Every morning I put new Film in my Camera.

[f/14]

Every morning I put new Film in my Camera.
Hoping to make a good Picture that Day.

In my D800E.
That's right. 800E.

Got my first Pentax in 1963.
50mm lens.
There was Tri-X and HP3.
Sometimes HP4.
Life was easy.
There was D76 and diluted Rodinal.
Prints were Agfa Brovira and Tetenal.
Darkroom was Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.
Life was good.

Moved to Nikon because they looked so cool.
Started gathering Lenses.

Raising children meant Paper Colour Prints for Years.
From the Shop on the Corner.

From 2000, moved up the digital Food Chain.
Digilux 2, D70, D2x, D3, D3x.
All the time I just took pictures.
Technically they improved all the time.
Still looked a bit "Digital" though.

Had an intense affair with Black Leicas.
Lasted for years.
M's and an R.
Tri-X and XTOL.
Silverfast.
Minolta Dimage.
Kept the R lenses.

Epson K3 Ink.
Digital Barytes looked like Agfa Brovira again.
Printing big got more expensive. Much more.

Today my camera is set to BLack & White and Raw.
3200 ISO looks like Tri-X in the Pentax.
6400 almost so.
200 looks like Tri-x in Hasselblad.
35 Mp feels like coming home to Film again.

Lightroom is good.
There is Miles and lots of new Music.
Miles is digitized.
Miss the Darkroom.

There is film in the Freezer.
Hblad, F5 and R Lenses on the Shelf.
2 Darkrooms packed up in the Garage.

Cameras will change.
Cameras will improve.

Just as in 1963.
Every morning I put new Film in my Camera.
Hoping to make a good Picture that Day.

 

[Archiver]

Groovy post. Love it. Sounds like you've found what you like and you're happy.

 

[f/14]

Yes you are right.
The reason why "Lightroom is good" is that we have just made it through a 10 year period of walking through a digital photographic desert waiting for the digital cameras to mature into something really useful.
By now quite a few digital caremas outruns the analog film cameras. That is, they are better in terms of techincal resolution per film or chip area, and similarly in terms of dynamic range or f-stops digital is superior.
This means that whether you go digital or stay analog is now just a matter of your personal artistic choice.

I have seen this a few times before.
In the early 80's the digital audio CD came along and at the very first it sounded slightly mediocre. After just a year or two the engineers solved some few remaining technical problems and in pure technical terms it could reproduce sound far better that the LP.
(Actually they mostly fixed small things in the analog filtering part, they got most of the digital part right from day one.)
Still, some groups claim the LP is superior to digital audio. If they would chage that to "I prefer the type sound that comes from the LP" it would be easier.

Some decades earlier the transistor replaced the tubes in analog audio. The first amplifiers with bipolar transistors were not too good. Same story. Some started digging themselves in claiming the superiority of the tubes.
The transistor amplifiers kept getting better, but before they got really good the FET transistors came along and wiped out most of the discussion with their clear sound.
We still have some pockets of resistance swearing by the tubes.
Guess they prefer the way it sounds. Fair enough.

For years we have had digital printers with ecxellent resolution and quite good digital photographic paper just sitting there waiting for the cameras to catch up.
It just took all those years out in the desert waiting for the technology evolve to be able to mass produce enough pixels with a wide dynamic range. Enough to remove most of the technical discussion. It is all coming together.
There is more choice.

Guess the next discussion could be on simulating the look of film in the computer from digital files.
Let's leave it there 🙂 and "just put film in the camera".

 

[jordanatkins]

Actually, printers have a long way to go as well. At my university we printed our digital photos on an Epson 4800 (19" wide, 8 inks including a matte black and gloss black), and still found the color gamut to be lacking.

I remember tuning my files black point to 8 and my white point to 244, because the ink doesn't get any darker on the low end, and goes to paper white above 244, which you don't want in an inkjet print. I still do this to all the photos I want printed to this day.

 

[f/14]

I just print in BW 🙂 On the 3800. Never attempted colour.
I have used Permajet and some Epson paper.
After some work on the settings in the printer driver I find that 20 gray-zones are printed fairly correctly checking with a densitometer. (The 10 standard ones from the Zone System plus 10 halfway in-between). Took some tweaking though.
This is more exact than what my eyes can do so I gave up measuring.
This only applies to glossy paper where I have measured a black-point density of 2.37
Matte paper caves in around 1.8 in density and it seems there is little to be done about it.
More of an optical phenomena than a printer feature it seems (?).
So I went back to measure my analog prints, and it seems the situation is the same there. The matte prints never got quite as black as the glossy ones.

 

[Pioneer]

Great post. Thank you.

 

[Aristophanes]

Yes you are right.
The reason why "Lightroom is good" is that we have just made it through a 10 year period of walking through a digital photographic desert waiting for the digital cameras to mature into something really useful.

Forthcoming tech will make the desktop PC increasingly obsolete, so the camera-to-PC workflow will become less and less relevant in the design and software. It will be done in camera, maybe via tethered iP*d (or like), then to the cloud. The whole PC-as-darkroom concept will become very, very niche. Whole camera systems designed for PC editing will become a thing of the past for all but the very high-end cameras and professionals.

 

[f/14]

Forthcoming tech will make the desktop PC increasingly obsolete

Then I hope to be somewhat professional 🙂

 

[agoglanian]

This was a wonderfully insightful post and I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. Thank you for sharing this peek into your life.

 

[Paul Jenkin]

Forthcoming tech will make the desktop PC increasingly obsolete, so the camera-to-PC workflow will become less and less relevant in the design and software. It will be done in camera, maybe via tethered iP*d (or like), then to the cloud. The whole PC-as-darkroom concept will become very, very niche. Whole camera systems designed for PC editing will become a thing of the past for all but the very high-end cameras and professionals.

You may be right - but I hope you are wrong. I doubt many photographers who enjoy creative control would welcome cameras that do much of what they do as post-processing work as part of the actual image taking.

I suspect you are 100% on the money with cloud-based storage, though. Having said that, are we all completely comfortable with some remote third party holding all of our images on some super server in the sky?

I intend to be shooting film, scanning t, processing via PS / Lightroom / Capture NX for a very long time yet...

 

[Photo_Smith]

Yes you are right.

I have seen this a few times before.
In the early 80's the digital audio CD came along and at the very first it sounded slightly mediocre. After just a year or two the engineers solved some few remaining technical problems and in pure technical terms it could reproduce sound far better that the LP.
(Actually they mostly fixed small things in the analog filtering part, they got most of the digital part right from day one.)
.

There are some engineers that would argue that red book CD has two shorter word length, that is being 16bit maximum that there can only be 65,536 samples over a 20-20,000 hz range. If you listen to pro audio recorded with much longer word length say 24bit you can hear the extra resolution.

Of course the limitations of red book standards mean those professional have to 'truncate' the bit rates when making plain Jane Cd's the effect of this process on an audio signal is to "magnify" quantisation errors which can result in audible distortion, especially in the quieter parts of an audio signal.

So CD designers rather than getting it right' did the best they could in 1981, if those standards were written now things would be better.

Also I really hate the sound of Field Effect Transistors and Super linear class A amps, I don't like the sterile sound. I dont have a valve amp, my brother is a musician and swears by his Valve guitar Amps both Vox and Marshall that they 'overload better' I guess that's why the majority of guitar amps still use valves.
Different strokes I guess...

 

[f/14]

Photo_Smith:
I surely agree about the CD quality. There are recording systems better that the CD, - like 24 bits and 192 Kb/s sampling. The thing is though that IMHO, even with this limitation the CD by far outruns the old LP.
Same story in photography. Even though the digital cameras still will continue to improve, technically the best ones already outruns the film.
So today it is and even choice whether you prefer the looks of prints from film or whether you will move to digital.
Slightly off topic, but try listening to BBC's recording of Bach on 17th century Silberman organ. Coverdisk on http://www.classical-music.com/issue/may-2011
Done with state-of-the-art equipment and reduced to 16bit/44.1KHz CD. Still blows your mind away.
I have the same experience with my 35 Mpixel / 14 f-stops camera.
That is, in black and white 🙂