements, copy prints/negs/slides, everything (we didn't do K-14, but just about everything else). We processed several hundred rolls a day, and I personally shot 10-15 rolls a week (we got film at cost, and processing was free).
So, yeah, I have quite a lot of experience with the nature of film photography.
Once the first decent DSLRs appeared on the market, I switched and never looked back.
Oh, I understand why someone might want to do it, in the same way that someone might want to, say, weave cloth by hand -- as an interesting hobby.
I was objecting to the implied snobbery in the OP, e.g. "if you actually knew what you were doing, you'd want to shoot film for everything".
Yes, I do know what I'm doing, and no, I don't want to shoot film. Neither do the vast majority of working professional photographers (I'm not one, myself, but I know a fair number of them). Digital has become better in just about every respect you can name. Yes, you can find the occasional art photographer who still shoots film, but there aren't many of them.
The film guys are exactly like the vinyl record guys -- they're basing their preference on factors other than quantifiable objective data.
I should add that no one is suggesting professional photographers with throughput requirements should switch to film. Digital makes life a lot easier in many ways for under-pressure professionals. The only people who will shoot film these days are art photographers looking for either film textures or the way film alters their creative process, and amateur enthusiasts who enjoy shooting film mostly for process reasons. That's no different than a lot of other hobbies. (Why would you drive a vintage sports car, anyway? They're expensive, break down, and can't haul groceries for crap. By quantifiable objective data, they're terrible cars.)
I'm not a professional photographer, but a fairly serious amateur - I broke 10k photos/year at peak, and have been published and done minor gallery shows. I'll shoot a few rolls of film a year, entirely for fun. I enjoy the process, and use it to impose restrictions on myself. (The last time I shot film, I was with a friend who was modeling for me. I told her we had 36 photos available, and that was that. It really made us think, rather than just blowing through 10x that many because we could.) If I need to shoot volume, or use studio lighting, or work in any sort of difficult lighting conditions, I'll use digital, absolutely.
It's quite possible to shoot both digital and film, for different reasons, and not just be a pretentious hipster who doesn't care about "quantifiable objective data".
There so, so is much more to a good photo (art) than quantifiable objective data. IQ is only one component of a good photo, and even IQ is subjective because it is impossible to design a lens that is perfect in every aspect because correcting certain abberations can make other ones worse.
That's why I think there is still a place for film. Fidelity doesn't equal quality.
I don't know why you'd want to base your preference for something intended to provoke an emotional reaction on "quantifiable objective data". That's like saying I shouldn't love my wife because there are other women who are thinner.
Nobody is saying "If you actually knew what you were doing, you'd want to shoot film for everything." Someone is, in fact, saying "The only reason to shoot film is because you're a pretentious hipster". Who's being judgmental here?
And likewise, "The only reason to shoot film is because you're a pretentious hipster" is a pretty good paraphrase for your response.
And I was the OP. I know what I said, and you paraphrased it terribly. If I thought people should shoot film for everything, I'd do it myself. Instead, film is maybe 2-3% of my output.
I've been shooting for almost 25 years, and invested lots of money into 35mm cameras and lenses. To replace my equipment with digital equivalents would cost many thousands of dollars. Also, I feel like film photography requires one to slow down and think more while shooting, a benefit that isn't readily apparent to every user, but (for me) results in much better photographs.
I've been shooting for almost 25 years, and invested lots of money into 35mm cameras and lenses. To replace my equipment with digital equivalents would cost many thousands of dollars.
I feel compelled to point out for passers by that this is not really completely true: very few 35mm lens formats are wholly incompatible with modern digital bodies, and most support graceful degradation for things like autofocus. However, the crushing truth is that older optics are often insufficient for modern digital full frame sensors. A normal f/1.8 50mm plastic-fantastic Canon lens will give you sharper resolving power 90% of the time than an older equivalent, and only costs $100. Sure, you lose something in bokeh, but that's often irrelevant. Also, there are many compelling technologies that have emerged in lenses recently that are very useful for realistic shooting scenarios: stronger autofocus, quieter operation, better anti-flare coatings, lighter construction, superior per-image documentation (eg. specific zoom lens position recording in EXIF), ability to immediately shift between a far broader range of sensitivities than film and shoot confidently in near-dark, etc. You get none of that staying still, even though the benefits of equipment familiarity should never be understated. Where film does shine is resolution with good optics and larger (>35mm) formats, and dynamic range (though this will come under threat soon, and cannot match multi-exposure HDR).
All of these things are true, but to get good quality glass for a new digital camera would cost much more than I have to spend. I can also get very high quality glass for obsolete cameras for next to nothing.
I'm not a film apologist - digital is awesome, and for most use cases, superior. If I were a working photographer, I'd definitely be shooting digital. For artistic photography though, on a hobbyist level, I'm fine with film. When I need a digital camera, I have a pretty decent sensor built into my phone that I can use.
I don't understand why you can't use old glass on a new digital body?
The only 'problem' is that the smaller sensor means that the old glass is effectively longer. In practice it means that some of the old glass gives beautiful results because you are only using the centre part of the lens, resulting in less distortion.
You can sometimes use old glass, but there are a lot of downsides. A lot of modern cameras put image stabilization in the lens. Old lenses can't autofocus, and that is crippling on some cameras. Also some meters and sensors don't necessarily work with the old lenses.
> I don't understand why you can't use old glass on a new digital body?
While certain of the new digital bodies are compatible with certain older film bodies and can use the same lenses and accessories, that's not universally the case, AFAIK.
As a rule, new DSLRs by major manufacturers (Canon, Nikon) can use the old lenses of the brand. Not always all of them, but an impressive amount of them.
Even the newest Nikon cameras can use F-mount lenses from 1959. Some of the metering modes are not available in some or all cameras. Some cheaper digital cameras cannot autofocus with lenses that don't have built-in autofocus motor.
> Some cheaper digital cameras cannot autofocus with lenses that don't have built-in autofocus motor.
Unless the camera system had autofocus in the body (which, as far as I've been experienced with, really only is medium format bodies) the lens always has had autofocus. Canon, Nikon etc.
The problem is that a lot of adapters for old lenses only feed mechanical (if even) instructions to the lens, for aperture and the like, and don't send over autofocus instructions.
Nikon lenses have only had autofocus motors since about ~2000 (which is not a long time ago in terms of lenses).
Nikon's compatibility with old lenses is quite stunning. They did one major change to their mount in the 70s but every mid-range or highrr camera since then has had 100% compatibility with any lens. Metering, aperture control, everything. The AF system still works too. You just have to use your hand as the AF motor and the camera will give you an indication when it thinks focus is correct.
Nikon AF lenses (which came to market in 1986) don't have built-in autofocus motor; the motor is in the camera body. Those days they were the film cameras, but also modern DSLR cameras have the motor (with the exception of cheapest consumer DLRs, i.e. the D3000 and D5000 series).
On the flip-side, as a person who has been doing cinematography for some time and has spent thousands on equipment over the years, I can say I would have never got into photography and cinematography if it wasn't digital.
Nothing about the experience of developing film sounds interesting to me.
Would you mind sharing other subtle nuances of shoot on film vs digital?
Digital is WAAAY easier to get started on, no doubt. It's also much easier to learn the basics of composition and exposure. Unbelievably so! You can "develop" your images in microseconds.
With film you have to supplement a lot of what's achievable in digital via guessing and checking with careful thought. You also have many fewer opportunities to get the shot right before you exhaust your film and probably blow the moment replacing it.
This makes film into a forcing function to perform excellent technique and to pre-visualize your shot. This creates better technique.
It's also nice that film has a very high effective resolution (when drum scanned), that film grain is a favorable aesthetic right now (it was usually considered ugly before digital), and that film has a logarithmic response to light meaning that it can handle a wider dynamic range than digital.
The logarithmic response to light is the first non-emotional benefit to film photography I have seen in these discussions. Thanks for pointing that out.
Emotional benefits don't really help me understand the difference between film and digital. It seems too anecdotal of an experience for me to take it seriously. Might be me though...
For better and worse, photography is largely an artistic endeavor. Finding emotional appeal is a big part of that.
On the other hand, scientific imaging is definitely something where non-emotional performance matters and I doubt people use film for any kind of scientific work these days.
> film has a logarithmic response to light meaning that it can handle a wider dynamic range than digital.
Not sure if that situation still exists in DV but for digital photography that stopped being true a long time ago (the balance started shifting almost 10 years ago), most digital sensors support more stops than even the best brands of film.
I went and looked it up to be sure and yeah, looks like empirically I'm off base with the dynamic range question.
That said, subjectively I still feel that way. It might have something to do with digital noise and how the experience of actually witnessing different exposures feels between the two media.
I see a lot of photographers starting out not learning the craft. Some of the convenience of digital can reinforce bad habits. You can shoot a thousand photos in a few minutes, switching between a bunch of modes and options that you don't truly understand, and inevitably get a few decent photos. This isn't a fault of digital, it's just human behavior. I think for this reason, a lot of schools are still using film when teaching photography.
As an artist, I have a use for both digital and film photography. There's something about the way film feels, and the way the process of shooting film makes me feel, that makes me enjoy it so much more. My old Pentax cameras are very substantial, physical objects. The shutter opens and closes, and you can feel it - it's a physical act. Digital cameras don't have the same physicality about them. I still use both digital and film, they each have their own advantages to me and have their place.
Speaking as someone who did lots of film photography over many years. I was actually pretty interested in cinematography back when I was school but the the technical/financial hurdles just turned me off. Super-8 or early videocams with huge battery backs. What I would have given for even a small P&S or cameraphone of today.
Darkroom work was rewarding in its own way (for B&W). But, honestly, it was always a means to an end. I knew people who would spend all day making the perfect print. I never had that kind of patience.
There's definitely a balance. Smartphones have opened a huge world of possibilities that were otherwise inaccessible. I'm amazed that people are shooting feature films on smartphones - that's truly exciting!
I'm not one for strong opinions either way, I think there's a place for film photography and also for digital, and I like both.
I enjoy B&W film photography as a hobby. I do not think I would enjoy any sort of film cinematography, due to the larger scale. A 24 frame roll of photo film is one thing but a reel of cinema film is another!
" I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot; I can't fallback on "guess and check" for exposure or composition."
Funny, I shoot film on my Minolta X700 (for over 25 years) because I DON'T have to slow down. What I see in my viewfinder is exactly what I'm going to see on film. The joys of real SLR versus Digital SLR. Your camera screen is not reliable for color reproduction - raw optics are.
Film doesn't necessarily match the color response of the eye any more than digital sensors do. Fujifilm's Velvia film was renowned for extreme saturation, not accurate color reproduction. And optical viewfinders don't take into account exposure length either, so they won't give an accurate view of long exposure shots.
If you shoot raw you can always tweak the color balance in post-production anyway.
"And optical viewfinders don't take into account exposure length either"
The Minolta X700 does do that via a secondary faux-shutter mechanism and a light sensor. If you actually bothered to have a battery installed (which dies after about 8 shots,) the tiny auto-exposure sensor inside would take over and the faux secondary shutter would move out of the way.
The shutter in an X700 is timed electronically and won't work without battery power, a common fault occurs when one tiny capacitor in the timing mechanism fails, preventing the shutter from releasing.
I have no idea what the faux shutter is because the camera had a fairly conventional horizontal fabric shutter. The actual innovatation is with the closed-loop AE mode where the camera will account for a faulty aperture or more importantly, non-TTL flash by measuring light reflected off the film in real time.
Most DSLRs I know of use the same mirror and pentaprism arrangement as a traditional SLR. Yes, they often do have an additional digital screen, but I only use that when I'm trying to find a specific shot on the card.
Yes, and they all pretty much suck. Auto-focusing optics that can't handle a scene because the sensor thinks there's changes in focus from even the slightest noise, poor color reproduction on built-in screens, sensors sensitive to even the slightest jitter of the internal components, shutter roll effects in video, and more. Almost every one of these problems is not happening in an analog SLR camera.
1) Autofocus can be turned off if you don't like it.
2) There's no (electronic) "screen" involved when you're looking through the viewfinder of a good digital SLR. It works exactly the same way as the viewfinder on film SLR. Exactly.
3) The same is true with respect to "sensors". Every DSLR I've used lets you shoot in full manual mode. No sensors involved.
4) I'm not sure what "video" has to do with it, since you can't take video on a (still) film SLR anyway.
"Autofocus can be turned off if you don't like it."
Excepting some lenses themselves have one built-in that you cannot disable.
"There's no (electronic) "screen" involved when you're looking through the viewfinder of a good digital SLR"
Tell that to my Sony SLT which has... wait for it... an electronic viewfinder. Oh, and many people find that focusing manually using an EVF is easier than with an OVF because the EVF allows you to magnify an area to clearly see when the subject snaps into sharp focus (assuming no cruddy interpolation,) which is why DSLRs are coming with an electronic viewfinder.
"Every DSLR I've used lets you shoot in full manual mode. No sensors involved."
Is that including the sensor which is required to take the picture?
"I'm not sure what "video" has to do with it, since you can't take video on a (still) film SLR anyway."
What do you think is inside a Super-8 camera (which has still film modes?) The exact operating mechanisms, down to the split prism (well, some used a half-mirrored optic) that you would find in a typical SLR. Oh, and then there's this thing called rapid continuous shot (battery assisted, of course) where you can shoot up to 30 shots per second with my old camera, which means... wait for it... VIDEO SPEED PHOTOGRAPHY.
I'm only a photography dilettante, but I'm a pretty decent golfer who chooses to use older equipment that is arguably less performant because of the emotional connection I feel with what I choose to play (ex: equipment from 15 years ago that I couldn't afford back then). I think that sort of emotional satisfaction shouldn't be understated for our passion pursuits.
It's like a hammer vs an automatic electrical nail driver. Sure, the hammer is an old, primitive, slow, and occasionally painful technology, while the electrical nail driver is modern, convenient, and fast. But sometimes a hammer is the right tool for the job, and it would be a shame if hammers stopped being made.
I shoot digital almost exclusively. However for a wedding in Tuscany I went with a medium format older than most of america, and a 35mm rangefinder (along with my nikon and stock 30mm prime lens)
First things: Film is a massive faff. Xrays, heat, light. All pains.
However each film type has a different way of handling/rendering light.
I had:
o Ektar 100 (120mm)
o portra 160 (35mm)
o Ilford XP2 135 (35mm)
First things, unlike digital, it gracefully degrades when you are operating around the edges of high exposure. Shooting into the bright summer sun yields really pleasing results (details in both sky and subject[1][2])
the Ilford makes everything look like a picture from a local news article.
But, I'm not a film purist. I was in VFX for the apogee of 35mm film. I know how much of an utter faff it can be. Digital Cinema cameras have surpassed film by quite a way. (unless they are latter generation RED cameras, those things are colour blind.)
A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity. But Damnit, film just looks "real"
[1]in most digital cameras, everything is log, so most of the information is in the lower exposure ranges, however there are complications.
[2] the scanner of course is log as well, but you can do things to get around it.
> the Ilford makes everything look like a picture from a local news article.
Heh heh. B&W film is a totally different world than color (although it's possible to make it similar if you scan after development). Wrapping one's head around color filters is a valuable and enlightening experience. The development itself is easy enough to do in your bathroom. Then the real fun begins: printing.
The digital editing experience pales in comparison to printing B&W film. Cropping becomes a physical activity, where you use your hands to move the rulers on the easel or the projection plane up and down and experiment with different aspect ratios and sizes and ratios of image to border. The act of making each print is often in itself almost a sort of "performance," as you, the artist, are affecting the image's development in real-time by dodging/burning/applying other effects. And the wait to develop gives you time to contemplate what you're creating, where your mind is spinning and coming up with other creative ideas as you gently agitate the photo paper and watch your image slowly come into being.
The darkroom itself is a kind-of meditative creative space, and I have extremely fond memories of staying up while in college till 2 or 3 AM, making prints and messing around with my photos. Lightroom and Photoshop are useful tools, and I've also spent a significant amount of time editing in those pieces of software, but it's hard to beat the satisfaction of making a black & white photo print on nice fiber paper.
If you're a professional wedding photographer, don't bother, it's a waste of your time and is probably not relevant to the product you're trying to deliver: memories of the event that just took place. But if you're looking for a visual creativity outlet with a deep history and a lot of flexibility and room to explore different levels of abstraction/ideas, it's certainly worth a try.
> A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity. But Damnit, film just looks "real"
Do you have a clear sense of why film looks "real" to you? Is it because film is a more accurate rendering of how we perceive light, or is it because you grew up on film?
There were plenty of films that didn't represent the real world accurately, and plenty of digital filters that don't either. But I find that the default settings for most digital cameras look about as realistic as the default settings for most film cameras did when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
I find the default settings for most digital cameras over-sharpen, blow out highlights, and create color fringes which looks less realistic.
though, sure, certainly all photos have a psychological component, and film may also look more "real" (absent significant defects) because culturally been ingrained. Once the culture changes, it will probably be film which looks less real over time. I wouldn't attribute it to individual tastes, though.
>and create color fringes which looks less realistic.
Interesting. I believe that lenses tend not to be corrected for chromatic aberration as much as they used to be because chromatic aberration is relatively easy to correct in post-processing. (Being lax about chromatic aberration can give lens designers more leeway to correct other more serious aberrations.)
It's not that, because classic film lenses are used on digital mirror less cameras rather routinely. Film has a pleasing, gradual acutance compared to digital - especially in high contrast areas.
Edit: but you are correct that chromatic aberration, distortion, and other things probably take a backseat to resolution these days, since those things are easier to correct in post.
I think its mostly that its what "historic" photos look like. I don't mean the lomo plastic lens rubbish.
Colours are more on the green/blue end (well dependent on what film of course) The dynamic range is well, film-ey, Highlights are smooth, as are gradients. Also 35mm lenses have shallower depth of field compared to a iphone sensor or similar.
The instagram filters don't really cut it. Its obvious it comes from a digital camera(depth of field, bad grain, silly colours)
I don't think that its accurate, I think its because all the iconic photos of the 40s-90s are in film
One analogy that I don't seem to find agreement is many is that shooting slide film is like saving only in jpeg/tiff on a DSLR: you get an image that is immediately ready to use but subject to the interpretation of a chemical formulation (or internal processing of a camera). Negative is more like RAW format, need more work and may never look as nice, but deep down it was more faithful than other options.
I've been in VFX during film's heyday as well. I even run a telecine/scanning side business, but I would never go back to film now that we have wonders from ARRI. It's nice to know people are still into film and it's not going away so easily. I mean, it's gone from the mainstream, but it's still around and looks like it will be for quite some time.
I was thinking about bringing my old AE-1 and my old rolls with me on my trip to Europe. I guess the xrays would kill them but they're already long expired so who knows if they aren't already dead. I don't even remember if you can process these fine grain films on any store, though I guess if it's all C-41 it's all the same.
X-ray does not actually kill film. It will just slightly increase the esposure. But on the films I took through X-Ray scanners I never noticed this. Also you can take the film with you in your carry-on and ask the person at the scanner to let your film pass unscanned. Worked for me back when I was concerned about this. :-)
Oh and film also doesn't die after its expiry date, I made enlargements of some shots from ten-year-past-expiry film recently, not technically perfect but I love the look. Try a roll and see what you get!
I've never had any trouble getting film manually inspected, in recent times, in many countries. It seems routine to the screeners, which surprises me every time.
X-rays definitely do fog film though. If you care enough to use film, but not enough to ask someone to manually inspect it... that's weird to me.
I was able to avoid X-ray exposure to all of my film (some of which was ISO 1600 that I was pushing to 3200) during a trip to Washington D.C. not long after the 9/11 attacks. At that time, all of the security checkpoints at the airports, monuments, etc. seemed to be on edge. However, by politely requesting hand checks of my camera and film I was always accommodated and never had my equipment X-rayed. Checkpoints that had swab based explosive scanners always utilized them during the manual checks.
I was worried about the lower ISO film as well because going to ten different museums/monuments a day meant ten security checkpoints. I didn't want X-ray exposures to accumulate for even the low ISO film.
That depends on the sensitivity of the film and the strength of the X-ray imager.
100 ISO through carry on once? Probably no issue. Instead of once, 8x? You'll see things. ISO 1600 through carry on once - you'll see lines. 100 on checked luggage? It's gone.
> A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity. But Damnit, film just looks "real"
And what of larger formats? Where do you get your 4"x5" digital back, or 8"x10"? Maybe you can do it with a scanning back, but it's hardly equivalent.
The resolution benefits of larger formats aren't as big as you might initially think for a number of closely interrelated reasons.
First, you always end up shooting at narrower apertures with larger formats (as the lenses have longer focal lengths for the same field of view, and hence less depth of field for the same field of view). In practice it's rare to shoot with a wider aperture than f/16 with 4x5. Diffraction therefore negates some of the potential resolution advantage of the larger sensor.
Second, large format lenses typically don't have the same resolution as lenses for smaller formats. This is partly because you can't have your optical cake and eat it (wider coverage comes at the price of lower resolution, all else being equal), and partly because the lenses are designed to be shot at small apertures anyway.
Third, owing to the typical focal lengths used, near-perfect focus will only be achievable in small areas of most 4x5 photos. You may get some of the resolution benefits you were hoping for, but only on that one tree that you focused on!
Fourth, you typically need long exposures with 4x5. Resolutions above ~20MP can't be achieved if the tiniest amount of camera shake or subject movement occurs.
In my experience (with cheap 4x5 equipment), I can usually capture slightly more detail than my 24MP D3300 with kit lens, if everything goes right. But then, anything you shoot with a 4x5 camera has to be standing pretty still, and stitching multiple shots to increase resolution is trivial with digital.
So I'd say that as awesome as a 4x5 negative is, the resolution advantages are marginal at best. It's absolutely not the case that you are getting 10x the resolution because the negative is 10x as long/wide.
This isn't in line what what others photographers (including myself) see.
Many respectable sources estimate 35mm to approach 24MP in the best conditions with specific film, 120 to be in the 40-80MP range, and 4x5 to be 100-300MP.
To address some of your other points: good LF glass can approach 70/70/50 line pairs per mm which is still really good, diffraction doesn't affect resolution as much as some people think, and f11-f16 is the sweet spot on a lot of modern LF glass - you don't need long exposures with those apertures and Portra 400, for example.
Honestly, the claim that 35mm film can achieve 24MP of resolution is pretty wild. That might be the theoretical resolving limit (depending on how exactly you translate lpm to megapixels, which is not so trivial), but no real world comparison that I've seen has ever shown 35mm film resolving as much details as a 24MP digital camera.
As far as what photographers like you are "seeing", then for goodness sake, if you are actually seeing 35mm film capture the same amount of detail as a 24MP DSLR, let's see the photos!
The f-number is a ratio, not a specific diameter. f/16 is not the same between a 4x5 lens and a 35mm lens of equivalent angle of view. A 90 mm lens at f/16 has an entrance pupil diameter of 5.65 mm, while a 28 mm lens at f/16 has an entrance pupil diameter of 1.75 mm.
So no, diffraction is not an inherent limiting factor of shooting 4x5 and you will in fact gain resolution. You will only lose depth of field (and your savings) when you go to larger formats.
Diffraction effects depend on the ratio, however, not the diameter. I didn't get through all of the forum post you linked to, but if it's saying otherwise, it's wrong.
The reason 4x5 appears to suffer less from diffraction for a given aperture is simply that the sensor is bigger, so that the blurring has relatively less effect.
Hmm, kind of the opposite here, I've never found anything supporting the contrary view!
Here's a quote from the forum discussion linked below:
> Yes, diffraction does depend on the absolute diameter of the aperture, at least that is what determines the angle of the diffracted rays. But with a longer focal length, the rays diverge farther before they hit the film, so the Airy disc (the fuzzy blob created by diffraction) becomes larger with longer lenses. When you get done crunching the numbers you find that the final result -- the physical manifestation of diffraction on the film -- is dependent only on the f/stop, and the focal length and absolute diameter of the aperture make no difference. A 20mm lens at f/22 will create the same size Airy disc as will a 200mm lens at f/22. In short, all lenses will produce the same amount of diffraction when set at the same f/stop.
So of this is correct, it's in a sense true that diffraction depends only on the absolute diameter, but the effect of diffraction on resolution is dependent only on the f stop.
If your 4x5s are barely beating your D3300, that's on you. Only the higher end medium format digital really matches 4x5 in terms of resolution. Now, if your argument is that you only print 16x20 so it doesn't matter, then that's fine, but that's a completely different argument.
The reasons to use large format, as I see it, are as follows:
* Lens choice. There's a wealth of options here that you simply don't get with smaller formats
* Movements. The mild DoF hit is easy to accept when you have complete control over the focal plane, as well as the distortion control
* Film. Digital PP still isn't quite up to replicating the chemistry. Someone good, and with a significant effort, can get really close, but it's not quite the same.
>If your 4x5s are barely beating your D3300, that's on you. Only the higher end medium format digital really matches 4x5 in terms of resolution
These two statements contradict each other. There is not much difference in resolution between 24MP and 50MP (4.9 : 7), so if I was getting ~50MP of resolution in my 4x5 negatives, you wouldn't expect to see a big difference, even if I was doing everything right.
>Moreover, if you do a 'DSLR' scan of the negative, you can get quite a bit more detail.
This is in fact what I do (using a very sharp pre-AI 55mm Micro Nikkor). I do get benefits from stitching multiple 24MP "scans", but this is because there is always some resolution loss in scanning. So, sure, I might end up with a 100MP file, but I find that I can typically reduce that down to around 30-40MP without losing any detail.
Do you have an example of a 100MP scan of a 4x5 negative that loses detail when reduced to, say, 50MP?
> A decent full frame 35mm digital will probably beat a film medium format comfortably on colour reproduction, resolution and clarity.
I think this is true for B&W films.. the grain even on medium format is still visible. But, I would be surprised vs shooting a color slide film like provia 100F with very fine grain structure and getting a proper drum scan.
Medium format, with fine film, excellent lenses, ideal lab conditions, and a drum scan, can have more detail than a Nikon D810. Any comparisons of shots taken in the wild I've seen favor the digital camera, though. Also, drum scans are /expensive/.
Ordinarily, airport x-ray machines will not fog film. At least, not appreciably, not at the ISO you are using and not at the levels that airport x-ray machines use, not unless the technician is feeling particularly vindictive. The old warning about x-rays was for ISOs above 800 or 1000 or so.
As one who has been a photographer for 50 years I have a great appreciation for the technologies involved. Digital imaging has advantages to be sure, but I think it's best to think of film vs. digital as two distinct media with only superficial resemblance. That's very similar to acrylic vs. oil painting, which, for very good reasons are considered distinct media.
In the world of art, "old" media don't really die, interest may come and go but never disappears completely. Casein-based paints were used in ancient Egypt, egg tempera dates to the middle ages, oil painting goes back 600 years, etching was invented in the 1400's.
BTW acrylic paints are very recent inventions, products innovated by Bocour and Golden in the 1940's, modern forms coming available in the early 1960's. But despite its technological benefits older techniques are hardly obsolete.
Same with digital vs. film. They are different media with distinct aesthetics. Film will never die, and that's a very good thing for the sake of the art of photography.
The revival of Ektachrome is a heartening sign, but I sure wish Kodachrome were still around, there has never been any medium that was its equal.
I don't know about this. Been shooting 30 years, including a couple years at a college paper (Daily paper needs lots of photos). I think film will be very niche.
We shot film at the college paper, specifically black and white, 400 iso, but can be pushed to maybe 1600 (it starts getting really grainy at this point. For a newspaper it doesn't matter). Being a daily paper getting photos out quickly was often a priority.
Slide film is way pickier on exposure than Black and White, with very little margin for error on the under/over (low dynamic range so to speak)
Developing film and making prints was always kind of a pain (we didn't know it at the time having no alternative..). While making the print, watching the image appear in the developer in the darkroom was almost magical, trying to make a good print was often frustrating). While printing we'd adjust the contrast, dodge a burn (lighten and darken regions). It was time consuming and error prone and not easily repeatable. Dust shows up as white spots on your prints too, which you won't see till the red light comes off.
Ansel Adams is the consute example of someone who made amazing prints by dodging and burning a lot, post processing. (He co-invented the "zone system" of printing.. [1])
The photo ink-jet printers these days are good enough to reproduce a lot of photos.
Honestly I don't miss film. I get to focus more on composition and subject, rather than the tech details. Except the sorting, we all take way too many pictures these days.
My favorite thing about film shooting isn't the look of film, but rather how the camera works. Digital cameras have so much distracting/confusing crap on them. Reducing the world to just aperture and shutter speed, with a comfy cushion of exposure, really makes life more pleasant.
That said, I love auto-ISO to death. It's my favorite thing about digital photography. On film, you're either compromising shutter speed or compromising aperture to get the exposure. So nice to be able to easily adjust the third variable in the algebra.
Definitely agree on your point about slide exposure relative to black and white, too. Slide film is almost as fussy as digital. What's the fun of that?
I have fond memories of B&W darkroom work--including having to run into the darkroom after some event to develop negs, contact them, and then print them. Though I can't say I really miss it.
And I don't use auto-ISO but find being able to switch ISOs--including to rather high values--is one of the aspects of digital that is probably underappreciated.
But color slides, which is all I did latterly until digital came along, was mostly a sort of fussy way of capturing color images for reproduction and projection. Absent spending a lot of money and effort, you were pretty much stuck with what you captured, which may have a certain purity to it but could also be very frustrating.
I did somewhat obsess over different film stocks but that's sort of in the same bucket as playing with chemistry to push B&W film. Sort of a geek hobby but not really an end in itself at the end of the day.
I used to do a lot of dance performance photography, which is a real technical challenge - low light and fast motion. Being able to shoot 6400 ISO and still get a decent image was a lifesaver! But it was good to be able to auto-ISO to deal with varying light while keeping aperture and shutter consistent so I know what I'm getting.
> "... but rather how the camera works. Digital cameras have so much distracting/confusing crap on them."
One thing I always miss about the film days is the utter simplicity of film equipment vs. digital. Traveling was so much easier in the old days. In the carry-on just needed to pack a couple of camera bodies, a few lenses, stash of film and optionally, a flash. With digital it's necessary to keep track of a daunting armload of chargers, cables, spare batteries, SD cards as well as bodies, lenses and flash.
And of course, just about have to pack a computer to do something with the images, after all we paid for the capabilities and damn it, we're gonna use 'em.
Yes silver-based photography will be niche, no doubt it already is. I'd emphasize that doesn't mean it's going to disappear, or cease to be a legitimate art form in its own right. Film won't compete with digital imaging, best to think of it as an entirely different medium.
Of course you're right about transparency films having little latitude, especially on the overexposure side, but this is also true for digital cameras. A lot of the "old" techniques are still applicable in the new digital world.
The astonishing possibilities of film are exemplified by many artists, one of the all time geniuses IMO is Jerry Uelsmann [0] whose work back in the 1960's anticipated imagery of the digital era.
Interestingly, there's a shop in town that specializes in old film cameras and related equipment. Speaking with the owner I thought most of the customers would be old-timers like me. To my surprise he said nearly all his paying customers were under 30 years old. To them, digital is old hat, they were looking to try something different and "authentic". Most of us experienced photographers were using digital gear. FWIW his business is thriving.
But this is not just about film. One has also to be able to create high-quality prints, for people to be able to appreciate the image and understand the reason the artist has gone through all the trouble.
Using film in cinematography, on the other hand, no longer makes sense at all, especially as more and more computer-generated imagery is being used - just as it would make little sense to use film to record still images that were generated by a computer.
I think this is a good call from Kodak. People are enamored with less accurate reproduction of vinyl records. So it's no surprise that up and coming hipsters will soon be shooting with another media that capture a less accurate version of reality, calling it superior and claiming they like it better.
> People are enamored with less accurate reproduction of vinyl records.
I just did a quick estimate and would say that there're around 300 vinyl records in my household, which I suppose is at the low end for people I know with a record player. A few years back, I owned one or two at most, and didn't have a functional player. That seems to have shifted similarly for a lot of people. You can buy the things new at such resolutely unhip outlets as Barnes & Noble, if you're so inclined.
I'll be pretty happy if vinyl settles into a role as the end-state consensus equilibrium of physical media for music, which is roughly what seems to be happening. Still-playable records encompass most of the era of recorded music, require no digital computation to play, and are substantial enough as artifacts to incentivize paying money for units of art. They're also physically attractive objects with attendant ritual protocols that are easily legible across every living generation.
Accuracy of reproduction is, above some baseline threshold, not the real concern here.
All of which, I guess, is just to say: You're probably right that this is unsurprising. There's a market. "Hipsters" is a convenient shorthand, but it's worth remembering that technologies usually have important properties which are lost to succeeding modes of tech, even when things like the appearance of film grain can in theory be easily reproduced by a filter or what have you. We use the new stuff and we forget the real dimensions of the old stuff.
You're right about the ritual, and the inherent limits caused by physical things (1s and 0s notwithstanding).
Digging a record out and dealing with a sound system is more work than opening up Spotify. You're also not already on your computer, surrounded by distractions. So, being invested in the process and having to make deliberate steps to engage in something else encourages people to focus more on the music and the experience.
Also, and this sentiment is probably a meme or something, but I feel that being able to take unlimited pictures has hurt casual photography. The extreme example here is people living through their phones, taking pictures of every bite of food, etc. A disposable camera really made me think about each picture I took (limited # photos, paying for the camera, have to go get them developed).
This. When putting on a record, I sit down to LISTEN. I am not putting it on to have some music in the background while I do other stuff. I listen.
Now, obviously I could listen just as well using Spotify, and on occasion I do - but to me, the whole ritual of bringing out an album, putting it on the turntable, brushing off the lint (if any), putting down the needle...
It all sets the stage. It gets me in the state of mind, if you like, where I can sit down and enjoy music at the fullest.
It is not because it sounds better (It doesn't, unless someone f---ed up the mastering).
It is not because of any inherent superiority of analog systems (they aren't).
It is because my stupid mind plays tricks on me and will not let me relax properly unless I put some effort into listening to the music.
Also agree fully on the 'advantage' of having limited exposures available - again, this is a problem of lacking self discipline, but I find when reviewing my photos that I have a significantly higher keeper ratio when shooting film; as I only get 38 (35mm) or eight (6x9) exposures on a roll of film, I tend to think a little bit more before pressing the shutter release - taking the couple of extra seconds to fine-tune the composition, make sure I haven't got too much clutter in the frame, etc, etc.
Again - if I were better at showing my mind who calls the shots, digital would be just as great. Problem is just I tend to go all Texan (no offense) with a digital camera - lots of shooting, sort out the good ones afterwards. Spend more time in front of a computer.
I sometimes take pictures of people speaking at events, and wow, I'm really glad to not be doing this on film. I might take 50 pictures to end up with one or two decent shots, that don't have the speaker's face in some grotesque contortion that I absolutely do not notice at all while just watching with my eyes...
Absolutely. Horses for courses, etc. (I mostly shoot things which don't act like that; architecture and landscapes, mostly.)
I bet a lot of sports photographers, too, were quite relieved when they could offload their F5s for something digital.
(The F5 being a beast, by the way - if memory serves, you could get 8 or even 9 fps out of it. A friggin' FILM camera. As if that wasn't enough, Nikon would be happy to sell you multiple F5s (each with its dedicated lens, of course) and an expensive thingamajig which let them shoot synchronously, but with an offset so that you'd get [n] times 8fps - though at a staggering cost.)
I love my F5. Closest I'll ever come to wielding a gatling gun.
Most people talking about "accurate" have no idea wtf they're talking about. I'm a musician, and I've produced records. At best, vinyl vs digital reproduction aren't "better" than one another, just different. But personally, I think vinyl can be more true to the music.
Start with dynamic range, since that's one of the spots where the "But it's more accurate!" people get it wrong. In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound.
And why is this? Because either way, most audio reproduction equipment is in no way able to reproduce the sound of instruments in an "accurate" way. You cannot shove the massive sound of a 100 watt Marshall stack through a pair of iPod earbuds, any more than you can look accurately at the Grand Canyon through a pinhole. So records are a miniature of a real sound. The entire recording, mixing, and mastering process is built around trying to capture the essence, the spirit of the original sound (or an ideal sound) in a way that can be reproduced on car stereos, cheap headphones, and the like. And the sound itself isn't exactly accurate, not on a record where the acoustic guitar is as loud as the drum kit!
"In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound."
Garbage in, garbage out. What you're really saying is that good masters beat bad masters - nothing to do with vinyl at all. In the context of the larger discussion, this is disingenuous; the return of vinyl means that the new stuff will have the same "loudness war" problems that the digital stuff has. Unless you're claiming that artists are saving a super-duper special master just for their vinyl customers.
In a larger sense, this comment exemplifies the fallacy of gray[1]. Just because neither of them are perfectly accurate doesn't mean that CDs aren't more accurate.
To be absolutely clear here - I don't give two shits about "accurate". I care about reproducing the emotional content of the music. As a musician and a recording engineer, I take this stuff very seriously. I find the arguments for "accurate" to be utter nonsense 99% of the time, completely removed from the experience of music creation by people who have zero experience actually making music.
As for the fallacy of gray and the idea of loudness wars in vinyl mastering... nope. Two reasons. First, the loudness wars are a function of competitive reproduction on the radio or television. That competition doesn't really exist in the vinyl world, where listeners tend to listen to an entire album in a sitting. Second, it's not physically viable to make vinyl records much louder than they already are. High RMS volumes can make the needle jump the groove, or introduce a lot of downstream distortion (not the pretty kind).
Rather than fallacy of gray, this is more like saying you should eat with a bucket rather than a spoon because a bucket can hold larger bites. It doesn't matter if digital is technically "better" if there's no good way to take advantage of the additional benefits in can provide in practice.
(This all said, I'll record in digital rather than on tape, any day. The editing and management benefits are tremendous.)
I just complained about the post you're complaining about, but I'm also going to complain about yours.
There is actually a "super-duper special master just for vinyl" in many cases, with more dnamic range. The reason I've heard for that happening, though this could be wrong, is that the needle would be more likely to jump out of the groove with the loudness that CD masters are often getting. Whether that's true or not, the vinyl release often has a different, less compressed master. Some people rip the vinyl versions to digital for that reason.
Skipping is caused by high acceleration, so vinyl masters might use something called "acceleration limiting". The vinyl master might also mix the bass down to mono. So, in order to fix problems with needles jumping out of the groove, the solution is actually to apply more limiting and not less.
Vinyl has also been a production afterthought since about 1990. You'd create a stereo mixdown and send it to the mastering engineer--but by then it would often have some master bus compression already applied to it, equalization, and limiting. The mastering engineer would spend most of their time, day in and day out, working with music meant for CDs, and maybe they'd tweak the CD master a little bit to make it acceptable for vinyl. So, basically, by the time the loudness war started, people didn't care enough about vinyl to make a special vinyl master, and by the time the vinyl resurgence hit us, the loudness war was mostly over.
Hell, there's a ton of vinyl out there where they used the CD as a master, rather than using the original mixdown. The mastering engineer will cut a normal CD and send it to another mastering engineer which specializes in vinyl.
Of course, there are exceptions. There are records mastered separately for CD and vinyl, and there are artists who would deliver pristine mixdowns to the mastering engineers. But the vast majority of vinyl releases are not special. There are even plenty of cases where the vinyl master was butchered a bit compared to the CD.
I'm not trying to argue that CDs are better than vinyl in practice. I'm just arguing that there's not a technical reason to prefer vinyl, at least for most releases. If the difference you perceive is important to you, then the difference is real.
That's changing these days, as vinyl mastering becomes a forethought and not an afterthought, and cds are going the way of the dodo, in favor of compressed digital formats like mp3. Vinyl is selling well and is profitable. And it's not selling because people are pretentious hipsters who don't understand quality. It's selling because vinyl creates a better listening experience. People are getting back to listening to music other than as something to decorate their jogging.
The "better listening experience" is a tired argument, if you have a sentimental / emotional attachment to vinyl then the advantage is very real but for those of us not attached to the medium the listening experience is not better.
Vinyl may sell "well" but not if you compare it to other media, such as CDs. Even though CDs continue to collapse in popularity they still move 8x as many units as vinyl (and they're more durable, smaller, higher fidelity, etc). Albums instead are getting mastered for iTunes and Spotify, and that's had a much better effect on master quality than the vinyl resurgence.
I'm in audio too, and while what you say is true, it feels kind of like saying digital photography is worse than film if everyone's shooting with their exposure set five stops up. Then you can say "digital's clearly worse - look how blown out it all is!"
The loudness war is unfortunate, but a CD can be used properly to have plenty more dynamic range and plenty less noise than a record.
There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping.
Well, yeah. But that's a different issue than the "accuracy" line that's brought up by dudes who don't play instruments and have never mixed a song (or alternately, have little experience at professional-level photography and couldn't tell you the three factors of exposure if you asked).
This same argument has been made forever in photography too. There's no hope for "accuracy". Even if you ignore the obvious facts like 2-dimensional representation and tiny form, even just the light itself is something that is at best interpreted artistically by the photographer.
Good photography is about producing a piece of art which represents and evokes a scene the photographer saw. Film is a tool for doing that and the entire process surrounding it influences the choices the photographer/developer/printer makes in their interpretation of the scene. Digital is just another tool and has it's own downsides (its own "loudness war" for that matter, too).
While I've used digital SLRs almost exclusively for about 12 years, there's still something I enjoy about using film. Maybe it is less accurate, but it's less accurate in what I find to be an aesthetically pleasing way.
That said, I am surprised that Kodak is bringing back Ektachrome. I find it hard to believe that there would be enough users to warrant this, from a business perspective. I guess we'll see what happens. (I personally prefer Fuji film anyway...)
Most color films aren't designed to capture accurate colors, they're designed to look good. Portra, Velvia, the various -chromes, etc. are all deliberately inaccurate.
What you like about film is the color grading that the emulsion engineers designed for you.
Film-emulating post-processing is getting there, but it's not there yet. Even with a good digital capture that keeps the highlight information, it's very difficult to get a good film look. It's more than just curves adjustments. I've played around with some software that tries to simulate the chemical development process, and that seems on the right track, but it's not there yet. I tend to think this would be a good application for ML if someone did the work to take side-by-side images with a given film and digital.
Perhaps a larger concern is the chemicals that are required to develop the stuff and making sure they are disposed of responsibly and not just flushed down the drain. There's more important reasons than "liking how it looks". I know people will disagree, but a skilled photoshopper can often reproduce the look and feel of film with digital. And certainly can do things film could never do. I believe it's a good trade-off
> Perhaps a larger concern is the chemicals that are required to develop the stuff and making sure they are disposed of responsibly and not just flushed down the drain.
The same argument can be made for the disposal of electronic devices, the half life of digital camera bodies seems to be far shorter than that of film camera bodies. I know of at least one photo project on the subject: http://www.bitrotproject.com/ and i'm sure there are others.
I think what has happened here, in reference to your original comment, is that the decline of film sales has reached its end state; that being it has stabilized. The fact that there are millions of film camera bodies floating around means there will, at least for the short to medium term (decades), be a market for film. Hipsters or otherwise.
> There's more important reasons than "liking how it looks". I know people will disagree, but a skilled photoshopper can often reproduce the look and feel of film with digital. And certainly can do things film could never do. I believe it's a good trade-off
I agree, but the film vs digital argument is always reduced to boring technicalities like resolution, sharpness, colour rendering, etc etc. The most important reasons to shoot one camera over another, or one medium over another, is that it will inform your approach and ultimately your results. If you're working on the long term, then that matters.
> I know people will disagree, but a skilled photoshopper can often reproduce the look and feel of film with digital.
But why go through the hassle of photoshopping when you can just get the image out of the camera the way you want it? This is especially the case where you're taking a lot of pictures. All of that photoshopping would be tedious.
And why is a more "accurate" photo superior? Like take any famous photo and ask yourself: If the photo showed even more detail would it be better?
The issue with film is that you can't get an image "out of the camera," it must be developed first. In order to get a usable image, you must know how to properly develop the film yourself, or pay one of the handful of competent remaining labs to develop it for you.
It's a much more sustainable process to throw a digital filter on your image.
>The issue with film is that you can't get an image "out of the camera," it must be developed first. In order to get a usable image, you must know how to properly develop the film yourself, or pay one of the handful of competent remaining labs to develop it for you.
To some degree I think this is part of the reason that film photograph has retained some appeal. There is no instant feedback, the process forces you to be more deliberate with each photograph, and the techniques to create images with film are becoming more arcane each year.
Like many other things that have been made easier by technology, there is often lasting interesting in the art of doing something by hand even if there is an easier/faster/more efficient way to get the same result. See Etsy:IKEA, craft beer:Budweiser, Digital:Vinyl music etc. I see film photography headed towards a similar niche.
>To some degree I think this is part of the reason that film photograph has retained some appeal. There is no instant feedback
Leica took this philosophy to extremes when introducing the M-D a while ago - a digital rangefinder camera with no preview screen. It's one of those Marmite things, apparently. If I wanted to shoot without instant feedback, I'd use a film M, thankyouverymuch - but obviously, YMMV.
If you want a film look on a batch of digital photos, you'd be wise to use one of the very capable batch processing programs.
Digital is going to beat analog for processing times, but the argument for which one is subjectively better is going to go around in circles forever. I still like and will enjoy working with both.
It's interesting how this parallels the arguments around realism in painting. Once you have a machine that can produce a more accurate representation of a scene, the degree of accuracy becomes an aesthetic decision.
This might pass in commercial work, but right now only the nicest of digital filters can capture the je-ne-sais-quois of analog. Everything else looks subpar to a trained eye.
Good luck buying a large format digital camera with a high quality sensor, it'll cost you an arm and a leg. Film cameras are super cheap, you can get 35mms for free on yard sales or Craigslist. Their lenses also. A high quality 50mm prime lens with an old mount is absurdly cheap compared to its modern equivalent used on digital cameras - you can even get high quality prime lenses for free if you're ok with manual focus.
For some mounts, 40-50 year old lenses still work. The breakdown isn't film/digital; it's manufacturers deciding to (or not to) retain backwards compatibility for forward flexibility.
Film isn't necessarily less accurate than digital capture, especially with film cameras that do automatic exposure and focus. Film uses chemical reactions to capture light, and digital uses electrical signals. Accuracy is based on how we map these to their true colours.
Digital would make sense to be more precise (not accurate) than film, though.
Film is automatically much worse any time you need higher sensitivity because of low light situations and can't use a tripod or need to capture a more mobile target. 400 iso film in 35mm format is noisier than any modern DSLR used in 3200+ iso settings, any, even entry-level $400 Canon or Nikon.
Also, in terms of level of details it has been possibly a decade since DSLR have become much better than 35mm film. Medium and large format film was still better for a longer amount of time, but medium format cameras are a lot more cumbersome and large format cameras are something only the most dedicated would ever bother to carry anywhere.
This is one of the smallest medium format camera for comparison :
https://melbournestreetphotography.files.wordpress.com/2013/...
And it's a rangefinder, so it's basically unusable with telephoto lenses. Mirror based medium format cameras like the Hasselblad were things that pretty much never left indoor studios.
Correction: 35mm is grainier, not noisier. After staring at grain vs color noise in shadows for hours at a time, the aesthetics of grain are one of the reasons I still shoot film sometimes.
This is somewhat of a good point, I like film's aesthetics too. But, grain and noise are two different inter-related things.
A digital full-frame sensor (vs 35mm film) at the same settings is going to have much less noise. I love film. But the fact is that silver vs cmos is a losing battle of technologies.
Ever used a manual typewriter? I've got a lovely West German Olympia I picked up used. Very authentic writing experience...how authentic? It actually hurts after enough effort.
If every keyboard took the same amount of effort as the typewriter, 80% of the internet chatter would be gone because of the amount of physicality involved.
An odd benefit of vinyl records is that they're harder to copy, especially if the listener actually wants vinyl. Thus, the choice to distribute on vinyl might be a way to generate a return on the cost of recording.
Working with film was fun. It imposed many subjective qualities to one's imagery that do appeal to me--and when it worked, it worked well. But when it didn't, it was very frustrating. I honestly don't miss film or the perishable chemicals. If I'm up for pain, I'll go out shooting with just my Sigma DP Merrills and work the proprietary raws in SPP--that's as close to the "fun" of film I get, nowadays ...
Photographers who still enjoy film do so for the same reason that a lot of guitarists still enjoy tube amplifiers: it's reproduction is less accurate, but it's inaccurate in an aesthetically pleasing way.
I don't think that's particularly fair. With a sheet of 4x5 film, I can capture much more information than any digital camera on the market; even the $50,000 100MP "medium format" system cameras. Film has the disadvantages inherent in a chemical process; time and chemicals are required. But in terms of maximum information capture with minimum equipment cost, it wins.
If anything, the shortcuts that digital photographers take degrade the quality of the image. The tiny image circle of DSLR lenses means that you can't control the image at the time of exposure, and have to use information-destroying transforms in post-processing. In the end, it doesn't matter, art is art, and jacking up all the colors to a million gets you the likes on 500px. Nobody will notice that the lighting was poor or that some of your square-at-the-time-of-exposure pixels are now rectangles. (That's why everything in the grocery store contains sugar. Nobody ever complaints about too much color, and nobody ever complains about too much sugar. It's a great way to make something mediocre delicious for the mass market!) But there is some value in getting it right in-camera, if only for the sense of achievement.
I have a 6x9cm medium format rangefinder, but it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison to digital cameras. A much more direct comparison would be between my Canon EOS 55 and something like an EOS 6D. But regardless, I have a decent, although APS-C, DSLR (Canon 7D) yet I still shoot film for 99% of photographs that I take with anything other than a cell phone. Usually I use my Olympus OM-1 and a 50mm f/1.4 lens.
People used to make similar arguments about 35mm film. Now that that's firmly surpassed I guess 4x5 will do. 4x5 is only 16x the area of a 35mm sensor so it's not too far away, you will have to soon move on to 8x10 to make the same argument :)
Current APS sensor technology is around 15 stops of dynamic range and 50MP. 4x5 sheets of Portra can resolve 100-300MP with 18 stops of dynamic range.
Digital has beaten 135 film, but it still hasn't beaten 120 / medium format in several key areas. I would be surprised if digital beat 4x5 in the next 10 years because there's no substantial market for such a product.
You're just making my point exactly. You're getting 6 times the resolution out of 32 times the area. 35mm sensors are already common and that's already twice the area with better SNR. Maybe not all the 18 stops but close and it's also all semiconductor technology which improves for many other purposes than making sensors. There are also computational techniques to make the equivalent of a larger sensor from many small ones. We're coming at this from too many directions to not solve it. We'll soon need to have this discussion with 8x10.
The resolution of the sensor is pretty irrelevant. Camera and subject motion, the MTF of the lens, and diffraction are much bigger factors (once you get to a certain point). You're almost diffraction limited on modern APS-C cameras at f/8! The motion of your hand and body will cause a point of light to illuminate two sensor elements even at 1/8000 shutter speed.
Basically, DSLRs require perfect conditions in the field to actually achieve the sharpness stated by the camera manufacturer. A 4x5 sensor allows much more slop.
So you're doing 4x5 handheld? I don't understand your point. If there's anything digital clearly wins at is at getting you better results than film for a given physical constraint. It has better sensitivity so takes better advantage of the light, it has more density per unit of area so gets you more resolution per unit of camera volume or weight, etc. The only thing film still wins at is being able to cheaply build larger "sensors" since film doesn't get more expensive to manufacture larger. And as sensors have gotten better it's gotten harder and harder to actually realize a benefit from larger film up to a point where you need a large cumbersome camera in a very sturdy mount and really good technique and process to have a shot at it. I expect that within the next 5 years multi-sensor/multi-lens cameras and a bit of software to finish off the last few advantages there still are[1].
Meanwhile semiconductors are already so good that we could build that today already. Nokia's 2012 PureView sensor's density was over 400MP in 35mm and that's already 4 years old. I'd bet on the digital side for this.
No, but we've got films in development where the individual grain size is just a few atoms. Got any semiconductor display techs capable of that small size?
There's nothing fundamental stopping semiconductor technology to reach those feature sizes and a fair comparison is between technologies at the same development stage. If you use the proxy of what is commercially available today CMOS sensors beat film. There are still reasons to use very large film, mostly because no one develops large enough sensors (and even if they existed cost would be very high), but the advantages are being overstated.
"There's nothing fundamental stopping semiconductor technology to reach those feature sizes"
The laws of physics most certainly are THE fundamental thing in the way. Electron leakage, current ripples at nanoscale, capacitive interference. There's a lot more involved when it comes to semiconductor technology.
Analog film has far higher dynamic range than any digital format. The camera itself makes no difference with all the f-stops, the analog domain is far finer-grained. Film is not effected by moire.
This hasn't been true for a long time. Analog being "finer-grained" doesn't matter, because analog (just like digital sensors) has noise, and noise is the limiting factor for dynamic range.
This is completely incorrect - the 810 is tested at somewhere shy of 15 stops DR. Portra 400 can squeak out 18. A slow B+W film can do 20-21.
I spent years struggling with high dynamic range/contrast acutance with severe weather photography and digital cameras. Blown highlights, color noise in shadows, rough tonality through contrast transitions, etc. Specific films (not slide film like Ektachrome) were my salvation.
Also, noise is not the same as grain. If the difference is unimportant, I'd think the other nuances relevant to this conversation may be as well.
Example pics for extreme HDR 35mm film at similar resolution (pixels can be binned to reduce noise at cost of resolution)? I've never seen any better than what the 810 can do. And note that cooled sensor digital cameras exist, so even better digital dynamic range is possible.
I consider grain to be noise, just like vinyl surface noise is noise. I don't consider any distinctive and "artistic" defect of a reproduction medium to be a good thing.
That looks more like a long-term exposure than HDR - look at the water blur, it's not the typical HDR ghosting. My Polaroid PDC700 camera did that color range and picture quality almost 2 decades ago (big sensor helped, admittedly.)
And that's not impossible with 35mm at all. Chemistry advances as well, you know. The age of nanotechnology. We're getting analog films in 35mm format that do gigapixel+ resolution equivalent images. Along with that, these newer chemicals are far less susceptible to noise. Add to that things like high refractive index lenses made from fluorite and optical calcite, and analog cameras can still hold up to/stomp digital, all day. I do keep my eye on the analog world of film, because I've got ~$10K in equipment sitting in my bag and I like having equipment that I can use.
There's not much motion blur in the water, and it's a lightning strike so the event itself is very short. You can even see some lightning that's not hidden by the cloud, in the same frame as stars! This is a great example of HDR. Dynamic range compression can be done tastefully - you don't need ugly halos everywhere.
I've spent a very significant part of the last 20 years of my life staring into screens. I love low-tech analog media. If nothing else, it's a great way to relax and break free from my work life.
i find digital cameras and post-processing software endlessly fiddly. as my photography teacher says, "you want to take photos? buy a dslr. you want to make art? shoot silver halide."
no, the teaching is all about technique and he teaches digital too. this is just his personal opinion and was in no way central to the teachings of the class.
If he actually cared about technique he wouldn't have said anything remotely like what you quoted. Even if it was hyperbole.
The only difference between film and digital is the set of limitations. Arbitrary limitations can be instructive - e.g. fixed focal lengths, monochrome, limited shutter counts. They can also be pointlessly stifling, e.g. tediously long feedback loops.
I would guess that with good-quality film, the lens is more often the limiting factor for sharpness. Maybe you should advocate for older, less tack-sharp lenses. You might get results you like even with a digital sensor.
I understand, my degree is in imaging technology. :) I was implying modern image sensors add a large degree of unsharp mask via their built in post processing, especially true to cell phone cameras.
I wish there was a cheap, automated service where I could post rolls of film for developing, and would get high quality scanned TIFF download links in my email a couple of days later, with the developed negative/prints returned as an optional extra. I think most of the time I would just want the scans though.
I love shooting film but it is expensive, and slow.
Used to be you could take a roll of film to a kiosk at a grocery store, toss in a CF card, and you'd get scanned and processed digital negatives right to the card immediately. Of course, once film went away for the most part, so did those kiosks.
I shoot digital now, but I still get that darkroom feeling by processing my images from NEF (raw) to PGM/PPM using code that I wrote myself (C and Haskell). My algorithms may not be as good as Nikon's or Adobe's, but they do give my images a look that is all my own.
Prior to become a web developer I was a photojournalist (staff photog at a mid-sized newspaper) for 10 years starting right before digital started. I always loved working in the darkroom and printing but I do not miss film. Film was just... meh. Limited number of shots, bulky to carry, expense in processing, relatively primitive light sensitivity, color sensitivity, etc.
If it were up to me, for hobby purposes I would love to shoot 4x5 or 8x10 tintypes and wet plate collodion. I mean, the quality is spectacular with those processes (especially tintypes) when done perfectly. Otherwise, give me super high quality digital. I'm either going to do it (real) old school or I'm going to choose the tools that limit me the least. Nothing in between.
But who will develop it? That's going to be damn expensive. That's why I have all my b&w gear still. If I get the bug to shoot film I can develop it myself.
Unfortunately, it's not cheap. You're looking at $10+ per roll in development, and I'm guessing one roll of Ektachrome will be $10+ if it's anything like Provia/velvia. $20+ for one roll and that's without scanning which many have a lab do.
Don't get me wrong, I love slide film and I'm so excited to shoot this, but it's not exactly easy to make a habit out of shooting E6 for hobbyists.
You can pick up a decent 35mm kit for $100 off Craigslist, if you are careful.
Difference between $100 and say $15/roll total costs vs. $700 kit = 40 rolls @ 36 slides each = 1440 exposures until you start spending more than if you bought digital.
(thanks to poster below, I have corrected my very bad math errors)
Interesting. I never did E-6 processing. But I have to say it's a lot more involved processing than b&w [1]. But nice to have a color process to do from home.
Been there, done that. My friendly recommendation would be that you don't go there without a very good semi-automated development system.
E6 chemistry is incredibly picky about the temperature it is being used at; unless you've got proper temperature control (or, at worst, a large tub of water at the right temperature to act as a thermal buffer), you're in for a world of hurt.
Granted, I took a bit of a cavalier attitude towards the whole thing at the start ("I've processed B&W (literally, not a figure of speech) hundreds of times - how hard can this color thingy really be?")
I was promptly humbled. I still shoot slide film (in 6x9 and 4x5, where digital isn't an option for mere mortals) - but leave the processing for professionals.
The money saved by doing it myself simply wasn't worth the added strain from doing it all so painfully accurate as you possibly could, only to find the results sub-par
Where do you have your large format slide film processed? I purchased a Jobo tank recently so I could do 4x5 C-41 at home, since neither of the shops in Seattle that still develop film are willing to do sheets.
I am in Norway, and the last domestic lab doing E6 quit doing so late last year.
I have since had a few -34, methinks- sheets processed by an outfit in the UK which came highly recommended - The Darkroom (www.the-darkroom.co.uk)
34 sheets in three batches are not much to go on, but so far I am most satisfied - reasonable pricing (YMMV not being Norwegian and used to price gouging in the first place!), most accommodating with regards to special instructions, top-notch work, proper packaging, OK turnaround time.
My main concern is that some postal worker will X-ray the sheets to oblivion - even as the sheets are in film envelopes labeled as such and lined with lead; however, such are the worries of international postage.
My B&W stuff I mostly do on the kitchen bench - the dark stuff inside a film changing bag, the wet stuff in the ubiquitous Paterson tanks (With steel reels, thank you very much.)
Heh, I've never been able to get the hang of them. But, hey, I've done a couple hundred rolls of B&W on Paterson plastic reels without any problems. To each their own :)
6x9 is a Fujica GL690; 4x5 is a Linhof Super Technika IV.
The Texas Leica (The GL690; Google it and you'll understand how it earned its nickname) is handholdable unless you insist on using very slow film (or the 65mm f/8 wide angle).
The Technika? Not as much. I use a tripod for the Technika always, for the 690 probably 90% of the time.
(90, 150 and 300mm lenses for the Technika, 65, 100 and 180mm for the Fujica)
"Kodak" exists as much as 'Standard Oil' does, this is Kodak Alaris, 'a separate company owned by the UK-based Kodak Pension Plan'... This film is just a branded product like the Polaroid branded TVs, someone has thought 'what can we stick this Kodak logo on...' and thought 'film! We can make money out of that, or at least some money.'
The factories in Rochester where they make the film never stopped making the film. Ektachrome took a 5 year break, sure, but they've been making Tri-X and Portra and Vision3 cinema film etc. the entire time. It might be technically a different company than Eastman Kodak was, but it's not like they've subcontracted out the production to the Chinese and just kept the brand name.
There is a lot of discussion of the merits of film versus digital capture which really isn't the point or why someone would necessarily choose to shoot film today. Much like how a better camera doesn't automatically take better photos the same goes with the film vs digital debate. A camera, and film/digital sensor, is a tool that is used accomplish an ends (capturing an image). One tool might be easier to use or have more control or some other quality of preference. Similarly, a given film might subjectively have a preferred color palette or a sensor have more flexibility. I shoot film because it requires me to slow down and think about each shot; I can't fallback on "guess and check" for exposure or composition.
Another thing to note is that much of the film market (both pro and consumer) have stabilized in recent years. Kodak (also Kodak Alaris) and the other manufacturers have adapted to be able to meet the lower demand of a niche market. A great example of this is Ilford.
Anyway, I am just excited to have an excuse to shoot some slides this year!