I bought a 3.1 meg camera to play with and quickly realized how poweful it was. I did a back to back test of an outdoor image and was more impressed with the digital camera when printing an 8x10.
I will conceed to professional photographers that film is statistically better than digital images below 20 megs. However, most people shoot film with a $300 camera and then have it developed. What comes back is NOT superior to digital photography and that alone is (IMO) the reason digital cameras are so popular.
With that said, I find that film is superior to digital images in situations of high contrast. If you are taking pictures in sunlight then film will deliver a more even picture. For this same reason digital cameras suck when using flash. Any white-out on a digital file is basically lost information. You can coax overexposed images back to life when using film. I will admit I like using Adobe Elements because I can flash fill or background fill images back to life but there is a limit to this.
The best of both worlds is a film camera and a film scanner. You get the better resolution of film, the ability to deal with high contrast situations, and the high resolution of inkject printers. All done on a computer for easy correction of minor flaws.
I can’t wait to get a digital projector. It will make presentations SOOOO much easer.
Storage: as long as you keep up with converting your digital stored on old formats to new formats, and as long as you keep backups (burned CDs don’t last forever, you know), your digital photos can last indefinitely, and will look exactly the same 50 years from now as they do today, even if they are nth generation copies. You can store slides and negatives, too, but they do fade, get scratched, etc. You can copy them, but you can lose detail in the copy. Some high-end digitals have dual media and store two copies of every shot in-camera, so if a memory card is lost or defective, you have a second chance.
Resolution: somewhere around 6mp to 8mp is as good as any commonly available 35mm film. Current high-end 35mm digitals are 11mp to 14mp.
Speed: Any current 35mm digital will do 800 ISO (some 1600 ISO), at shutter speed of 1/4000. Plus you can change ISO on the fly, so you don’t need a second body loaded with different film.
I still use film and haven’t bought a digital camera yet (unless you count a digital camcorder). I’m waiting for full-frame digital SLRs to come down in price. Most digital SLRs have sensors that at less than full-frame, which means you have to get a really expensive very-wide-angle lens to get effectively a full-frame 35mm wide-angle. Kodak just introduced a full-frame digital SLR (which fits Nikon lenses), and its street price is $2.5k. I figure in a few years full-frame digital SLRs (Canon or Nikon) should be about $1k, which is the price of current entry-level digital SLRs.
Shooting digital is similar to shooting slide. If you blow out your highlights, you’ve lost information, so in that sense it’s not that much different than film.
What you would be surprised at is how much information IS stored in your file if you shoot in the camera’s native format (RAW files for Nikon.) Some sports shooters here regularly underexpose night shots by two stops instead of using the muddy 1600 ISO equivalency and pull out some rather damn impressive shots using Photoshop CS or other programs that can read all the data for native formats. You can adjust for color balance and exposure after the fact, and the first time I’ve seen it, I was absolutely blown away.
A 6 to 8 megapixel camera for most consumer and even professional purposes does hold up well to 35mm formats. But if you’re going to display really large format in a gallery, it does lack the sharpness and brilliance of a high-quality (and expensive) Ilfochrome from slide. But if you’re only shooting up to 11 x 14s, you’re golden as long as you don’t have to crop too much.
Another point is that for black and white imagery, film still has a brilliance and tonal range that I feel digital prints can’t quite capture. A simple grayscale digital image just isn’t as vibrant, that’s why a lot of photographers will fuss around with duotones with their black and white imagery to help perk up the tonal range of digital black and whites.
I’m all for digital, love digital, but there still is a certain beauty about a well-printed fibre-based print from a Hasselblad or Mamiya negative that is hard to match.
No…no…no! As an art form, film photography is not dead!
On February 7, one of my friends had an opening exhibit of photographs from a recent trip to Morroco. She expected a maximum turnout of 150 people. 460 people turned out on a snowy night in Nashville. It was spectacular! You couldn’t get people in with a shoehorn. Her framed color photographs sell for $1800 – four times the amount they were three years ago.
For art, sure, film will live on. But art photography is 0.001% of the market, and some art photography will go digital, too. My photography prof (at a major art college) was playing around with digital, and that was 6 years ago, when he was just a few months from retirement.
I own a middle priced film camera and my brother owns a middle priced digital camera. I am envious of his camera’s ease of use, the ability to get instant feedback, and the convience of quickly sending off pics to everyone’s e-mail box before we even get home after an event. I am also envious everytime I have to drive to my photofinisher (twice) and give him $10 per roll.
However, I am not envious when my pictures come out looking much better than his, even if we are taking pictures of the same thing, at the same time, standing shoulder to shoulder. My camera has more features and aparently more flexibility. I am also not envious when he admits that he does not know where half of his important family pictures are stored and he fears that one of his kids erased some in order to download more Harry Potter screensavers. He admits that it becomes overwhelming keeping up with the downloading, cd burning, and computer changes, repairs, and upgrades. I have all my negs and prints in numbered storage boxes that I can retrieve, show, and carry around forever.
There are many advantages of digital, and I am looking forward to taking advantage of them. I am going to wait until the price of high quality digital slr cameras comes down to an average consumer price level. By then, maybe there will be a simpler way to keep up with what I percieve to be a storage problem that would be a pain to keep up with. I can imagine using film for a few more years.
[QUOTE=owlofcreamcheese]
why is there the idea that film has something to do with art? can digital not do art?
[QUOTE]
Certainly you can do art with digital. As I wrote, my photography professor, who was head of the photography department at a well-respect fine arts college and is now professor emeritus. He “went digital” in the late '90s (albeit with a film scanner).
IANA photographer, but I think film photography will go the way of painting. Most photographs will be taken by digital cameras, which are easier and more efficient.
Unfortunately, I think I will miss film. It seems that with digital cameras we are better empowered to change the past, touch up whatever that we are not happy with. Is tampering with truth desirable? I think it comes close to lying to ourselves.
I’m sorry, I’m a bit confused about your last point. Almost all published film photos also get digitized, too. Photoshop does make it extremely easy to tamper with the image, but that’s been around well before digital cameras were around.
I don’t think the average consumer has the skills, time, or desire to tamper with the image beyond color balancing and cropping (if that) in order to distort the “truth” of the photograph.
But Photoshop itself has raised doubts in the mind of many average viewers about the credibility of images. I create all my editorial images in-camera. And working photojournalists who wants to keep their jobs do the same. But I’ve noticed in the last ten years people doubting the truth of the images, and I find this disturbing. I’ve been asked on my images whether they were Photoshopped. I’ve seen threads on messages boards accusing news organizations of distrubuting Photoshopped images (the devil-in-the-smoke WTC photo comes to mind.)
But it isn’t the source medium that’s responsible. Film/digital, it doesn’t matter because when it ends up in Photoshop, you can do the same thing to the photos.
Film isn’t dead but it is beginning to smell funny. I’ve made the transition to digital and my film bodies are gathering dust. I won’t sell them becuase they still have a purpose for me but also because no one wants them.
My first serious digital camera was a Minolta Dimage 7 and I now shoot with Nikon D100 DSLR. The minolta was a good camera despite it’s serious shortcomings. The Nikon is vastly superior, mostly because of a CCD with almost eight times as much area as the Minolta. This gives much lower noise, particularly at high ISO values.
Film cost is not as big a factor as you might think. I’m still shooting with a 1 gigabyte microdrive. Shooting RAW format, highest quality, I can only get 107 shots. I need to get more memory but it’s costly. A high speed 4gb card optimized for the D100 is about $1,200. I may make do with a published hack though. A specific MP3 player uses a 4gb microdrive. The bare drive costs $500 but the MP3 player costs $200. No warranty once you crack the case open to get the drive out but it’s a calculated risk.
The biggest advantage is workflow. When shooting portraits with digital I setup my light and take a test shot with a standard 18% gray card in the frame. In post production I use the value of the gray card to set white balance. This can be fully realized with RAW images since the white balance is not encoded into the image color values but is a meta tag attached to the file. I don’t have to worry about varying color balance or different lots of film or have to trust a lab to make the color the way I want it. Once I’ve set color I burn a CD with upsized, uncompressed JPG files to my local Costco to get prints from their Maritsu for a fraction of what I’d pay a pro lab with film.
Don’t know if I’ll shoot much 35mm film any more but am considering shooting some 4x5 in the near future.
Anyway, there’s a great deal of other factors to consider other than speed and size. For example, how good is CCD (or whatever they use) as compared to film and slide.
The big problem with CMOS has been image quality. The big problem with CCD has always been power consumption and farication difficulties. Going up to full-frame 35mm sensors really puts CCD at a disadvantage. A lot of work has gone into improving CMOS sensors.
True, but I don’t think Canon is stupid enough to put a CMOS sensor in its top-of-the-line digital SLR if it wasn’t up to the task. For what it’s worth, Kodak’s brand new top-of-the-line digital SLR (takes Nikon lenses, $2500 to $5000) also uses a full-frame CMOS sensor.
The debate between Canon and Nikon regularly breaks into fisticuffs on message boards. Canon uses in-house made CMOS chips and Nikon uses Sony 6mp CCDs in its D100 and new D70 and in-house designed (not sure who makes them) CCDs in its pro level cameras.
There is a difference in image quality between otherwise similar cameras like the Canon 10D and Nikon D100 but it’s kind of subtle. A lot of folks feel that Canon’s CMOS has better tonal gradiations and better skin rendition. I won’t get into that dogfight but IMO a lot of it has to do with camera settings and post production which is part of the game when you only shoot in RAW mode. I chose Nikon because it offered more flexibility in control including uploadble in-camera response curves. The Canon has lower noise at ISO 100 (the minimum ISO for the Nikon os 200) but the small difference dissapears when a print is made. The edge goes significantly to Nikon at ISO 1600 where it really makes a difference, another reason I went with Nikon.
Those factors have nothing to do with frame rate in a DSLR. The frame rate is a function of how fast the image in the sensor can be converted from analog to digital (and optionally converted to JPG or TIFF) and shoved into buffer memory. For example my D100 which has a much smaller buffer can shoot four raw images at three frames per second. After that it takes about six seconds (this time will vary slightly with different memory cards, I shoot with a 1gb microdrive) to buffer each subsequent shot to storage.
Film speed in digicams is a bit different. The sensor doesn’t have an intrinsic speed quite the same way film does. It has a measurable sensitivity, so many photons striking a photosite cause a certain number of electrons to be excited. The analog to digital conversoin is really what sets an ISO sensitivity. Because of this a shooter can sometimes fudge a bit when shooting in raw mode. Some people have reported better images by shooting at ISO 400 and underexposing by two stops then correcting the exposure in the raw conversion later than by shooting at ISO 1600 in the first place. At any rate the result of shooting at high ISO is increased random noise which gives grainier looking images. No way to break the rules of physics but a physically bigger photosite (with proportionally bigger lenses and true apertures) gathers more photons for the same EV, giving less noise. That’s why DSLRs with big sensors have much lower noise than consumer cameras with small sensors.
There is no restriction in aperature or film speed, however, just like in film cameras, if you want burst mode you must have your shutter speed quicker than some value (generally around 1/250). The reason for 1/250 instead of, say, 1/8, is that there are things going on other than the shutter going off. There is shutter lag, film winding (film only, of course), image buffering (digital).
The trio of shutter speed, ISO and aperature define a “correct” exposure, so if you are shooting 100 film in not-so-bright light and you want to do burst mode, then you’ll need a wide aperature. If you want a closed aperature, you better have another body loaded with 800 or 1600 (or be prepared to really push the 100). With digital, you don’t care, you can do it all in one body.
