Hi,
You know, sometimes Swedish winter has a feel of Tri-X underexposed three stops. Other than that there is nothing natural about film. Which film by the way? Ektachrome? Provia? Velvia. By the way, have you ever seen grainy blue California sky?
Does the M6 has better DR than a Canon 5DII? No, it has no DR at all! The film you put into it has DR. Velvia has about 5 stops, a bit less than Canon 5DII at 12800 ISO. Negative color may have 16 stops.
Next question is, what do you do with the stuff? Are you looking at projected slides? Great! If you need prints or screen the image needs to be printed by a lab or yourself. The paper you print on has nothing natural in it. Now, Kodak and Fuji have spent a lot of effort on developing papers, films and chemistry that match and give nice colors.
If you are into serious photography with film you either have a dark room or scan. Scanning is a can of worm of it's own. Most scanners don't have enough dynamic range to handle Velvia. My experience may even be that they even don't have enough DR to correctly handle Ektar 100. Some people have drum scanners that can eak out every detail from a slide or negative. I'm pretty sure that scanning has a steep learning curve.
My take is really that digital is mostly preferable. Large format film in combination with an excellent scanner and scanner operator can give excellent results.
Best regards
Erik
This is a nubie question but I need to ask it to help resolve a discussion with a friend who has recently switched from digital - a Leica M9- to film - a Leica M6 I think.
He says that the "truly great photographers" only use film and I found this astonishing given the huge possibilities of digital technology.
His arguments for film are
- film has a more natural look
- film has greater dynamic range
- film images are more beautiful. They have a certain something that is difficult to pinpoint.
So I wonder what your opinion is. For instance is it really true that a Canon 5d Mark 2 has less dynamic range than a Leica M6?
Aren't there techniques - such as adding grain or noise - that make digital images look as natural as film images?
Why do so many people say that film has that certain something? Why isn't this purely a matter of taste?