I was listening to the Simon and Garfunkel hit “The Kodachrome Song” and I realized how different taking pictures was way back. Back then you had to set up your shots, adjust your focus and lighting, snap your picture, then have it developed.
Then getting your pictures and the excitement, and disappointment, of seeing the results. Then sharing them and putting them in albums. We were starting to put together components for a darkroom when digital hit.
Now sure, I love taking pictures on my phone and we still have a good digital camera. But its different. I take dozens of shots with the hope one will come out right. Plus I really cant control focus and such. Finally its not the same seeing them on a video screen.
So what do you all think?
Do you miss old classic camera and film photography?
Don’t miss it at all. There are plenty of digital cameras that allow you full control over you image. Composition is more important that technical stuff any day.
It only allows 24 pictures to be taken before you have to wait a day or two to see the results, just like using film and sending the film out to get processed. It also has a tiny viewfinder and adds light leakage, etc, just like you’d get from a disposable camera. Enjoy!
No. Once, it occurred to me that a (fairly, a few hundred dollars) expensive Canon Eos camera that I used to want would probably be cheap now in the digital age. I looked on EBay, and sure enough it could be had for around 30 bucks. I briefly considered doing a BIN, but then realized that I didn’t feel nostalgic about the hassles of film and had no desire to ever fool with it again.
Oh, do I miss sitting in a completely dark closet and threading film into a little canister and hoping I did it right? Um, no.
Do I miss loading film into my SLR and hoping I didn’t kink it somewhere so the film doesn’t actually advance? Um, no.
Okay. Well I kind of do miss that, it’s just that there were then so many possibilities of making mistakes that made all your pictures bad. If there even were pictures.
Note, I can still screw it up. Less likely now. So this is better.
I only miss it for the physical aspect of it.
In nearly every respect, Digital is far superior. The number of “keeper” shots I get is far greater, the images look better, and it’s much cheaper.
However, I do miss playing in the darkroom, and the smell of the chemicals. I think that anyone who wants to be a decent photographer should be exposed (so to say) to a photo darkroom. It teaches a basic understanding of exposure and dynamic range. But, especially for color, digital is a zillion times better. I used to spend all evening, and a bunch of money, to make one Cibachrome print, only to find that it was a tad magenta when I looked at it in the morning. :smack:
ETA: Some of my most recent photos are posted in this thread.
Not a bit. While it was moderately fun to fiddle-fuck mixing chemicals and regulating temperatures and dodging and burning and retouching and all that shit, it was all in pursuit of the image. The image was what was actually important. Digital photography and image manipulation make that possible without most of the fiddle-fucking. You know what else I don’t miss? How expensive film itself was. Remember rationing the number of pictures you took in the field because you only had so much film because you could only afford so much film? Today, you shoot and shoot and shoot. Run out of memory? Delete some of the unsatisfactory shots on the spot.
I don’t see any reason to miss photography. If you’re just looking to record an image, a digital camera does the job a lot more efficiently than a film camera.
And if you want to use photography for some reason, it’s still around. The same way you can still paint a picture if you want to.
The lack of the physical aspect of it is what I think is best about digital. I’ve got shoeboxes full of old photographs lying around that I don’t want to get rid of… but they’re still shoeboxes lying around. And it’s a pain to try to go through them looking for anything. Nowadays, all of the pictures I take end up on the same machine as all of my recipes and most of my games and many of my work tools and several of my hobby tools and lots of other stuff, and it never gets any bigger, bulkier, or more awkward for having all of those things on it.
Agree with this. I’ve been doing it as a living for almost 20 years now. I went fully digital in 2004. I don’t really miss film at all. I mean, sure, in some sort of nostalgic, abstract sense, but not in any practical sense whatsoever.
The one thing I did somewhat enjoy was the meditative nature of darkroom printing. There was something zen about being stuck in an orange-red tinted dimly lit room smelling of stop bath and fixer (I don’t have as strong a scent association with developer) churning out print after print, dodging and burning along the way and being physically connected to your creation. Next thing you know, the birds are chirping outside and the sun is coming up. There were several times I would lose myself in the darkroom and completely exist out of time.
But that’s mostly nostalgia. I still have my film cameras, and I’ve had darkroom equipment in the garage for almost ten years now, thinking that one day I’d set it up again, but I’ve never bothered. I so much prefer digital.
The only thing I miss is that with a physical shot, the default is to keep it, so you can still discover troves of missing photos as long as you never made the decision to throw them out. Whereas with digital photos, you have to make the conscious decision to archive them.
With digital cameras that use batteries, you can take an order of magnitude more pictures in a shoot. With a battery pack, it’s several orders of magnitude, limited only by your stamina. Honestly that’s the best thing about my DSLR versus my previous digital camera (that took batteries and also had used a lot of battery power in zooming) : with my former camera I could “only” take 100-200 pictures before I had to replace the batteries. I hate to think how limited I’d feel if I used film!
No way. Digital is the greatest thing ever! Not being limited to the 24 or 36 exposures in a roll is tremendously freeing. Now, you just take every damn shot you see, and delete the ones that are sub-par. It costs you nothing!
Ever been on the last day of your vacation, and you’ve only got four exposures left? Never again!
I was never into photography all that much, but it occurs to me that that was a very expensive hobby. so much trial and error even after you mre or less knew what you were doing. And having to wait for the pics unless you had your own darkroom. Now you can see right away if your settings are way off and correct immediately. More skill and knowledge was required for “real” photography back then, for sure.
Now, though, with cameras in our phones, I wonder if there aren’t TOO many photos floating around. No more undocumented anything. But that’s a topic for another day.
BTW, the album that has Kodachrome on it, “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon,” is one of my all-time faves. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. And the Kodachrome song definitely does not improve with modernization…
“SD Caaaarrd!
It gives the nice bright colors
Gives the gree-ee-eeen to summer
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day-- oh yeah!
…
Mama, don’t take my SD Card away…”
Digital photography is still photography, though. I don’t understand why people are using that word restrictively. Photography is literally “light writing.” That’s what you’re doing, whether on film or on a sensor. To me it’s like saying digital music isn’t music or something.
Never got into photography. Or anyway, the hard work of it. We’d take our film rolls and drop them off at the drugstore. Then I had Polaroid cameras. Instant gratification. I got a digital camera in the early 2000s. If a shot didn’t look good, I could delete it from the camera’s memory. My last few smartphones have had decent cameras. I don’t even print pictures anymore. There are so many ways to share them.
Yeah, but we knew what the question meant, “do you miss the traditional physical processes of photography prior to digital cameras.” It was shorthand.
And digital music is still music, but using music software on a computer or electronic keyboard is not exactly the same process as writing and copying out orchestral scores by hand. I think Mozart would have LOVED modern music techie tools!
This is a double-edged sword. I still find making prints of photos I like to be very important in terms of preserving memories for future generations. It’s a lot easier to find grandpa’s old shoe box of pictures and just look through them, no further equipment required, versus finding a stack of old hard drives or DVDs or god forbid Zip disks or Syquest cartridges (I’m dating myself to the 90s here) that may or may not still work, that may or may not even be easily plugged into the generation of computers many years down the road, etc. So you do have to actively maintain your photo archive, and do a lot more work in keeping the data “alive” versus a physical print, in my opinion.
I had a camera, not a professional-grade camera, but a good snapshot camera, that used two AA batteries. Batteries were never a concern, just throw two fresh ones in. And AA batteries are compact enough that you can carry several packages with you.