Film versus Digital, and vice versa

[wlewisiii]

Define better...

To my eyes. Nothing more specific.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Film and film cameras are so awesome if you have time and money to waste.

I did it from 2012 to 2022 with few rolls developed and some frames printed under enlarger ... per week.
It was easy job, easy life time. I have purchased, fixed, sold dozens of film cameras of all formats.

Right now my life is much more busier, dare I say, interesting and challenging to keep waste it on film.

My 12YO daughter switched to Canon digital P&S after realizing how much instax film cost...

Sorry.

 

[joe bosak]

For me film has become too costly and too much hassle (whether turnaround times, faffing with chemicals or all the shennanigans with scanning or digitising by camera), relative to what I get with digital.

Sometimes I look at my digital photos and think "wow that looks like an old film photo", but I have never thought "I wish I'd used film" no matter how bad the photo came out - though I do sometimes wish I'd used a different (digital) camera, or that the (digital) camera I'd used wasn't so capricious/situational/whatever.

 

[Godfrey]

I dunno. I've been shooting and processing film since I was 8yo, that's 62 years now. The worst I can say is that it's a little tedious at times. Better or worst than digital capture? Irrelevant with any modern camera.

I like what film looks like, but I also like what digital capture looks like. I have good cameras in both domains so, eh? The real advantage to shooting with a digital camera, for the way and what I shoot, is how quickly I can turn a shoot into prints .... But I'm never in a rush and have no clients bangin' on the door any more, so I get to enjoy whatever process I pursue.

G

 

[JohnGellings]

To my eyes. Nothing more specific.

Fair enough...subjective.

 

[Disappointed_Horse]

I love taking pictures with my film cameras; the tactile delight of loading and winding the film, the feel of a precise mechanical device in my hands doing exactly what I tell it to and nothing more, looking through an optical viewfinder. I love the look of my photos on black-and-white film. I can get black-and-white images I like with my digital camera or my phone, but they don't look like my film photos.

I'm mostly a black-and-white photographer. I like color photography, but I don't like my color photography. With color, I still greatly prefer shooting with my film cameras, but I don't like the results enough better than what I can get from digital to bother most of the time. If slide film wasn't so astronomically expensive, I might think differently.

The quantity of film that I shoot is small enough that the cost is tolerable. I have noticed that for me personally, I am okay with the cost of film until it goes over $10 per roll (35mm). If black-and-white film gets over that, I will probably rethink my position.

Realistically, I am never going to have time, space, or money to have a darkroom, so getting images from my film cameras is going to involve scanning at some point. I have found an inexpensive lab to have my film developed and scanned, and other than a few frames that have had obvious dust, I have been very happy with my results.

I always keep my negatives, but in terms of archiving my photos, I prefer digital hands down. Having my photos save on my personal hard drives (plural) plus backed up to three different cloud services makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Well, other than the fact that one of those services is Google, which is probably using my photos to train its AI. Don't have to worry about that with my negatives in the shoe boxes, at least!

 

[Dogman]

Dust spots on negatives. I really hate spotting.

 

[hendry86]

Felt it's not versus. Seems like some other members have similar sentiments too.

It's all about what we want and like. Depends on the season in life we are in.

I went through a period of shooting film but the time and cost are harder and harder to justify, so I went on to shoot digital.

And recently got into the craze of digicams to capture those 90s digital vibe 😀 happy that I was buying those unwanted digicams before the price hike!

 

[JohnWolf]

Dust spots on negatives. I really hate spotting.

I find removing dust spots on scans very enjoyable, while removing them on digital files annoys me. I can’t explain.

 

[Godfrey]

Spotting with Lightroom's tools makes it a pleasure.

G

 

[Dogman]

Dust spotting with LR is quick and simple as long as there are only a few. Dust spotting from a negative is a PITA, whether with Spotone on a print or digitally. Removing sensor dust spots in images can be impossible without a LOT of tedious diddling and doodling around.

i repeat: I hate spotting.

Spotting with Lightroom's tools makes it a pleasure.

G

Quick and simple (sometimes) but never a pleasure.




.............................

 

[agentlossing]

If there's extensive dust, for me it's a re-rinse and dry of the negative.

 

[bulevardi]

Removing sensor dust spots in images can be impossible without a LOT of tedious diddling and doodling around.
i repeat: I hate spotting.
Quick and simple (sometimes) but never a pleasure.

That's where AI dust removing or automatic photo repair tools can come in handy 😉

 

[bulevardi]

There's no "versus" for me, it's digital for colour and film for b/w, that's all. Never gave up my darkroom.

Haven't you ever felt the joy desaturating a digital colour photo in an editor?

 

[Harry the K]

Haven't you ever felt the joy desaturating a digital colour photo in an editor?

I do this from time to time. But B/W feels so much better on film..... for me. I always ask myself why do the imitation instead of the real thing.

 

[Godfrey]

Dust spotting with LR is quick and simple as long as there are only a few. Dust spotting from a negative is a PITA, whether with Spotone on a print or digitally. Removing sensor dust spots in images can be impossible without a LOT of tedious diddling and doodling around.

i repeat: I hate spotting.

...

Quick and simple (sometimes) but never a pleasure.

Diff'rent strokes. I enjoy the digital process, despite that I hated spotting a wet lab print. 🙂

I do this from time to time. But B/W feels so much better on film..... for me. I always ask myself why do the imitation instead of the real thing.

Imitation? Not sure I understand. Imaging sensors at their baseline are only sensitive to intensity of light, not color other than at their spectral sensitivity level, very similar to B&W film. RGB sensors simply have an array of filters over the photosites so that we can calculate and interpolate approximate color across the spectrum. Using a desaturation process simply inverts the analog filtering process to restore the sensor's 'real' response to light. There are losses, of course, which is why the monochrome digital cameras from Leica and Pentax have an edge.

Of course, film's response curves differ from digital sensor response curves ... but to call one 'real' and the other 'imitation' is dubiously credible. Neither is a natural, 'real' fit to the native response of the human eye, both are approximations.

G

 

[Harry the K]

Diff'rent strokes. I enjoy the digital process, despite that I hated spotting a wet lab print. 🙂



Imitation? Not sure I understand. Imaging sensors at their baseline are only sensitive to intensity of light, not color other than at their spectral sensitivity level, very similar to B&W film. RGB sensors simply have an array of filters over the photosites so that we can calculate and interpolate approximate color across the spectrum. Using a desaturation process simply inverts the analog filtering process to restore the sensor's 'real' response to light. There are losses, of course, which is why the monochrome digital cameras from Leica and Pentax have an edge.

Of course, film's response curves differ from digital sensor response curves ... but to call one 'real' and the other 'imitation' is dubiously credible. Neither is a natural, 'real' fit to the native response of the human eye, both are approximations.

G

Excuse me, I´m no technician and don´t care what those people do with the many photons. And I don´t have to convince anybody, just sticking to my layman attitude. If you think different, that´s fine.
B/W was for many years the only way to produce photographs, and I just consider B/W as part of film photography, that´s all.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Haven't you ever felt the joy desaturating a digital colour photo in an editor?

No, but I did enjoy writing my own DNG processor in Fortran to convert to Monochrome. I wanted to see how close the M9 could get to the M Monochrom. For the latter- I wrote my own software to scale the 14-bit pixel values to 16-bit using a Gamma curve. That was fun.

 

[Disappointed_Horse]

Despite what I said above about using film for black-and-white and digital for color, I convert a lot of my digital photos to black-and-white. (As I said, I like color photography, just not my color photography.) I wouldn't necessarily call the process a joy, but because I edit most of my photos on my iPad, I have found a few apps I like for this purpose. Snapseed is pretty good for this, and I have a few favorite settings in Hipstamatic Classic that I sometimes use to achieve certain looks, but my favorite black-and-white conversion app is called Darkr. The idea of this app is that the black-and-white conversion is a digital simulation of printing a negative in the darkroom where you choose the exposure time and contrast filter for exposing the paper and then dodge and burn as needed. It sounds kind of silly (maybe it is kind of silly), but I enjoy using it and I really like the results. Here's an example:



Not that this is a great photo or anything, but just an example of the results I get with Darkr. Image taken with a Nikon D7000, Nikon 55–200mm VR at 55mm. I also upscaled this image in Photomator prior to editing it in Darkr, then had to downsize it to upload to RFF.

 

[Godfrey]

Excuse me, I´m no technician and don´t care what those people do with the many photons. And I don´t have to convince anybody, just sticking to my layman attitude. If you think different, that´s fine.
B/W was for many years the only way to produce photographs, and I just consider B/W as part of film photography, that´s all.

hmm, lessee: Hand-colored photographs first appeared in the late 1830s, shortly after the invention of the Daguerrotype. They pre-date the existence of the modern photographic process, which dates from 1839-1941 depending on whether you believe the British or French first innovated the negative capture to print positive process. 😉 B&W was for many years the only way I could afford to do photography as color film and color processing invoked much more expense than I could afford. And, at the same time, I found I enjoyed B&W photographs for their inherent abstraction from perceived reality.

... Which is why I bought a Leica M10 Monochrom. Fit a light green filter, and the output looks indistinguishable from the results I used to get in the darkroom with B&W film.

Crashed Wicked Witch - Santa Clara 2022
Leica M10 Monochrom + Color Skopar 50mm f/2.5, green filter
ISO 320 @ f/4 @ 1/180​

That photograph is straight out of the camera. Is it "real" or is it "imitation"?

G