Cutting to the chase - Digital is better than 17 year expired film. Picking from the best of many digital shots is easier than getting one perfect shot on film. A native 24MP shot is superior to a 16.8 MP scan. An interesting exercise. No one questions that digital offers opportunities and convenience that film doesn't, but what about the same exercise with fresh film, either single shots or the same number of exposures per subject. Even with a level playing field, almost certainly advantage Digital, but a more even match.

The classic portrait focal length range is considered lenses between 85mm through 135mm on a full frame camera. The 85mm focal length is also useful for landscape photography, creating a slightly compressed view of the world. When working with fast apertures, the 85mm focal length can isolate a close subject against a blurred background.

Flowering Pear


This isn't intended as a scientific comparison. Rather, a look at the results of similar 85mm lenses of similar subjects at similar distances in similar lighting.

Flowering Pear


The film shots are the first three, using the Canon EF 85mm f/1.4L IS USM and the Canon EF 12mm II Extension Tube that allowed me to focus at about 18-inches from the nearst blossoms. The film is 17-year old expired Fuji NPH 400, a now discontinued professional film stock.

Flowering Pear


The remaining images use the 1981 manual focus Canon FDnew 85mm f/1.2L lens mounted to the 24MP Sony a7II mirrorless camera. A Vivitar FD 12mm Extension Tube provides the same close-focus abilities with this manual focus lens.

Wrigleyville Spring


The images are visually similar, possibly some are blossoms from the same tree, but on different days. A crop at the end of this sequence looks at details of one blossom and discusses how they're the same and how they differ.

The primary difference has less to do with the visual aspects, and instead, the differences are found in the shooting process. The film shots are 1-off shots. I'm not going to rip 3 to 5-frames over and over. Instead, I have the film camera in a BBF configuration with AI Servo and a single AF point on the subject. While holding the BBF (Back Button Focus) and trying to hold myself still and watching the flowers to pause for a moment in the breeze, I smoothly tripped the shutter once. There's no feedback to review. Unless I think I completely futzed the frame, I move onto another blossom or tree.

Wrigleyville Spring


The manual focus lens on the digital mirrorless body is both similar and rather different in shooting technique. On the MILC I can very precisely focus the lens in the Electronic View Finder (EVF) using the 10x zoomed display where I can see the fine details of the point of focus. MILC - Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera. Most important of all, I can rip 3- to 5-images at a time (per second) and then check a few results if desired, and most importantly, I can repeat the process multiple times expecting one or a few to be in perfect focus and position in the frame.

Wrigleyville Spring


When I get the digital results to the computer, there's more total images to select from and the best of the best are always 1 to 1 sharper than the best of the film, even when the film frame seems 'perfect'.

Wrigleyville Spring


The crops below present two 800pixel squares from two different images. The digital was show above, the film comes from another post. The exposure details are listed in the images. The manual focus lens does not report the aperture into the EXIF. I probably have more depth of field at probably a smaller aperture, I'm guessing at f/5.6.

Another difference is the pixel resolution. These are pixel level crops, where the film was scanned to a file at 5035x3339 (17MP). I haven't tried to resample the digital file to the size of the film scan.

pear-compare


Details on the exposure and lenses are provided in the EXIF data from Flickr, just use the image titles as URL links to Flickr. The scanned JPEGs were processed in Adobe Lightroom v6, as were the digital RAW files.