Why I still love film

[350D_user]

For myself, digital greyscale photos cannot match film b+w photos. Digital photos have not got the latitude present in film photos (unless several digital photos are taken, then compiled into yet-another-file-format).

I can remember 35mm film cannisters from.... way back (my first camera was a Zenit EM, back in the days). Various RAW fileformats have been dropped well within that timespan.

Inkjet "photographic" paper has not been proven, regardless of claims of 100yr lifespans... film's been around for that long, so has been proven.

 

[Steve Bellayr]

A very interesting question. Will digital replace film? The comparisons being made are between vinyl records and CD music which I do not think is correct. Let's make the comparison between CD recorded music and digital Ipods. By the 1990's film cameras had reached a near perfect operation. Cameras built in the 1950's and 1960's could wil little CLA work a person's lifetime or at least 50 years. Not a bad product. If the average photographer bought one camera and three lenses every 20 years he or she could keep photographing indefinitely. Good for the photogrqpher not good for the Industry. Music CDs work the same way. It could be played indefinitely, copied infinitely, and if lightly scratched still work. Unless you loose it you do not need to buy it again, much like a Leica. Solution for the Industry is to create an Ipod. Download music for 99 cents each. Buy and Ipod and fill it up with 1000 downloads. Everyone buys Ipods ergo more sales. Loose the Ipod start over. And, best of all no secondary used market. I have no problem with digitals (I even own one). They are for professionals. They can take hundreds of photos and reproduce the image for the client instantaneously. Corrections can be made so that even the original image does not look like the one photographed. And, they can be sent across the world quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. (I have done it.) But the cameras themselves have not reached the stabilization point or their highest point which could be defined as where there would be no need to further improve them much like the music cd. At that point the camera lasts 30 years, the body is hard enough to hammer nails, it is impervious to dust, interchangeable lenses are available. People could afford several computers and high grade printers. Software will be cheap. When that happens Industry will need to develope a new format to sell to us.

 

[Topdog1]

I love film too ... I have all my negs scanned high res at the time of development. A modest price, I don't have to buy a machine, and no dusty negatives.

The local photo processor in Englewood, NJ, Click Camera, develops and scans my film. But I find the scans rather inadequate. File size is only about 350K, although they claim to scan at 6 megapixels. Can you specify the size scan you want with some photo processors?

/Ira

 

[MP Guy]

I tend to rely on the labs scanning my film. Then if I see something really nice, I scan the negative at home with better res and then make prints.

 

[gareth]

I love film too. B&W, colour neg and colour slide. It's all got something that digital hasn't.

Where I do love digital is in flat lighting, or in low lighting. My 5D is just brilliant at 800asa and over for colour work.

 

[robert blu]

I love film because ... it is film ! I'm not ready yet for a digital camera, but I have a film-scanner which, if some money left after winter holidays, I'll replace with a better one (4.ooo dpi instead of 2.700). Trying to combine film and digital worlds, maybe one day a digital camera which looks like a camera...as let say the Ricoh GRD...but not early !
ciao, robert

 

[climbing_vine]

Oh one thing to add as long as I'm wasting time when I should be working, I have many CDs that I burned with photos on them that have somehow faded away or corroded- the metallic layer has perished to the point that it cannot be read, this in less than three years storage. I've got negatives that got too humid and stuck together in abusive storage situations that are 30 years old, but an image can still be pulled from them.. The corroded CD is hopeless- but redundantly backed up!
So I guess whatever argument one tries to make, one can.

This is a good point. I certainly wouldn't consider home-burned CDs (and maybe not even pressed ones) to be archival quality storage, but since they've been a pervasive commodity for 20 years (very *un*like most variations of floppies, which in the larger scheme of things are somewhat a speciality item) I have no doubt that we'll continue to have the facility to read and copy them for a long time. Just like negatives, digital archival materials need some care to remain "archival". Luckily, the nearly infinitely easier and cheaper means of backing up digital vs analog makes this a much easier proposition, as you note.

 

[climbing_vine]

SACD is all I can say.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's pretty much entirely irrelevant. SACD is a proprietary medium pushed by one company (Sony, who loves proprietary and its one reason they are beginning to fail as a company). Anyone who took their chances with it had the responsibility to do the research and accept responsibility--they were a niche that failed.

This is directly opposite to "blue book" CDs or JPEG image format, which are based on open standards and so pervasive that there will be both ability and motivation to keep them viable for a long, long, time to come.

 

[climbing_vine]

Music CDs work the same way. It could be played indefinitely, copied infinitely, and if lightly scratched still work. Unless you loose it you do not need to buy it again, much like a Leica. Solution for the Industry is to create an Ipod. Download music for 99 cents each. Buy and Ipod and fill it up with 1000 downloads. Everyone buys Ipods ergo more sales. Loose the Ipod start over. And, best of all no secondary used market.

You make an interesting point, but I'm not entirely sure it's applicable. First, your example is slightly off--the music industry *fights* things like the iPod and iTunes Music Store, explicity because it does compete with their own formats and distribution channels, and encourages the secondary used market (most people are filling up iPods with music from purchased used CDs, not iTunes store tracks--it's cheaper). The iPod as a conceptual music media (like a CD or tape) came from outside the industry, not within it. Secondly, lose the iPod doesn't mean start over--you have to have the tracks on your computer to put them on the iPod in the first place. If you lose everything when you lose the iPod, it means you removed it all from your computer as well, in which case that's not anyone else's fault. 🙂

There is also a basic problem with the analogy. There isn't a player with both a vested interest *and* enough control over the market to mandate media transitions, ie planned obsolecense, of file formats or storage media in digital imaging. Kodak used to try in the analog field, and hadn't had real success in 50 years or more.

With digital, there is no film to be purchased, so there is really no consumable that is vulnerable to such a format issue. Obsoleting the format of the images (even if they could) wouldn't make any sense--people are making the images themselves, not buying that content from someone else as in the case of music. Thus obsoleting a format doesn't force people to re-buy their content, as it does in the music world. The only reason to do it would be to force people into a proprietary vertical imaging chain, where they use a Canon camera, Canon software, Canon sharing, and Canon printing.

This is exceedingly unlikely, because in the world of consumer imaging compatibility is king--everyone wants to know that they can print their photos at any lab, share them with any of their four grandparents, etc. I think every manufacturer understands this. Even Sony, with their self-destructive love of proprietary everything, uses their own physical memory device in their digicams but still uses JPEG.

This is true in music as well--people continued to buy CDs and universally rejected MiniDisk and SACD. The music industry has never *really* been able to enforce a format shift at all; consumer demand lead the move from vinyl to tape to CD, because of improvements perceived and real. Note that these are all open formats. Others, including every closed, proprietary attempt, failed.

I think at some point even RAW will likely become standardized, because it will make things easier on even the industry players. This will require a standard for certain aspects of sensor electronics, which is not out of the realm of possibility... some of the companies that would likely be involved are, interestingly, some of the same ones who collaborated on the CD Audio standard over two decades ago.

 

[gregg]

Same here Jorge (preview with store scan, do a better job at home when printing/posting.)

I've recently taken rolls for develop/scan to Click (Noritsu equipment), Cord and W*l-M*rt (the last two have Fuji Frontier). Generally pleased by the JPG files that all deliver although the saturation of 400UC throws them for a loop. Take a look at a W*l-M*rt scan vs. one done on my ancient Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II (8 bit, 4 pass, ICE, auto exposure.) I adjusted curves prior to the scan and did nothing but resize in PS.

Frontier Scan from W*l-M*rt


Dimage Scan Elite II


This shot was in flourescent light so a little more work with the input curves and the tones could have been even cleaner.

 

[gareth]

First, your example is slightly off--the music industry *fights* things like the iPod and iTunes Music Store, explicity because it does compete with their own formats and distribution channels, and encourages the secondary used market (most people are filling up iPods with music from purchased used CDs, not iTunes store tracks--it's cheaper).

It's very interesting what is happening with the music industry. I think perhaps they are realising that maybe the fight is over, and it's lost. There is nothing the industry can do to stop copying and sharing.

I might have some sympathy for the big names in the music business, if it were not the for the fact they have been ripping us all off for years. Anyway it looks like they are going to have a complete re-think about how they operate and make their money.

As for me I kept buying vinyl for many years after CD was introduced, it sounded better, and it still sounds great.

However the turning point for me was when I could burn a CD. At that point I switched to CD. And now I can make mp3 CDs and stuff for my car.

As for the photographic industry, what may be interesting is camera sales over the next year or two. Is the digital camera boom going to die, how many people will upgrade. How many will dump their cameras and fall in love with the convenience of a phone camera. Interesting days to come.

Technology changes our lives, but the rate of change today is frightening.

 

[climbing_vine]

As for the photographic industry, what may be interesting is camera sales over the next year or two. Is the digital camera boom going to die, how many people will upgrade. How many will dump their cameras and fall in love with the convenience of a phone camera. Interesting days to come.

That's for sure.

And to return my posts more towards the topic: nice shots to start this thread, Jorge, and I still love film because it doesn't blow out highlights and I like putting myself in the hands of destiny 😉 ie no light meter and no instant feedback. And I like to have a catalog of prints to dig through every few months and find something that I never really noticed before, and toss it up on my wall then and there.

 

[amateriat]

This is a good point. I certainly wouldn't consider home-burned CDs (and maybe not even pressed ones) to be archival quality storage, but since they've been a pervasive commodity for 20 years (very *un*like most variations of floppies, which in the larger scheme of things are somewhat a speciality item) I have no doubt that we'll continue to have the facility to read and copy them for a long time. Just like negatives, digital archival materials need some care to remain "archival". Luckily, the nearly infinitely easier and cheaper means of backing up digital vs analog makes this a much easier proposition, as you note.

Part of the problem here, IMO, is that most people are simply not interested in paying for the Good Stuff (or at least the Better Stuff). I've had to jump through flaming hoops to save data on clients' dead or near-death HDs becasue they simply couldn't be bothered to back up their gigabytes of digital images (usually taken with digital cameras, meaning they're truly SOL if I can't get their data back, which sometimes has been the case). When I can get a few of them behind the idea of getting those images backed up onto CD/DVD, they don't want to pay for anything more than whatever's on special at Staples or Best Buy, because "they're all the same, right?". (Hint: best bet for optical disks with reasonable archival quality without going broke is Verbatim's DataLife Plus CD-R/DVD-R disks; that's all I use for my stuff now, after having gotten burned by a few other "name-brand" disks from outfits that should know better).

As far as shooting film goes, it works like this for me:

- Cameras: there isn't a single blessed digital camera out there at the moment, including the gigunda Canons, that works the way I truly like to work with a camera. Since I've crossed SLRs of either imaging medium off my list of "working" cameras anyway, the big digital guns don't even get to the starting line, but the digital overlay simply makes the going more tedious. It's not that I can't get a good (or great) picture from using the things, but the "getting there" is no fun at all. (And I really, really hate big-ass cameras and lenses.) I'll do the menu-driven thing after I get home, thank you.

- Film: I know what I like. I've long gone off the "emulsion-of-the-month" thing. I know the labs I hand the film off to (if color or chromogenic b/w; otherwise I soup it myself). I have several "go-to" emulsions whose characteristics I've pretty much nailed down. I don't do a lot of head-scratching about color balance in a given situation, because I know what to expect 90% of the time (the other 10% handled by the rare use of a filter, or, failing that, PS). I feel mush lighter on my feet working with film (figuratively , at least...yes, fifteen rolls is bulkier than a honkin' big CF card, but clearly manageable). I know the film I want to use. I load the film I want to use. Then I go, go, see how I go!

- Scanning. Yes, it's work. But a drag? Come on, this is the greatest development in post-shoot photography since Kodak mailers! I never knew how much better my work could look before doing my own scanning and printing...and this was before I even halfway knew what in hell I was doing with the stuff.

- Printing: Yes, inkjet printing sucked for a while. Correction: it really sucked when Epson changed over from dyes to pigment-based inks, and we haven't fully recovered from that changeover, although things are a lot better in the past year. I still think the printer I'm currently using (HP 8750) offers a more convincing wet-print look than other pritners I've tried (especially printing b/w), is acceptably archival (at least Wilhelm says so, for what that's worth), gives me great b/w and color without going through major contortions, and manages to do all this with dyes, which to my eyes work better in the final print than pigs. Is any inkjet print as good as a silver b/w print? If by "better" you mean "has the same look, but improved", the quick answer is no. Is it great in its own right? Definitely, but just as with silver printing, it comes down to the method and the practicioner. In terms of color, it's miles ahead of anything short of a stone-cold pro darkroom setup with a big RA-4 processor. We've all seen crappy silver prints (and probably made a few...don't be shy admitting it)). We've definitely seen, and likely made, dreadful inkjet prints. You can get great results from either process (or any permutation in-between).

So, yeah, I love film a good deal more than digital for most everything I do, at least for now. On the post-shoot side, I love digital a lot more than conventional print processes. And I love my iPod, but I'm keeping (and playing) all my vinyl and CDs.

Sorry for the little rant, folks. I still need that first cup of tea...


- Barrett

P.S. Photo taken late 2000 @ my old stock-photo agency desk.

 

[climbing_vine]

Part of the problem here, IMO, is that most people are simply not interested in paying for the Good Stuff (or at least the Better Stuff). I've had to jump through flaming hoops to save data on clients' dead or near-death HDs becasue they simply couldn't be bothered to back up their gigabytes of digital images (usually taken with digital cameras, meaning they're truly SOL if I can't get their data back, which sometimes has been the case).

Absolutely true. Because I'm paranoid, I keep everything but my most recent digital shots on four different hard drives in three different locations (one of the drives is in my laptop, which moves between two of those three locations). The most recent ones are only on my desktop at work and the laptop. I try to encourage everyone I know to do at least that much: a copy at work and a copy at home, or a copy on the desktop/tower and one on the laptop.

Verbatim's DataLife Plus CD-R/DVD-R disks; that's all I use for my stuff now, after having gotten burned by a few other "name-brand" disks from outfits that should know better).

Good advice. Same here. Much lower failure rate on writing than other brands as well, in my experience.

As for the rest of your post, I'm somewhat in the same boat except that I use a digital Canon Elph for non-art, non-serious day to day observational shooting. I've learned to manipulate the few manual controls it has (shutter speed, ISO, and a ± 3 stop exposure compensation) to nearly always coax it into doing what I want. It definitely took a good amount of experimentation to get there, though, and it's incapable of really shallow DoF. But it works for what I need it to do.

Speaking of cameras to carry around, and still loving film: One of many reasons that I like cold weather: wearing a coat with pockets turns a Hi-Matic 9 into a pocketable camera. 🙂

 

[amateriat]

Absolutely true. Because I'm paranoid, I keep everything but my most recent digital shots on four different hard drives in three different locations (one of the drives is in my laptop, which moves between two of those three locations). The most recent ones are only on my desktop at work and the laptop. I try to encourage everyone I know to do at least that much: a copy at work and a copy at home, or a copy on the desktop/tower and one on the laptop.

I have to salute you. That's at least one more layer of redundancy than I have!

As for the rest of your post, I'm somewhat in the same boat except that I use a digital Canon Elph for non-art, non-serious day to day observational shooting. I've learned to manipulate the few manual controls it has (shutter speed, ISO, and a ± 3 stop exposure compensation) to nearly always coax it into doing what I want. It definitely took a good amount of experimentation to get there, though, and it's incapable of really shallow DoF. But it works for what I need it to do.

That' s what I have my little Olympus digicam for. Can't do a whole lot with it, but it comes in really handy for what it does well.

Speaking of cameras to carry around, and still loving film: One of many reasons that I like cold weather: wearing a coat with pockets turns a Hi-Matic 9 into a pocketable camera. 🙂

I hear that. Trouble is, I'm in need or a new winter coat. Big pockets, good!


- Barrett

 

[SDK]

I'm glad film is still going well, and I'm glad I spent a packet setting up a tiny color darkroom with a Fujimoto CP31 RA4 processor. I had jury duty this morning, but the trials all got settled, so they let us go at 10:30am. This afternoon I've been at home making some great 11X14" prints. I wish 12X16" were a standard US size so I could print a bit bigger.

I rarely see digital color prints that approach what I can make in the darkroom, though some are pretty good. I've seen some very impressive large Lightjet prints on RA4 paper. If I were setting up again, I might get a Fuji Pictrography digital printer and the best MacPro for personal use.

 

[MP Guy]

Here is one more with a little more grain. I hate to say it but I use my digital 9 out of 10 times and I wish I would use the MP more. But on the brighter side it is always with me just in case.

 

[Terao]

Quite apart from technology and archival (which I have to say I'm not convinced on - have you seen 40yo Kodachrome?) I just love the fact that I have the chunk of film that reacted to the light coming through the lens all those years ago. Its a tangible link with the past (see the excellent Poliakoff drama "Shooting the Past" for an expansion of this). Its enhanced for me because I also have the camera and the lens that exposed those 40yo 'chromes. Fortunately my Dad is still here, despite his best attempts to drop dead several times over the last couple of years, but when he does finally die I'm going to have his camera and his slides (in sequence and numbered) in my possession. Its a very powerful physical link with him that's a little difficult to explain. I feel the same way about the film I've shot in the past - I can remember taking the shots, which lens/camera I used, who I was with, how I felt etc. Being largely electronic cameras I didn't have the same emotional attachment to them so I've sold them (a regret for the future no doubt) but I won't feel that way about my R-D1. Rangefinder photography intimately involves me in the process of taking photographs in a way that (D)SLRs never did - they were far too clinical, precise, and automated. What I don't like about digital is that the shots aren't tangible - they're just a collection of 1s and 0s on a chunk of magnetic or optical media. Its just not the same, they're just not permanent, and because of that they are almost by definition incomplete, imperfect, and intangible. Imagine how ten years down the line when we have the computing power of a small govt agency sat at home and suddenly we'll be able to go back and "redevelop" old digital files - better noise removal, artificially intelligent image manipulation, etc. We don't have to wait ten years - I've gone back and improved digital shots I took in 2002 because of new software (noise removal, etc.) Does this matter? It does to me - photographs capture a moment in time and you shouldn't be constantly changing that moment to fit your requirements - you're meddling with history...

 

[ywenz]

I don't think this can be done with digital.. Well maybe my 5D + 85 1.2L can get close to the bokeh, but I need to try it. This was shot with a cheapo Mat 124G.. However, that 1 week turn around time for the film processing was a killer!

 

[Trius]

Barrett et al: I agree on big pockets. My "standard" is a pocket that will accommodate an Oly 35LC, which is one of the larger Oly RFs, probably in the M5 range. All else will be easy unless you want the hood in situ as well.

My "secret" is to go to thrift shops to shop for jackets, coats and cargo pants that are appropriate. If I see a jacket that is large-pocket-full, I grab it, even if it is lightweight. Layering is good.

Ywenz: Wonderful shot. I'd almost move to Chicago as a result.