A stranger told me film is back..

CharlesDAMorgan "A pro friend used to shoot concerts with film and got similar results. It can be done."

It has been done! There was a lot of great photography under difficult conditions before the advent of digital photography circa mid 1980s....
I guess Jim Marshall never got the memo that it wasn't possible....

4bfbd93d82f9c7e8c3f5e2b8f0667b9a by , on Flickr .... Jim Marshall M4
 
Deardorff38 said:
"A pro friend used to shoot concerts with film and got similar results. It can be done."

It has been done! There was a lot of great photography under difficult conditions before the advent of digital photography circa mid 1980s....
Click to expand...


For me, that's the whole appeal of film: that making the great shot is more difficult, challenging, and requires skill. With today's digital cameras you can just up the ISO to 12800 or higher and take low light shots with ease. Sorry, I dont see the point. You're just a button pusher at this point then.
 
Deardorff38 said:
"A pro friend used to shoot concerts with film and got similar results. It can be done."

It has been done! There was a lot of great photography under difficult conditions before the advent of digital photography circa mid 1980s....
Click to expand...

I know; not sure why this is such a mystery especially on this forum.
 
It's good to see renewed interest in film and it's good to see old cameras being used again, rather than sitting idle or being thrown away.

I love film and film cameras, but also use digital in situations where I feel it's a more suitable choice.

Anyway, I am both perplexed and possibly envious that other people here report the comments they receive about their cameras. Since the early 1990's I, too, would shoot motorsports at Portland and Seattle raceways (PIR, SIR), both in film and digital, and not get a single comment about my cameras. Whether I'm walking around in town, tourist spots, anywhere, medium format (Hasselblad, RB67, Rolleiflex), or 35mm (Nikon, Canon Leica, Exakta, anything...), nobody deems it worthy of comment. Only Polaroid has elicited surprise: once by a lady I was with who was embarrassed that I had an SX-70 with me and once by a lady at the Festival of Cars (Bend, Ore.) who commented to her husband that I still had film for "that old Polaroid".
 
Ted Striker said:
For me, that's the whole appeal of film: that making the great shot is more difficult, challenging, and requires skill. With today's digital cameras you can just up the ISO to 12800 or higher and take low light shots with ease. Sorry, I dont see the point. You're just a button pusher at this point then.
Click to expand...

I get what you mean, but the choices of composition and content are still there... what to shoot and in which way. Unless you think how you frame an image doesn't matter... to me, how you choose to frame an image is the essence of photography, not how slow of a shutter speed you can handhold. If only holding a slow shutter speed handheld makes a photo good, then one might as well be shooting guns.
 
jsrockit said:
I get what you mean, but the choices of composition and content are still there... what to shoot and in which way. Unless you think how you frame an image doesn't matter... to me, how you choose to frame an image is the essence of photography, not how slow of a shutter speed you can handhold. If only holding a slow shutter speed handheld makes a photo good, then one might as well be shooting guns.
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There arent a lot of framing options when you are photographing at a concert or night club. You have certain limitations that keep you in your place and so executing the shot, documenting the performance, is where the challenge is. And as we have seen above, it can be done and done well with film.
 
Deardorff38 said:
CharlesDAMorgan "A pro friend used to shoot concerts with film and got similar results. It can be done."

It has been done! There was a lot of great photography under difficult conditions before the advent of digital photography circa mid 1980s....
I guess Jim Marshall never got the memo that it wasn't possible....
Click to expand...

I`ve been following Jim Marshalls work since 1969.
One of my all time favourite photographers .
Amelia Davies is doing a great job today promoting his work with new books and exhibitions.
Yes it certainly can be done but more often than not it`s beyond my pay grade.
I wish it wasn`t .
In that respect digital is much easier .
 
Ted Striker said:
And as we have seen above, it can be done and done well with film.
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I can agree with that... it was silly to think it couldn't be done. My point is that just because you can use ISO 6400 these days doesn't make a good photography bad. You could jack up Tri-X to 1600 or use Ilford 3200 in the past too.
 
Those stage & follow spot lights can be bright so picking the right moment to 'click' certainly helps.
 
The point about digital being The Choice for low light is fair. While it CAN be done well with film, the cost of the ones that are not keepers are high for non-pros.

Pros these days wouldn't even think about shooting a low light concert with film, unless they were going for some kind of niche angle.

Adams shot landscapes in B&W with an 8x10 view camera because those were the limitations of his day. You can bet if he were born more recently, he'd have shot digital, maybe medium format digital.
 
Smaug said:
The point about digital being The Choice for low light is fair. While it CAN be done well with film, the cost of the ones that are not keepers are high for non-pros.

Pros these days wouldn't even think about shooting a low light concert with film, unless they were going for some kind of niche angle.

Adams shot landscapes in B&W with an 8x10 view camera because those were the limitations of his day. You can bet if he were born more recently, he'd have shot digital, maybe medium format digital.
Click to expand...

Boy’o’boy :)
Never heard of Paris by Night? Brassai. This about your AA passage.

And what amount of keepers have to do with film and low light?
Take a measure and expose. I have done it. Under low light.

Those “digital rules” passages seems to come from those who didn’t learned film enough, yet. Sorry.
 
Smaug said:
The point about digital being The Choice for low light is fair. While it CAN be done well with film, the cost of the ones that are not keepers are high for non-pros.
Click to expand...

Fair points about digital and low light if iso3200 is insufficient to capture skin tones, but if that's the case the lighting kind of sucks anyway so your task is doubly difficult regardless of how you capture the image.

As for cost of non-keepers, meh, who cares. This is art. :p

If I had to photograph performers on stage frequently I'd probably use digital for convenience. Thankfully I don't.

Smaug said:
Adams shot landscapes in B&W with an 8x10 view camera because those were the limitations of his day. You can bet if he were born more recently, he'd have shot digital, maybe medium format digital.
Click to expand...

Predicting how dead photographers would work today if they were only alive strikes me as kind of silly. Maybe Adams would be a pianist instead, or a painter. He lived in California; maybe he would have been a skateboarder, YouTube "influencer" or some other thing. What if Adams was born in 2007?
 
jawarden "Maybe Adams would be a pianist instead, or a painter. He lived in California"

Well he was an accomplished pianist. & BTW Smaug.... A Adams did use medium format... Hasselblad Here's an example: http://anseladams.com/portfolio/3012/
 
What I found notable about the original post was that the person commenting on the use of film / film cameras was a casual bystander so to speak. When someone that is not heavily involved with photography takes notice of such things it represents a different sort of awareness.

As has been pointed out already in this thread, film has never disappeared. But I imagine that there are a large number of people in this world that feel this is the case. So when some of those people see enough photographers using film cameras that they take notice then I do find this interesting.

My level of photographic activity is actually quite low. Not that I am proud of admitting this here on this forum but I can be seen walking around with my film camera very infrequently. Yet even I have received numerous comments and questions from a surprising number of strangers about my camera and the use of film. That is what I thought this thread started out examining — the public’s perception of film photography as it stands today.
 
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