Yet another professional opinion on film...any thoughts?

With regard to modern digital monochrome cameras, Nikon, Leica, and others offer them for Lab use. These are specialty cameras made for microscopes and other lab equipment. You can have a high-end Monochrome Camera made by some companies for general photographic use, but it will be very expensive. Expensive as in an M9 looking cheap by comparison.

Having a camera modified for IR is much less expensive, requires the IR Blocking filter be replaced with clear glass or a visible blocking filter. Conversion cost runs $500 or so, depending on the camera. Mostly paying for a technician to take apart the camera, the replacement filter is a small part of the cost. BUT: if the camera companies chose to offer a native Infrared camera, and made it IR at the time of construction- the cost differential would be minimal. Fuji offered a camera for IR and UV recently, but I cannot easily find a dealer:

http://www.fujifilmusa.com/products/digital_cameras/is/finepix_ispro/index.html

Looks like Fuji offers it for only $2600, for the body. That is cheap. You have to fill out a questionnaire to by one. Glad I looked!
 
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RichC said:
My thoughts about film? Utterly disinterested. I really don't get this *nostalgia* for dead technology, nor understand the attempted justifications for doing so...
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I couldn't agree more. I feel the same way about woodcuts, stone lithographs, oil paintings, charcoal sketches, sculpture (except that made on a 3D printer), books printed on paper, calligraphy (except that done on a Wacom), and music played on acoustic instruments (especially old ones, like lutes and fortepianos).

All of these things deserve nothing but contempt, as do those who care for them.

Right, Rich?

Edit: [Crickets.]
 
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bobby_novatron said:
A preamble: hello, my fellow RFF'ers, I'm just plopping this jumble of words on RFF for people to read and think about. It's a "cross-post" from a thread I started on Flickr earlier, but I thought it might be of interest to photogs amateur/pro on RFF. Happy reading!

This is an excerpt from a recent interview with Stanley Greene, a photojournalist who has covered numerous troubled areas of the world over several decades. Mr. Greene has taken many strking photos that have been published in the major media.

BTW the original interview is here:

lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/shoptalk-7/?scp=2&s...

This is his opinion on film vs digital, not mine. I am posting this here for elucidation and discussion only, not to inflame passions.

So here we go:

"I also think we are going to have more pictures from the 20th century than we are going to have from the 21st, because everything is getting deleted. Digital is not real. I can touch a negative. I can’t touch digital. When you have to back something up with 15 hard drives, doesn’t that rattle something?

And also, when you shoot digital, you can chimp; you can look at the image on the camera. Imagine Cartier-Bresson if he was trying to take a picture and all of a sudden he looked down. He would lose that next moment. A really good combat photographer chimping in the middle of the field could get a bullet in his head. I am surprised that no one has been shot yet.

But by shooting film, you are forced to really think about what you are photographing. You have to have a dialogue between you and the subject. When I shoot, I shoot from every angle possible because I am a super insecure photographer. And when I am shooting film, I am even more insecure. I push the envelope on trying to get the right shot, but I also think it through. With digital, there is a moment where you say: “Oh, I got it. What the hell.”

I think that we have no choice but to go back to shooting film because we have to get back to some kind of integrity. I think we are losing the moral code. And I think that in the end with film — yes, you can manipulate it and yes, you can change some things — there is still a moral code.

Anyway, I like shooting film. I have a thousand rolls of Kodachrome. But the fear I have every day is, “When I am going to get that golden assignment where I can actually go shoot the Kodachrome, then ship it off to Kansas and still hope that they are still processing it?” I am waiting. Any day now, they are going to say, “It’s all over.” But they said that about Polaroid, and now Polaroid is coming back with a vengeance..."
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Great thread - and thanks for sharing the references too: I've been telling my students something like this this for years; when I think back to the amount and type of different storage mediums I have used often cranky, unreliable and shortly obsolete - to use one notorious example 'Jazz' misrepresented as an archival back-up tool for goodness sake. Unlike film, I doubt in a 100 years they will recover a treasure trove of photographers images in dusty lofts and outhouses on old hard-drives, in the way we find 'Capa' suitcases, unknown masterpieces on glass plates and such. The 'chimping' point is extremely valid too, and is related to the above: Images on film roles, pored over days or years after the even often reveal great, meaningful (sequences, contexts and juxtapositions) pictures which might otherwise been discarded at the time of taking. Not the best example, but the discovery decades later of the context of the Doisneau 'kiss' is a trivial example which shows us something of how the man worked, the discovery of more of the context of Capa's fallen soldier is maybe another ... I think.
 
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He's got a very interesting point about the archival abilities of film vs. digital. I also believe that, far into the future, we'll have way more images from the 20th century than this one -- which is ironic given that exponentially more images are being made now than ever.

It's a digital dark age, and Greene is hardly the only one to understand that.
http://blog.longnow.org/2008/07/24/edward-burtynsky-the-10000-year-gallery/?akst_action=share-this

And this, especially:
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2008/09/full-interview-ed-burtynsky-on-10000-year-old-photos/
 
Colin Corneau said:
He's got a very interesting point about the archival abilities of film vs. digital. I also believe that, far into the future, we'll have way more images from the 20th century than this one -- which is ironic given that exponentially more images are being made now than ever.

It's a digital dark age, and Greene is hardly the only one to understand that.
http://blog.longnow.org/2008/07/24/edward-burtynsky-the-10000-year-gallery/?akst_action=share-this

And this, especially:
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2008/09/full-interview-ed-burtynsky-on-10000-year-old-photos/
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It may be a all true that we leave less photos behind than the last century. But now comes my serious question: who cares? What problems do we really address if we spam lots of photos into the future?

Perhaps I'm a bit provocative but it sounds sometimes like we have a kind of obligation to feed future archeologists with material for their work?

Of course it's nice to look through old negatives of my grandfather that are over 60 years old now. I even have the camera he used for the photos. It's nice, but not essential for me.
 
aperture64 said:
As much as you don't like it, it's true. With digital, you can never put the image on a light box and see the detail via a loupe as it is. With digital, it all depends on how your monitor or camera is calibrated.
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I fail to see the point.
what about negatives?
Do you see an image? or only raw material for an image?
How is it relevant in an art where the end product is a picture?
 
Archivability is a tricky thing.
Think about antiquity...
Lots of very important texts have been lost because they were written on paper vs stone. The only way for a paper to come through the ages to us is if it was important enough to have been reproduced in a certain quantity.
The original memories of Hadrianus have been lost. Important texts regarding the dawn of christianity have existed in very few copies so when someone, somewhere was powerful enough to put his hands on them, they were destroyed. the original hebrew text of "Hasmoneans" is lost because it didn't enter the canonic text of the bible due to the politic dissentions at the moment of the book "closing" (only the greek translation have survived).
Think about the impact of the invention of printing in that regard.
Without printing, my guess is that 90% of important text wouldn't have survived to the numerous political/religious "cultural purges" (comunists/ Nazis/ Christian church/ Taliban, you name it...) that happened to us since the invention of printing.

I think Digital is a bit like book printing...

No negative will survive centuries, or thousands of years. endlessly reproduced data will (let's rule out apocalypse where frankly, I don't think that the first concern of survivors will be the impact of the photography of HCB on Koudelka style)
Film unsustained archivability is superior to digital for decades, and that's why I use film. But the argument about the vulnerability of my archives when all of them are in a closet that can be destroyed is damn real.

All this discussion is about personal choices.

You can use film like you do digital with minor differences (of course if the client insists on either option...). In my eyes, the only relevant question is how the new photog generation aprehend photography, given they are raised up in a digital world. The small format camera did revolutionized our way of thinking about photography, and the digital may do the same.
HCB wouldn't probably have chimped, but with digital he could have saved precious moments spent on changing rolls..

Meanwhile, to each his own...
 
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sanmich said:
Archivability is a tricky thing.

HCB wouldn't probably have chimped, but with digital he could have saved precious moments spent on changing rolls..
To each his own...
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HCB with digital, traveling where he did, and in many places where people work today, require a Honda Generator to keep the batteries charged and and the laptops and backup drives running for a few hours a day. i guess he could have packed a bunch of batteries (I carry 4 spares) and traveling with the gas for the generator can be an issue.. And then when working in bright light It's kinda hard to see the LCD on the camera and computer.. so a outdoor tent used for picnics is best, but then it takes a couple of assistants to set all this up.. and then if you want to move quickly.. Ya know, even though I shoot a lot of digital, when I do something for me, it's easy to take a film camera with a couple of rolls of film in my pocket and maybe a second lens in the other pocket. And you don't smell of gas after feeding the Honda. And god (photo god) help you if you have to do a sensor clean in the field...
 
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PKR said:
HCB with digital, traveling where he did, and in many places where people work today, require a Honda Generator to keep the batteries charged and and the laptops and backup drives running for a few hours a day. i guess he could have packed a bunch of batteries (I carry 4 spares) and traveling with the gas for the generator can be an issue.. And then when working in bright light It's kinda hard to see the LCD on the camera and computer.. so a outdoor tent used for picnics is best, but then it takes a couple of assistants to set all this up.. and then if you want to move quickly.. Ya know, even though I shoot a lot of digital, when I do something for me, it's easy to take a film camera with a couple of rolls of film in my pocket and maybe a second lens in the other pocket. And you don't smell of gas after feeding the Honda. And god (photo god) help you if you have to do a sensor clean in the field...
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I know and I personally agree.
I just want to say that some of the arguments brought by Mr Green can be a bit er.... wrong?:rolleyes:

I have heard Stanley Green reacting about the trend changes in the industry to a panel of journal editors, and he seems to be both very intelligent and a gentleman, but I think most of the arguments of "why film" or "why digital" can be turn around.
(see the "its very hard to alter a raw file" thing that I personally wasn't aware of)
 
sanmich said:
I know and I personally agree.
I just want to say that some of the arguments brought by Mr Green can be a bit er.... wrong?:rolleyes:

I have heard Stanley Green reacting about the trend changes in the industry to a panel of journal editors, and he seems to be both very intelligent and a gentleman, but I think most of the arguments of "why film" or "why digital" can be turn around.
(see the "its very hard to alter a raw file" thing that I personally wasn't aware of)
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My Opinion:
Stanley (and anyone else) can use any kind of film or digital media he chooses. He can store the stuff any way that pleases him. I don't care how folks make their photos (unless I can learn something from their experience) and i can't understand why anyone is interested in how I make mine. This has become a hardware/software-religion, with a bunch of folks trying to get one an other to convert. It's like getting worked up over what kind of tires someone buys.. or what kind of pickles they like on a burger..I just don't get it.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
The artist created the work so I really think the artist's thought on its meaning is the only legitimate view. If the work doesn't say to you what the artist claims it does, then either the artist failed to create an effective piece or the viewer wasn't smart enough to understand it. I think art should not be hard to understand though, if it is so difficult to understand that a large number of viewers are not smart enough to get it, then I think thats a failure on the artists' part rather than a failure on the part of the viewer. Not that art should be dumbed down, but it shouldn't be deliberately difficult either. Too much of what's made today is designed to make the viewer feel stupid, in my opinion.
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I understand what you are saying. But is an artist can evoke different emotions (especially if they are positive) in different people, are those people's interpretation of the work invalid?
 
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