You can get a DSLR that will have a lot of the features of a 35mm SLR
Still does not touch what you can do with a full mechanical SLR and good black and white film.
It is faster though.
I still shoot film, my Exakta’s need no batteries and last forever.
How do you meter exposure then?
A separate handheld light meter, perhaps?
And that cab he was trying to hail didn’t even come out at all.
Digital images are photographs, to me. Even in film, if I take picture and never make a print from it, I’d consider that photography. What else would you call it? Besides, plenty of people (like me) print and frame their digital photographs. Are those not photographs? The distinction doesn’t make any sense to me. So if I print it, it’s a photograph and it’s photography, but if I don’t, it’s not? That’s just nonsense. Whether the light is focused on film or a digital sensor, the end result is the same. You are recording a light image, i.e. “light writing,” on a surface in order to view it later. Whether it happens to be on a screen, on paper, or maybe even pumped directly into our brains in the future, it’s all photography.
What features are missing? The only one I can think of the ability to be operated without a battery if you’re using a mechanical film SLR. I have a slew of Nikon dSLRs in my closet, and my last film camera was a Nikon F5. I can’t think of anything my F5 could do that my D800 or D3 can’t. OK, I can think of one: an interchangeable viewfinder on the F5. But many film SLRs didn’t even have that.
The only advantage I see is the ability to operate in the most extreme conditions because of lack of battery. But 35mm film just looks like dogshit compared to digital (in my opinion, of course, but I went through scanning a portion of my digital archive last year and was surprised to find just how crappy the format is and how poorly detail resolves compared to the last couple generations of digital photography). Medium and large format I can still see some sense in using.
The reverse step in E-6 for slides smelled like mutant apple juice.
Ever try to get consistent results at home with color? Finding an honest politician is more likely. Not to mention the witches brew of chemicals was trying to dissolve everything in the dark. I’ll take dealing with inkjet print heads. Or just emailing the files to the local Staples.
I miss the split prism focusing screen from the old days. (bonus: how it works PDF)
They weren’t better than modern AF cameras, but they sure were better than manual focus aids available until only recently. These days things like live view with focus peaking are making MF much easier, but the split prism focus screen has a special place in my heart.
This is all nostalgia of course. I wouldn’t give up the amazing ease of processing and ability to shoot hundreds of shots at a session, just to have the film experience with warts and all.
1/ASA @ f16
For full sunlight
What I miss about film photography is the skill it took and the sense of accomplishment when you make that ONE shot, just right, that you took the time to compose, calculate the proper exposure, checked the frame for intrusive elements, and timed the shutter release JUST SO, and got a PERFECT image! I’m talking Ansel Adams type stuff here. 4x5 view cameras, sheet film, hours in the darkroom, the whole shebang.
With digital photography, the skill set has shifted from pre-shutter-click setup and film/print exposure/developing, to post-production image manipulation (IMHO). Missed the exposure by a stop or two? Photoshop it. Didn’t see that unsightly tree sticking up inappropriately in the background? Photoshop it. Want to get that nice orangy glow of a dramatic sunset, but the atmosphere just isn’t cooperating? Photoshop it.
Yes, the old ways of doing things photographically were expensive, time consuming, labor intensive, and had a high failure rate. But it took SKILLand PATIENCE to do it right. With digital photography (again IMHO) we make up for a large part of the formerly required skills by capturing an enormous number of images cheaply, sorting through them for the one that comes close to what we were looking for, then manipulating the final image to get the desired result. Not that that doesn’t take skill too, but it’s a different set of skills and much more available to the masses.
Digital photography does produce beautiful images, but when I see the results I’m always asking myself “How much Photoshopping was needed to get it to look like that?” It just doesn’t leave the same awe-inspiring impression that seeing a perfect image captured on film does. At least not for me, and certainly YMMV.
Like Pulykamell, I think this is very, very strained. If it’s not photography until a photo is produced, does that mean the person taking the picture isn’t a photographer? If a veteran newspaper photographer switches to digital and just sends a digital file to the layout department is that person no longer a photographer?
Or are they only a photographer when the paper prints their photo? And if the ink smears does that make them a bad photographer? And if the image is only used in the digital edition, then they aren’t doing photography?
I can’t believe anyone who made money taking film pictures feels that their product became fundamentally different when they switched from film to pixels. It was photograhy then, and it’s photography now – whether or not you stick some slick paper in the ink jet and click “print”.
We maipulated images in the film days too, both in the camera and the darkroom. Remember getting dramatic skies in your b&w shots by using a red filter? Colored filters were quite useful on the camera or on the lights… Then in the darkroom we cropped and dodged and burned and maybe even retouched. We played around with color balances when making color prints. (Lord! Wasn’t the dichroic enlarger an awesome tool?) We used tinted printing papers or even hand-tinted images. We used printing paper that was glossy or matte. An awful lot of what photoshop does just duplicates what we did but withoute needing a mountain of additional tools, accessories, and chemicals. You know what is really awesome about it? When you get the image how you want it, you can immediately and easily make as many copies of it as you like. Doing it the old fadhioned way meant doing almost all that shit for every print.
I miss the stat camera we had at work. It was fun hanging out in the darkroom and checking out the pinups we had on the wall. Also the line screens, cutting rubies, fanning out type by hand (back when ‘cut and paste’ really meant ‘cut and paste…’)
And setting type on the Compugraphic and the Varityper. Talk about chemicals, I was swimming in them…
It’s easier now but not nearly as much fun. Back then you had to know something… I even belonged to the Typesetters Union, once upon a time…
I still have the 70s vintage 35mm Minolta my mother passed on to me when I was a teenager. I remember her teaching me how to set the exposure by lining up the bouncing stick inside the little circle. It’s heavy, but it’s survived a few drops, and according to more experienced photographers, has a really good lens. It was a nuisance to carry, took forever to focus, but it took some great pictures for me. I miss the ability to fiddle with the settings to get those really good pictures, and the element of surprise when I got back my photos from being developed.
I have a nice DSLR, and a couple of point and shoot cameras, but mostly I just use my phone. Small, light, and almost always with me, and it takes pretty good pictures that I can crop and tweak right on the phone.
I still print photos. Mostly of my dogs so I can have them on my desk at work. but also for my Mom, who has no computer. I print off a few and mail them out to her every so often.
We used the quartz lights on the stat machine to light our cigarettes. Set the exposure time for 20 secs. and hold the ciggie 2" away. (Yeah, you could smoke in the office back then.) I don’t miss smoking, or processing chemicals.
Yep, aka, “the sunny 16 rule.” For full sunlight, the exposure time is 1 over the ISO (or ASA if you’re going old school) of the film you’re using. And then you just learn how to convert from there if you want to use a different aperture. And if it’s a little hazy, open up a stop. If it’s overcast, go down another stop. If it’s heavily overcast, yet another stop. Shade will also be around this exposure, probably even one more stop down, depending on how much light is reflecting around.
And, anyway, after awhile you get good at guessing exposures even in indoor situations. Remember, with negative film, you can be off by a good three stops and still get a usable print (I would say two stops on the underexposure end, and three stops overexposure. Some neg stocks are apparently good up to +6 overexposure. If you’re going to err with neg, err on the side of overexposure.) Now, if you’re shooting chromes (slides), you really need to be fairly spot-on. In that case, make an educated guess and bracket, erring slightly on the side of underexposure.
Yeah, I never really liked the split prism focusing, but that’s because I shot mostly action stuff. I always kept the clearest focusing screens in all my cameras (well, minus the FM2. That has the split prism in it.) I found it much easier to focus that way. But there’s no way in hell I could manually focus well today. My visual acuity isn’t nearly what it used to be, and I’m thirteen years out of practice (that’s when I finally decided to trust AF and felt like an idiot for not trusting it much, much earlier.) I’d definitely need the split prism for static subjects, and probably still just hope for the best with a clear screen on action subjects.
At any rate, you can get them for digital SLRs.. It is a custom third-party product, though. There also used to be a company called Katzeye that produced them, but they seem to have gone out of business after a decade.
No and no.
Digital photography is great. You couldn’t pay me enough money to go back. (Well, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett surely could, but you couldn’t.)
The very first digital photos I took with a mere 3x optical zoom were far better than all the pictures I’d taken on film. And when digital cameras with 8-10x optical zooms came down to ~$60-$70 (did that ever happen with film cameras?) made it possible to take amazing outdoor shots. So much freedom in knowing you weren’t limited to 24 or 36 exposures. So convenient to be able so see your last pic right away and know if it was good, or if you needed to take another. So handy to be able to crop and adjust the exposure of your pix after you’d taken them.
My parents have a few hundred photos of me and my sisters from when we were growing up. That’s all. And any pix that are lost, are gone. How weird that all seems, now.
There is some truth to what you say, but I think it’s too extreme. Miss exposure by a stop or two? Didn’t really matter with neg, given the high exposure latitude mentioned above. (With slide film, it matters much more, but if you’re shooting to print, typically you’re looking at neg film.) Fuck, I screwed up one portrait session by something like 5 stops overexposure on black and white film (somehow screwed up the aperture and instead of being at f/16, I was at f/2.8) and was able to salvage it after developing by thinning the negs in a chemical solution. You blow out a digital image like that and you are absolutely screwed. Once your channels clip, there is no getting that information back. That is one of the possible advantages film still has, that there is a lot of exposure latitude on the overexposure side of negative film because the highlights “roll off” in a way that they don’t with digital.
Nice glow of sunset? Heh. We had tricks for that in the film days, too. Look up graduated density filters. You see them all over the place in movies and scenic still photographs back in the film days. But, even minus that, you can emulate it in the darkroom if you wanted to. Want to make day look like night? Look up “day for night shooting.” Want crazy colors? Try cross-processing or any of a number of alternative printing techniques.
There were always ways to manipulate photos. It’s just easier to do now and you have much more control and repeatability with the process. That said, for me, the most important part of the image is still at the moment you take the image. All I do in post for the vast majority of my photos is adjust color balance, contrast, cropping, and make localized exposure adjustments (dodging and burning.) When I was doing photojournalism, that’s ALL that was allowed (and even those changes had their ethical limits.)
And you might be surprised just how many photos film photographers took back in the day. A National Geographic assignment over a month might produce as many as 1000 rolls of 35mm film. I never did work that exciting, but shooting sports I could easily hit 20 rolls of film, and the handful of film weddings I shot, I typically took at least a brick (20 rolls) to a brick and a half of 35mm film with me.
I agree that image manipulation could be done in film photography, but it was difficult and took some skill. Both to know what needed to be done as well as to execute it. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that film photography took a different set of skills and was, to me at least, a more thoughtful endeavor. And the mistakes were much more costly.
I certainly don’t miss having shot what should have been a perfect shot with all of the planning and execution that involved, only to have the film destroyed by a bad batch of processing chemicals. That was the main reason I never pursued a career as a professional photographer, especially shooting weddings. It didn’t matter if you processed your own film or had it processed for you, a roll of film would get messed up occasionally and there’s no way to get that back. And you can’t restage the wedding a day or two later to recapture the missed shots. With digital, you know right now if you got the shot or not!