From light to shadow - from digital back to film

rolleistef said:
how much do they exactly pay in the US for film and processing? in France it's 3€ for a generic (Foma) bw film, processing is no trouble of course, about 4e for a colour fuji superia and about 8e for processing and printing. (multiply by 1.5 for $)
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That is more than the USA.

I generally do not have film processed anymore, with the exception of C41, which I have processed only - no prints, no scans. That is cheap - around $2.20 at the local Walgreens drugstore. Last time I had prints made, it was around $6 or $7. I've seldom had a CD made - the commercial scanning is generally terrible.
 
In answer to Rolleistef"s initial question: This weekend my son came home and was enthralled with my large Nikon D1 digital. He took it with him. It had too many buttons and knobs for me. I always felt like I was using a computer program. I, personally, do not like looking at the images immediately after I take them especially on the small screen. Film cameras with much less "buttons & knobs" make you concentrate on what I feel is important in photography...capturing the image...and the confidence of having captured that image without immediate feedback.
 
Being able to see the LCD after shooting is all fine and dandy, but it's not necessary for me. Now that I've learned properly about DoF, shutter speed and aperture, I know that my shots are going to come out in all but the most tricky lighting conditions. When moving over to film it was frightening at first, especially flash-pictures. Then it struck me how for over 70 years people did perfectly fine photos without LCDs to help them. It's a scary photographic world when people need to chimp after every photo. What is that teaching people? That the machine is in control and you're just along for the ride.

Plus I found that when doing digital, the LCD was a disadvantage. One because the LCD lied: it showed me what the photo was supposed to look like. Once I got it on the computer I found it was quite different (I hate post-processing.) Two, because after I saw the photo on the LCD, I wasn't in a hurry to get it onto the computer. In my waning days of digital I'd have 2 month old photo on a memory card I'd lost interest in long ago.
 
Although I have a DSLR and use it frequently (almost always for commercial work) I rarely look at the LCD, probably due to a lifetime of shooting film cameras, which I still use regularly also.

I know the camera, I know its lenses - in other words I know what it can and cannot do - and I feel (I know this sounds absurd) like I'm cheating when I look at the LCD. Also, it takes the anticipation and surprise out of photography, at least for me.

And anyway, the image is so small on the LCD as to be somewhat useless.
 
That's a good idea, then using it would be more like using a Leica film camera, right? Photographers got along just fine for more than a century without LCD's.
 
sitemistic said:
... Honestly, and this comes from someone who did learn all this photography stuff over 40 years, what is the problem for 99 percent of the photos most people take to just let the camera do the math?
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For other people that's fine. For me, it's not. Personally I've found that most auto-exposure systems don't capture images as I want them.

Technology isn't going to suddenly disappear and people have to resort to extinction meters and waterhouse stops just to take photos, anymore than I'm going to have to go back to doing calculus with a slide rule.
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What happens when the batteries die?

I just don't get this anti-technology stuff.
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These are my personal beefs with the digital photography industry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
 
I agree with dogman.
It is a user level. One can stick to all manual regulating a couple perameter by by zeroing a couple indicators.
It seems to me an idiot proof process.
A more serious problem is that of the artistic content of a photo.
HCB was not a gear head as far as I know.
Having said so I have an additional interest in visual perception and image processing.
That this might allow me one day to achieve higher artistic levels is all to be seen
Cheers
Paul
 
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