Do you get more "keepers" with the M8?

[colinh]

I was wondering how the digital aspect has affected your photography. Not talking about technical quality of the pictures as such though - more the artistic ones.


Do you take more pictures than you would do with film? NB Assuming you were to have had the film camera with you.


Is the proportion of keepers (ie. good shots / total number of exposures) higher, lower or about the same?



I hope you can see what I'm getting at. Do you become more trigger happy just because each shot is free? And if so, does the number of keepers go up or down?


colin

 

[Joe Mondello]

The M8 is kind of in-between for me.

The extreme liberation to just shot and shoot came for me with the availability of high capacity memory cards that were affordable. And then yes, I way overdid things with my D200 and its 6GB MicroDrive. But I learned a lot from that experience.

Getting the M8 (and an Epson R-D1 six months before that) brought me back to a more careful way of working which I quite enjoy (I started out as a teen with Dad's M3).

Now it has been a decade since I regularly shot film, but the odd thing about it was the expense of "each shot" was always in the back of my mind -- and even though the digital cameras and their associated peripherals are far more expensive than continuing to shoot film would have been, the plain fact is that once that cost is spent, it fades out of the way and you then -- in the moment -- feel the freedom to take as many shots as you think might be needed to get a keeper.

As for the ratio, for me it has gone way up because I make lots of mistakes, but being able to see instantaneous results means I can correct and reshoot -- which is also enhancing my learning and paradoxically reducing the number of shots I take in toto.

 

[Ben Z]

First, these comments don't apply exclusively to the M8 because I haven't had it that long and mostly because like probably the majority of M8 owners it's not my first or my only digital camera. Now then, I shoot the same quantity with digital as with film. I found out early on that going through 1000 "free" images back home in the computer is a colossal pain (I can't tell diddly from an LCD review, even with zooming). I also have my LCD review time set to "off" because I can't stand the thing lighting up like an X-mas tree under my eye after every shot. In a nutshell, other than a memory card vs a roll of film, there's no difference for me.

 

[Bob Ross]

Both Joe's and Ben's replies hold many of my ideas, but I have found one more. I have, in the digital era, found that I can do things that I wouldn't try in the darkroom, so there are exposures that can be now "saved" that in the olden days would have been trashed. Raw development is just too flexible compard to the soup it once and live with it approach...well, I do shoot JPEGs once in a while to bring back that old feeling....LOL
Bob

 

[jbf]

er... I would say quite the opposite.

Digital is much more unforgiving compared to film. Even with raw if your exposure is off (aka blown highlights) your shot is gone. Raw can only pull out maybe a stop out of an image or so.

I've found that with film I can pull out information from blown highlights that I would have never been able to get out of a digital file.

Especially with scanning negative film. I can make multiple scans of an image and compile all into a RAW HDR file for a great dynamic range.

 

[Gary Sandhu]

Much more shots and proportionately more keepers -- digital and instant feedback have helped me learn quicker.

 

[Rob-F]

These comments apply to the Digilux 2; I don't have an M8. My experience is similar to the previous comments: I shoot more freely, with more freedom to experiment. I do review my shots frequently, so by the time I get home most of the losers are gone. With the losers mostly eliminated, a high percentage of the survivors are keepers. A great way to seem to be an expert!

 

[bottley1]

I find the instant feedback allows shots to be more quickly abandoned i.e. "This does not look as interesting as I thought it would" syndrome. So less "wastage" as it were. The M8 has also encouraged me to cheat like crazy, i.e. I take a shot one day, and see a cloud formation that would go lovely with it the next day. I then make a mental note to splice together in PS later. So overall, less wastage, more keepers, more versatility, if that makes sense....

 

[DaveB]

I probably get less keepers because digital allows me to bracket more.

I'll play with focus, exposure and composition and be happy if I get one good shot.

 

[Likaleica]

The M8 is kind of in-between for me.

"...even though the digital cameras and their associated peripherals are far more expensive than continuing to shoot film would have been..."

I agree with that! The notion that digital is less expensive because the cards can be used over and over again is simply not true because of the endless software upgrades that require hardware upgrades that require software upgrades...

What I have found is that I have more keepers with mechanical cameras, because they make me slow down and be more thoughtful about the photograph. Not that you can't be slow and thoughtful with a fully automated camera, but that is sort of missing the point. When I use my D2X I tend to treat it like a machine gun, whereas with the R6, and now the M8, I spend more time crafting each photograph.

 

[furcafe]

I definitely shoot more w/digital, w/the proportion of keepers about the same. Because this means more, & often redundant, shots that I have to post-process, I've started to shoot more selectively when using digital, but overall still end up shooting more than I otherwise would w/film.

I was wondering how the digital aspect has affected your photography. Not talking about technical quality of the pictures as such though - more the artistic ones.


Do you take more pictures than you would do with film? NB Assuming you were to have had the film camera with you.


Is the proportion of keepers (ie. good shots / total number of exposures) higher, lower or about the same?



I hope you can see what I'm getting at. Do you become more trigger happy just because each shot is free? And if so, does the number of keepers go up or down?


colin

 

[Joe Mondello]

When I use my D2X I tend to treat it like a machine gun, whereas with the R6, and now the M8, I spend more time crafting each photograph.

This is true for me as well.

 

[jbf]

When I first got my D70s i shot an insane ammount of photos (at least for me). I'm no photojournalist or photographer by trade, only by hobby... but there have been months (which honestly consisted of me shooting about 15 days in tha tmonth) that I shot almost a thousand photos or more in those fifteen days.

Lets just say having to sort through those was a pain in the proverbial back side.

Needless to say after I started shooting seriously with film for a B&W film photography class I really learned to slow down, pick my shots.

Now that I use my D70s... i can easily say that I've slowed down as well. I still take quite a few shots, but I've noticed i have far less stuff that I have to go through and edit out.


So all in all, digital by itself has made me a better photographer for the fact that I learned what looked good and what didn't in a quicker manner... but film really and i do mean really made me slow down and realize what really looked good and only shoot what i felt was the best angles, etc.

 

[Tony C.]

The combination of the switch to rangefinders and the fine available lenses for the M8 have definitely increased my percentage of "keepers".

Regards,

Tony C.

 

[shadowfox]

Film photography (manual everything) taught me how to take better pictures. So I can apply that even when I am shooting digital.

So at the end of the day, the frequency of keepers are the same.

But film cameras are way more fun to use 🙂

 

[mark_wilkins]

Digital is much more unforgiving compared to film. Even with raw if your exposure is off (aka blown highlights) your shot is gone. Raw can only pull out maybe a stop out of an image or so.

Color neg film sharply cuts off shadow detail and rolls off very gently into the highlights. Digital and transparency film both are relatively more forgiving in the shadows and roll off sharply in the highlights.

A good color negative workflow encourages biasing toward more exposure to ensure that needed shadow detail is there in the negative. A good workflow for digital or transparencies (assuming scanning and color correcting the transparency) encourages biasing exposure down so that you don't clip your highlights.

Digital has more dynamic range than transparencies, in fact it's closer to color negative film, but this difference can make it seem very unforgiving if you attempt to bring the same procedures to your shooting that you use with color neg film.

 

[semrich]

This is an interesting thread for me because in my case I started out with digital a year ago with the D-lux2 and quickly knew I wanted a viewfinder so next was the R-D1, it made me work harder by paying more attention to what I was doing. I took lots of photos posting them on the forum and learning more post processing over time. I'm really enjoying photography and the challenge and so I went for the M8.

Now as I have improved and already have the lenses I moved into film with the MP, I get far less keepers but am enjoying it more, enough that I will start developing my own B&W film and scanning it.

With digital I would go out with my camera and all my lenses shooting almost everything knowing I could keep it as color or convert to B&W. Doing that taught me a lot. Now I go out with the MP and two lenses with an idea of what I want to shoot while learning to see in B&W only. It means slowing down, waiting and wondering how they will turn out, and having had enough keepers to know it is worth doing.

So in a sense I owe it all to digital!