Amen to that! The pix my digital has taken of sunsets are just amazing in their clarity and capture of detailed color.
I would like to chime in on this one. I’ve been an amateur photographer for years, and used to shoot photos for the college newspaper. I won’t be giving up my film anytime soon. (Who knows in another ten years though.) I recently bought a new SLR knowing full well that I could be buying something that will soon be outdated. I wanted a camera, but I just wasn’t impressed with any digital I saw for under $1,500.
I have seen professionals use extremely high end digital cameras, and I am never satisfied with their results. My wedding photographer used both her 35mm and her digital. I can pick out the digital ones rather easily, even though her camera ran about $5 K for the body alone. I guess you can say I have a “pixel eye.”
I relate digital photography to digital music. Blowing up a medium to high quality digital picture is a lot like playing an MP3 very loudly. You get the general idea, but you lose a lot in between.
I don’t think it is physically possible for DC to have as high a resolution as film. In other words, you can’t make CCDs smaller than those silver dots you seem to loathe. I also don’t think you can make CCDs as fast as film, so forget about those 1/4000 shutter speeds for now. Besides, CCDs also need “recharging”, that means you can take a high speed sequence with a DC.
:smack:
make it “…cannot take a high speed sequence…”
How well does digital handle something like leaving the “shutter” open for ten minutes at a time to get a long exposure of a very dark subject—say, a starry sky?
Well, the new Canon Powershot Pro has a shutter speed of 1/4000 and can shoot 2.5 fps for six frames, with the limit probably due to buffer size rather than the CCD. The ISO is limited to 800 which may be what you mean by “as fast”.
As for “physically possible to have a resolution as high as film”, we’ll have to see.
The current generation of 8MP “prosumer” cameras are kind of pushing the technology right now in terms of noise and pixel size, but it’s not clear whether this is a physical limit, or just what current technology can produce. In 7 years, we’ve gone from what were essentially 640 x 480 resolution toys to 8 MP cameras where the question “Is it as good as film” actually has some meaning. I’m guessing that in another 7 years, the question will be as moot as CD vs vinyl.
You get increasing noise with longer exposures. There are ways to cope with it. Professional astronomers cool their sensors. But barring specialized equipment, you can use various noise reduction schemes, including averaging several exposures together. Most cameras have built-in noise reduction for long exposures. Some noise can also be removed during post processing.Consider LCD displays. For several reasons they can’t make the display elements in LCDs much smaller, and they have been working with LCDs for decades.
2.5fps is not really high speed photography. Okay, it is the low end of high speed photography, or is getting there. The Canon DC isn’t bad, but not quite up to SLR standards, yet.
Following old Ansel Adams, I’m looking for a large format (“view”) camera. You know; bellows, glass focussing screen, black cloth over your head. 10 by 8 inch exposures.
I repeat; An exposed surface measuring 10 inches by 8, not a tiny sensor a couple of centimetres square.
That kind of resolution will not be bettered by digital for decades yet.
Well, true enough, although anyone working with 8x10 emulsions is pretty much at the far, far end of the bell curve in terms of resolution requirements. You really only need that kind of resolution if you’re making truly enormous enlargements. And I suspect that one of the reasons Ansel Adams used huge formats is that the film of the time was of limited resolution. Film has increased dramatically since then, and I suspect a 4x5 or 6x4 back would do you just fine. You can also increase the apparent resolution of a digital photo by stitching a panorama together – that technique works very well for landscapes. I actually would not be surprised if at some point some manufacturers decide that in-camera multiple exposures and stitching together is a reasonable approach to simulating larger CCDs.
Yeah, actually 10x8’s are somewhat expensive and troublesome to buy and process; a 5x4 will probably be what I end up buying.
And yes, stitching is an option which will only get better. But some landscape work finds just the right light for mere brief seconds; trying to pop off 9 good shots to stitch together later while that perfect light holds will surely not produce the results of one or two 5x4 exposures.
My brother is a professional photographer and shoots exclusively digital. He sells 3x5’ prints down in Soho and film photographers insist that they must be film. The barriers of transition from film to digital are primarily the cost, learning a completely different medium, and the ability to rationalize not changing through faulty arguments of “remaining pure.” There will always be a population of film photographers just like their are “purists” who still listen to vinyl records, though in the latter case, perhaps the purism is somewhat justified. With digital their are no film costs, any photo can be b&w, color, sepia, platinum, etc., you can see what your getting in preview, you know when your camera isn’t working, and their is no degradation in the quality of the negatives. The list is long and convincing. Photopat are you talking about some sort of special platinum process? Because my brother has huge platinum prints.
Can I plug my brother? Mods delete if not.
I was refering to the platinotype, which is made by contact printing a negative to paper treated with chemicals that include platinum chloride. They are sort of the holy grail of fine art photography prints.
I should add one thing on the digital side that I forgot earlier. It’s possible to make negatives from digital files and use them to contact print on traditional paper.
Dead as the daguerrotype.
Even if the average consumer-class digital camera is not at a 12mpx minimum-acceptability resolution yet, I expect you’ll see it before Christmas 2006, if not 2005.
I’m not a photog buff, I like our digital camera just fine.
So I’ll answer this by way of my own parallel situation. I can burn as many CDs as I like with my computer, and I have equipment enough to transfer anything from another format.
All the same, you can take my 400 33 1/3 RPM LPs away when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands.
I’m a Luddite in a number of ways, but I have not used a film camera in several years.
The quality of prints (4x6 up to 8x10) is consistently higher with my digital cameras, the capacity for good shots under low lighting conditions is far better and I can click away without worrying about wasting film on marginal shots.
I am holding onto my film cameras, mostly out of nostalgia (and the Nikon will yet see some use for closeups). But I love the flexibility and results I get with digital.
Crap crap. Hamsters ate my post.
In photojouralism, film is all but dead. Around 1998 (about the time of the introduction of the 2.7 megapixel D1 and Canon 1D), almost all newspapers began switching to a digital darkroom. Today, so far as I know, every major newspaper in the US is digital. I would say about 90-95% of the images you see in your tabloids or broadsheets never saw a traditional darkroom.
Pretty much all the wires and news picture agencies (AP, Reuters, AFP, EPA, Getty, etc…) are digital. The speed, ease, and quality of digital photography make it almost impossible to survive if you’re still shooting film. For non-deadline assignments, fine. Otherwise, where all your competition is shooting digital, and your stuck souping your negs, drying, and scanning, you’re beaten by at least an hour.
Most of you may be surprised to hear that the high-end digital cameras used by professional photojournalists (The Canon 1D, the Nikon D1, Nikon D2H) are all under 5-megapixel cameras. (The new Canon 1D Mark II, just revealed recently, though, is 8.2 megapixels at 8.5 frames a second – this Nikon shooter will admit that it blows everything else out of the water. Canon definitely has had the advantage over Nikon in digital SLRs over the past five years.)
But with a 4 megapixel image, you can still get a very good quality 8x10 or even 11x14, especially if you use it in conjunction with such software as Genuine Fractals. I think most people would be surprised to see an image blown up to 8x10, printed on high-quality photo paper on an Epson printer, taken by a Nikon D1 at less than 3 megapixel resolution. For the average observer, the quality is damn close to a normal print. At 5x7, you’d be hard pressed to see the difference.
With a digital, you also have auto-white-balancing, an instant “Polaroid back” with the LCD screen which makes adjusting lighting a snap, and excellent performance in low-contrast situations which normally give film trouble. For high-contrast, film still has a slight advantage – you can always pull extra information off a neg, but if you’re highlights are blown to holy heaven in digital (or slide film for that matter), there’s not a heck of a whole lot you can do about it. But the gap is closing rapidly.
The only nuisance with digital is the continual changing of storage formats. You have to keep updating your archives every few years or so as the storage media change. In the beginning, we archived everything on SyQuests. Try finding a SyQuest drive today. Even Jaz and Zip drives are becoming a rarity, having lost ground to CD and DVD formats. But how long will those survive? That’s the main pain in the butt. With film you at least have a format that several generations from now, people will be able to produce a print from the original materials.
But that’s about it. Otherwise, for most practical applications, digital is the only way to go. Many high-end commercial photographers whose work is displayed at larger formats still shoot film. No doubt, there’s still a lot to be said for medium to large format film. But, in general, unless you’re enlarger to significantly beyond 8x10 or even 11x14, I can’t see any good reason to stick with film.
Another point of clarification on this. The new Canan 1D Mark II is not based on a CCD sensor, but a CMOS sensor. Like I said, it shoots 8.5 frames per second (a tad faster than my film-based Nikon F5, one of the fastest film cameras), has a fastest shutter speed of 1/8000 of a second (it’s really unusual to be shooting this fast. 1/4000 even is pretty quick) plus has a buffer that offers 40 frame burst at normal JPEG quality, 20 frame bursts at RAW quality. What more perfect sports camera could one ask for?
The Nikon D2H, with an LBCAST-based sensor, shoots at 8 fps, 1/8000 fastest shutter, at 4.1 MP, with 40 frame buffer at fine JPEG quality, and 25 frames RAW.
In terms of speed, the digitals actually one-up most film cameras now.
This isnt just a “nuisance” or a “pain in the butt”–its a CRITICAL problem. Most pictures are taken because people want them to be available 2 generations later. Nobody ever throws their photo albums into the garbage.You save the pictures you took of family vacations, of your wedding,of your child’s first birthday party, even your embarassing high-school summer parties, because they bring back fond memories, and you want to be able to show those pictures to your grandchildren.
But will a CD disc of JPG files be usable in the year 2064?
Its great fun to take a vacation trek to Mt Everest and email your photos from the internet cafe in Katmandu, so your current friends can see and share your experiences in real time. But will you be able to share those photos with your children 15 years from now?
or your grandchildren 55 years from now?
The solution, of course, is to make prints on archival ink on paper. That’s what I do. Otherwise, if you really want to go out of your way, you can “burn” digital photos onto slide film.
I mean, if your end-use is to display a photo album or hang up pictures on the wall, no problem. You still make prints, just as you would from neg.
My rule is …
Digital for conveinence, film for quality
I can’t afford to spend thw $$$$ on a good digital setup…you’re also TOTALLY dependent on electricity…
I shoot alot of film(b&w slide), print mostly inkjet
I wanna get back into doing more darkroom, again