digital and i

back alley

back alley

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i like and prefer digital because as soon as i insert an sd card i can feel my iq drop about 100 points.
it great how i can be careless because no film is involved.
the quality of my images may suffer but i can get to see them sooner and that is what's important.
 
Everytime I take a Digital Image I think to myself, "I need to port that FFT code to clean this up".
 
I like digital because it allows me to use my old film camera's. I love the freedom of getting back a CD instead of looking through crappy prints. Now I can select only the prints I want from the CD, & I no longer have to fill the landfill with a bunch of photo paper because I took a crappy picture.:)
 
Like Greg, I found a point of coincidence: my Nikon film glass has found new use with my D700 body.

While digital is subject to a number of variables similar to those in film (like light temperature, exposure, camera shake), at least in digital there are ways to prevent the problem from occurring.

And the prints... I like them. Like a digital convert acquaintance of mine said: "there is no grain!"

So, there you go, it has pros and cons. And one must learn to iive with the former, and tolerate the latter.
 
as stated, the me and film thread is not about bashing digital, it is an attempt to understand and explain why "I" find film more satisfying. but you knew that.
 
When I took up photography again after almost 30 years, I started with the best digital camera of the moment (Fuji S3 pro). First, I have found something was lacking in the images, like they had no soul... So I thought it was like that because the Nikon glass was too "anonymous". I bought the whole line of Zeiss ZF lenses then, and the results were spectacular, BUT... they still had no soul. So one day I made a little project on close up photography, mimicking Kar Blossfeld... AND I discovered almost simoultaneously 2 things: the colour pictures were nice, but soulless, as usual... However, the B&W conversions were interesting, BUT they sucked technically...
After much experimenting with the conversion methods, RAW image processing and so on, I took a great Zeiss lens (Planar 85/1.4 ZM) and made some shots of my daughter on digital and on film. When I finally made 30x40 cm prints and put them one next to the other, the veil dropped from my eyes: the digital colour version was beautiful: subtle skin tones, superb smooth tonality, faithful colours and great sharpness - this is the shot:

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When I looked at the B&W version though, I saw no sparkle - just spent greys, no gradation in the highlights, as if somebody wrung a floor mop full of dirty water on the image. The same shot made on film looked different - there was some grain, yes, but the image was alive, the blacks were black and the whites were white, and the multitude of shades of white were making the image acquire a new life - it had the spell...

Since that day I have only used the digital to shoot things for some documentary necessity, and my entire "pleasure" shooting is done on B&W film. I do not miss the immediacy of digital, on the contrary, I prefer to forget about the emotion I had about a photo when I was pressing the shutter. When I see it on my computer after several days, I am more objective about its actual merits. As long as B&W digital is a miserable caricature of film, in my eyes, all the digital cameras are like tools for a job that I do not need or want to do - indifferent to me.
 
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When I use digital, I'm proving that the "thousand monkeys" theory is correct.

(But seriously, digital is OK. Just not my cup of tea.)
 
in my limited span of photographic work over the past 4-5 years, after having not done any photography for a much longer time, i've come to a conclusion similar to marek's. i use digi for color work: sports, events, anything requiring flash or having a deadline. but i prefer film for B&W, hands down. maybe it's my ineptitude wrt conversions, but i can't get the B&W tonality i want from digi files.
 
I like digital because if I want to take a picture to sell smth (say on eBay) I do not need to shake tanks to do that... For the rest of the things - film!
 
I like Digital for Monochrome Infrared because the Silicon CCD goes deeper into the IR than does film.

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