Film versus Digital: the current comparison

[digitaldog]

Believe what you like. The adoption of 'wedding' films (Kodak Portra, Fuji NPS/NPC) by high end editorial photographers in the 1990s is an important part of the history of the film medium. When allied with a good printer, the photographer could do things with colour negative film that were impossible with transparency.

There should be little need to debate that segments of the professional photo community used color neg B&W neg and transparency. For those who's final was 4 color reproduction to a halftone, the vast majority was shot on transparency film. But the professional wedding and portrait market indeed used color neg film. What shouldn't need to be debated is the ausurd statement that: slide film is for amateurs .

[melchiorpavone]

There should be little need to debate that segments of the professional photo community used color neg B&W neg and transparency. For those who's final was 4 color reproduction to a halftone, the vast majority was shot on transparency film. But the professional wedding and portrait market indeed used color neg film. What shouldn't need to be debated is the absurd statement that: slide film is for amateurs .

Yes. Slide films were used primarily by pros and advanced amateurs (overwhelmingly male).

[Jim Pascoe]

Yes. Slide films were used primarily by pros and advanced amateurs (overwhelmingly male).

Is there a reason you have mentioned numerous times in the past few posts the gender difference in use of negative or transparency film?  I only ask because while it may or may not be true - I cannot see it has any relevance.  I agree that most 'serious' amateur photography was a male dominated pastime years ago - but that was because the man of the house probably controlled the purse strings and thought a compact type camera was plenty for the little woman and he should take share of the real pictures.  Which is a huge shame.  A very good friend of mine was in this situation until her husband died about 20 years ago.  He would never let her use the 35mm camera.  She took up 'serious' photography at the age of 55 and has since produced some outstanding work.  Luckily digital photography has emancipated the female photographers at last and has democratised photography.  Another female friend recently attained her Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society with a panel of prints shot on a Panasonic TZ compact camera.  At last the limiting factor is imagination and creativity - not what type of camera you can afford.

Anyway - on the subject of film v digital I would say each to their own.  It's a creative medium - just use what you enjoy.  I switched to digital in 2001 and never looked back really.  I miss the old workflow - shooting, dev film, printing etc, but it is nostalgia really.

Jim

[Petrus]

There should be little need to debate that segments of the professional photo community used color neg B&W neg and transparency. For those who's final was 4 color reproduction to a halftone, the vast majority was shot on transparency film. But the professional wedding and portrait market indeed used color neg film. What shouldn't need to be debated is the ausurd statement that: slide film is for amateurs .

During the last years of film use before and around the year 2000 in our publishing house we had started to use more and more color negative film for both 135 and 120 sizes. This was because the latitude, ISO speeds and grain of color neg started to be clearly better than with reversal film. It also caused slower workflows (no in-house developing and printing) as reproduction was done from 24x30 or 30x40 prints. Not to mention the cost of having one-off prints made by hand in a pro lab. Those were the financially good days, now that would not be tolerated anymore.

[melchiorpavone]

Is there a reason you have mentioned numerous times in the past few posts the gender difference in use of negative or transparency film?  I only ask because while it may or may not be true - I cannot see it has any relevance.  I agree that most 'serious' amateur photography was a male dominated pastime years ago - but that was because the man of the house probably controlled the purse strings and thought a compact type camera was plenty for the little woman and he should take share of the real pictures.  Which is a huge shame.  A very good friend of mine was in this situation until her husband died about 20 years ago.  He would never let her use the 35mm camera.  She took up 'serious' photography at the age of 55 and has since produced some outstanding work.  Luckily digital photography has emancipated the female photographers at last and has democratised photography.  Another female friend recently attained her Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society with a panel of prints shot on a Panasonic TZ compact camera.  At last the limiting factor is imagination and creativity - not what type of camera you can afford.


Jim

I worked in photo retailing in the past. Though some women had good equipment, most used the simplest and least expensive, and used color negative film, as their photos were mostly for family. Photography was not an end in itself. I bet 99% of 126 and 110 cameras were sold to women. The men customers tended to be serious hobbyists (most were doctors, dentists, professors or businessmen); they owned Alpas, Leicas, and Hasselblads. Most used transparency film and had projectors and screens.

[Telecaster]

I worked in photo retailing in the past. Though some women had good equipment, most used the simplest and least expensive, and used color negative film, as their photos were mostly for family. Photography was not an end in itself. I bet 99% of 126 and 110 cameras were sold to women. The men customers tended to be serious hobbyists (most were doctors, dentists, professors or businessmen); they owned Alpas, Leicas, and Hasselblads. Most used transparency film and had projectors and screens.

Lotsa kids owned 110 and/or 126 cameras. Me for instance, along with my childhood friends Greg & Dona. I still have my Kodak 110 (two unused flashbulb doohickies too!) but the 126s are long gone. Digging through my dad's photo archive last year I found two boxes of 126 Kodachrome slides I took during a spring 1972 holiday in Florida. Quality is pretty good.

-Dave-

[melchiorpavone]

Lotsa kids owned 110 and/or 126 cameras. Me for instance, along with my childhood friends Greg & Dona. I still have my Kodak 110 (two unused flashbulb doohickies too!) but the 126s are long gone. Digging through my dad's photo archive last year I found two boxes of 126 Kodachrome slides I took during a spring 1972 holiday in Florida. Quality is pretty good.

-Dave-

Yes, kids too, no question of that.

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Just to mention, we had a small shooting with our photo club. Let's see what we had

- A lady shooting Nikon
- Another lady shooting Nikon
- Another lady shooting Sony A7
- Another lady shooting Panasonic GH3
- A gentleman shooting Canon
- Another gentleman shooting Nikon
- Another gentleman shooting a DSLR the make of which I don't recall.

We also had two young ladies (14 and 15 years of age) acting as models, normally shooting Canon and Pentax DSLRs, but this time they were using my Sony Alpha 99 for technical reasons.

Myself was shooting my Hasselblad as I lent out my Sony Alpha two the two young ladies.

Some other observations:

The lady shooting the Panasonic GH3 felt that it was not serious enough, but I gave her a hint that James Russel regards it as one of his favourite cameras. I guess he is a photographer serious enough. That lady was making her living in database development and also happened to be the grandmother of one of our young models.

The young ladies both wanted to upgrade their cameras. The 15 year old wanted higher FPS, the younger one wanted a Canon, because all her friends had Canon.

So, it is not really my experience that ladies are shooting with inferior equipment. One of the ladies, the one shooting Nikon has made some of the best wet darkroom B&W prints I have ever seen. Ansel Adams class…

Some of my images from that shoot are here (full disclosure, both JPEGs and RAWs :-) :

http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/Nynas_NFK_2014_09_13/

First time I was shooting portraits in 40 years…

Some observations on the Hassy/P45+:

Shooting against the sun I got bad hazing in parts of the image on the Sonnar 180/4, somewhat unexpected.

In high contrast situations the screen and histogram was difficult to see.

I got decent focus on quite a few images. Better than what I expected.

In general I was happy with the Hassy.

Best regards
Erik

I worked in photo retailing in the past. Though some women had good equipment, most used the simplest and least expensive, and used color negative film, as their photos were mostly for family. Photography was not an end in itself. I bet 99% of 126 and 110 cameras were sold to women. The men customers tended to be serious hobbyists (most were doctors, dentists, professors or businessmen); they owned Alpas, Leicas, and Hasselblads. Most used transparency film and had projectors and screens.

[Iluvmycam]

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?

35mm flatbed scanned color neg film is = to about 4mp. So it is a lot fuzzier media than digital.

http://photographycompared.tumblr.com/

Film has a less clinical look since the smaller formats are less sharp than digital. It is kinda like the old film movies versus the HD video movies. The HD movies have that artificial look. But you can make digital to look like film. You just use the tools you mentioned. Put some old glass on the cam and you are almost like film

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Biker_37_Copyright_2014_Daniel_Teoli_Jr_mr.jpg

[Petrus]

35mm flatbed scanned color neg film is = to about 4mp.

When we got the Canon EOS-1d cameras some 12 years ago I made a test against Fuji Provia 100 transparency film, which was our standard film stock. Using same lens with same framing (had to zoom a bit, 1.5x crop factor) and after the slide had been scanned to 20 MPix resolution (60MB TIFF), I was a bit shocked to find out the 4.7MPix digital file was just as sharp as the Provia scan. Happily shocked...