abc1234 wrote:
I cannot really understand why people shoot film just to finish it digitally. No one ever justified that nor compared the two approaches side-by-side. The only thing I can think of is nostalgia. In comparing the two approaches, one has to look at prints, not computer monitors. I can see shooting film and then printing in the darkroom but if you scan negatives or slides, then what do you really need film for?
I did all my own darkroom work for over 40 years. I loved it and miss it. However, all digital has film beat in every regard as far as I am concerned and even for all my wonderful memories, I would never go back.
I cannot really understand why people shoot film j... (
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Would a comparison be meaningful in 2018? You seem to assume that people are making prints, or even caring about them. However, well over 90% of the uses of photographs are now digital. Graphic arts printing — what little of it remains — (offset litho, gravure, electrostatic, etc.) originates digitally.
That means, if you are going to need a super-high resolution image to make a few huge display prints that will be viewed from very close distances (18"), the only economical *capture* option is large format film. But if you need 24,000 by 30,000 pixel images to make 8 feet by 10 feet prints (in sections)... A box of Provia 100F, an E6 lab, an Epson V850 film scanner, and a 64" Epson inkjet are pretty good options.
Medium format digital cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars. Unless you do this sort of work daily, it's hard to justify the capital expenditure.
For small jobs, sheet film is far less expensive to buy, process, and scan. Those photographers who understand their ways around a view camera with its tilts, shifts, and WYSIWYG ground glass can play with a product photo in the studio, getting it just the way they want it before capture. Arguably, the medium format digital process IS much faster and more precise, but if you don't have the gear to do it all the time...
For hobbyists and artists who want the same advantages of large format, The same thing is true. Large format pigmented inkjet printers from Epson, and Canon rule the roost when it comes to making big, fine art quality prints to display in museums, offices, and homes.
Snapshooters now use digital cameras (or more likely, their smartphones). They put their images on sharing sites like Instagram, FaceBook, Shutterfly, Tinder, and on and on. Plenty of digital images just get sent via text or email. Very few digitally captured images ever get printed. Those that do are printed electronically.
Oh, a comparative few artists, artistes, hobbyists, and students still practice the tedium of film photography for many reasons. That's fine. They wanna? They gonna. I get it.
I HAVE compared the two media side by side. I was lucky enough to be deeply involved in the pro photo lab industry during the digital revolution. I got to run the digital operations of our lab as we transitioned from film capture and optical printing, to film capture, film scanning, and digital printing, to digital capture and digital printing. That was an interesting change, both to guide and to watch.
As Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, once said at a conference I attended, "Bits beat atoms." By that, he meant that digital technologies won because they are more useful. An image (or text, video, audio, graphics...) can be captured, processed instantly, and immediately sent via the Internet to its useful destination, or broadcast for all to see. There is much less latency. There is much greater utility.
Does it look different? Quite possibly it does, but quite arguably, it does not have to. Digital systems are far more precise and controllable, with repeatable consistency. Outcomes of both processes largely depend upon the skill, knowledge, experience, and equipment choices of the users.
When we switched from film capture and film printing of portraits to film capture, film scanning, and digital printing of portraits, we worked with Kodak to tune their high end film scanners so the output from our mini-labs was as close as possible to what we had had with fully chemical/optical systems.
When we went to digital capture (using simple mid-range Canons like the EOS 20D, 30D, 40D, 50D, 7D, 5D...), we worked with the Canon menus and adjusted our lighting to make the portraits look as close as possible to what the fully chemical/optical systems had provided. But then we took things a few steps further and improved the accuracy of the process.
The end product of the fully digital lab in 2007 looked far better than the end product of the fully film-based lab in 1997. Our turnaround time for complete jobs was cut by 2/3. Our costs were reduced. Our lab footprint was reduced by about 60%. And then, the digital tide rolled over us. Our customers — mothers who bought school portraits — quit buying them. The evolution of the cellphone camera, then the smartphone camera, plus other digital cameras, the Internet, and all the social media sharing sites, combined to make our product practically obsolete.
I also did my own darkroom work for 40 years. I loved it until I burned out on it (after eight years of 70 hour weeks doing multi-image AV production in the 1980s). I DO NOT miss it. But I hang onto all my film cameras and darkroom equipment, "just in case."
Meanwhile, I've begun slowly re-photographing the best of my old B&W negatives and slides... much the same way I used to make slide duplicates.