Some interesting points Teflon Mike, I won't quote the whole post as it makes viewing it on the ipad cumbersome. If all you are shooting for is Facebook at 1000 pixels then do you need the latest and greatest equipment? I find I have physical photo albums gathering dust of the pictures I do print out, and even if I do print out large from the D800 it is on the rare side.
Nope. Definitely DONT need the latest & greatest kit. Never have.
Look at the 'greats' and what they have used, has almost always been 'lower' tech; and they have got thier shots from having 'the eye' and having the patience to wait for what they want, and use the kit they have to the fullest, and the know-how to do so. We tend to put FAR too high a 'value' on the hardware... after all... thats what we pay for... only natural we should feel we get something 'extra' for our money. Unfortunate fact, though is, that 90% of a picture is in the eye of the picture maker, so the significance of how much 'better' better hardware can make will NEVER be all THAT big.
Twenty umpety years ago; I was playing with a couple of antique 120 roll film cameras; and had an aquantence, offer me loan of a Hassablad, telling me that after I had seen what it could do, I would throw away all that '35mm rubbish' and never look back... and as insentive, he offered me the Hassy, lens and light meter, I think for £100 or so! I spent a weekend with it, and my OM4 and my XA2 and my Sigma Mk1 and just for the heck of it my Zeiss Ikon folder. A week in the dark room later.. I emerged red eyed and fuggy headed and gave him his camera back.
Yup... I wont argue, a Hassy is a loverly bit of kit... BUT! After hours pouring over comparison shots and doing daft things like shuffling them up and looking at them 'blind' not knowing which camera they had come from..... the differences? Yes, they were there; at least at VERY high enlargements, but even then, they weren't THAT big a difference to make me chuck in my lot with 35mm.
Now, it was NOT long after that that I 'discovered' digital. About 1995 or so. ACTUALLY... I am working my way through the very set of snaps I ever 'digitised' back in the Summer of 1996. They were taken at an Open University Summer-School, while I was studdying IT. Folder says there's 176 pictures in it, so five films? (Unless more come to light as I work through the archive!) I had access to an early colour scanner, and as I recall, almost anything but lowest DPI settings locked the PC486 computer up! And I spent about a day, getting them into the computer one at a time, sizing them to fit a 1.44Mb floppy! Then rotating them for screen display! Cherry-Picking I think 30 frames, to not display, but upload to the Course Bulatin Board... which took about another three nights on Dial-Up connection! Oh! How much faster a new Pentium 90 seemed!
But, Digital Distribution; I am slowly working through the archive uploading my 'old' photo's to Face-Book, so that family and freinds can see them. and MANY are only just seeing them for the very first time.
Set I have just done; quite a big one; file contains 240 images according to the counter; family 'do' my little brothers christening. 9 or 10 films in ONE day?!?!? Actually recall a cousin commenting on all the film cans in the bullet belt in the top of my bag, that they were all just empties for 'show'... then showing him the cashe under the camera deck! Probably around two-dozen films in all! (Used to bulk-load) BUT, one of those events where a LOT of people you dont meet very often were gathered; and I'd been told, "Make sure you get pictures of every-body, wont you"
So, normal sort of scenario for the era; probably 150 or more folk, family and freinds turned up, and I took pictures of them all throughout the day. Week or so later, the films came back, in thier little happy-snap wallets, and the imediete family, perhaps six or seven people, flipped hastily through them. The wallets might have been shown to my Gran and Grandad, possibly the neighbours; but at most a dozen people got to look at them. Then, probably five of six years later, during a tidy up, they were dug out of the draw, and sorted out, and of 240 pictures? Maybe 60 made it into a 'Christening' album; seem by maybe an extra three or four people when they came for New-Years or something.
Now? Well there were maybe 150 folk at that do; of which probably 100 have never seen the photo's. Of those hundred? Well, its twenty something years on! Let me have a look... yeah.. HE's Dead... so's she... and her! Oh gawd... they divorsed YEARS ago! Him? No idea who he was then! LOL... isn't it the way! Any-how, of those 100 people... there's probably 50 who were in them, that can now look at them... and a lot of them were KIDS! Who NOW have kids of thier own! Who can ALSO look at them!
On thier i-phone! At thier convenience. When the idea grabs them. They dont HAVE to make an effort; or an apointment! Of phone me and say "Mike, have you got any pictures of..."
And THAT was what dawned on me when I uploaded that first set from the OU Summer School. I'd been on a course with 30 other people, who I would PROBABLY never see again. Yet, they and others all got to see these pictures, giving them a reason beyond a mere personal record of one week of one summer in my life.
The notion inspired me, and doing the IT course and learning early HTML and having to code in txt a basic web-site, lead in time to me creating my own webby, and in the last fifteen years or so, a lot of the photo's I have taken have been for that.
YET... it was only this Christmas I fessed up to buying a Digital SLR.
I have had a film scanner since 2000. I got a pretty respectable redundancy package that year and after looking at digital camera offerings of the day; decided to stick with film and scan; I reckoned I would pack the dark room away, all but the dev-tank and changing bag, and do it on the desk-top; after shooting and kitchen-sink processing slide film.....
THAT was when I discovered how much it DIDN'T save... when the now ex-missus demanded I print everything off, as she couldn't pass round a 14" CRT monitor screen to show her freinds our holiday snaps!
"Cant you make it Bigger"
WOMEN! Isn't that what they ALL say!
Yup, buying super-glossy photo-paper for 360Dpi printer, and trying to get six pictures to a page... Oh no! SHE demanded the full 8 inches! Of EVERY picture!
2003, I bought my first Digital Camera; a 1.3Mpix Jenoptic. Had 1Mb of internal memory, I recall, and I bought a 4Mb SD card to go in it! No that's NOT a typo 4
M not 4
Gb! Prices had 'just' fallen enough to make that a sub £100 camera!
YET.... I would STILL have to shrink full-res images from it for web-pub!
I'd still be using it; were it not for the fact it had a small problem and would only take four nice fresh Alkaline batteries. It would not run off Ni-Cads as they only bung out 1.2volts, which made it practically as expensive to run as one of my film cameras, before I tried making prints from it!
I blew the little bugger up, about 2006... I found a radio control car one of the kids had taken to pieces and robbed out it's AA battery holder, and mounted it on the bottom of the camera by the tripod mount to take 5 AA Ni-Cads! They lasted quite well until one day I connected the wires to the wrong terminals!
Which left me borrowing one of my kids cameras; they each had a Kodak 7.1Mp, with a 3x 35-105 equivilent zoom. Quite a handy camera actually... I have rebuilt one from the canibalised remains of the pair my kids eventually destroyed! A 'cheap' 5Mpix lensless Premier serving me in the interim.
Which brings me to this Cristmas just gone; after being frustrated on a day out with the kids by the limitations of SUCH a cheap compact, and what to do about it.
And biting the bullet, I bought the Nikon D3200. It seemed about the best value DSLR bought 'new' with the Nikon cash-back at the time; but I bought it full well knowing that I didn't really 'NEED' it; and I had struggled long and hard over variouse compacts and bridge digi's; concluding ultimately, that while they would pretty much do almost everything I needed a camera to do... ultimately I would feel cheated that it wasn't the camera I 'wanted'.
Interchangeable lenses aren't the big deal that they were when if you wanted 'big-reach' an SLR was about the only way to get it, now that super-compacts often have 10 or 20x zooms. BUT it IS a bigger deal if you like WIDE lenses... and I do! My favourite lens is an old Panomar 12mm Fish. And you dont get many zoom compacts that go much wider than 35mm equivilent.. and I most used 24 or 28 wides on my film SLR's.
I also am not much of a fan of view-screens; I like an optical view-finder, that I can more reliably frame with in low light or bright sunlight.
24Mpix? Yeah, little on the high side; but I fully expect that pix counts will creep up, and long before I'm done, become less than average rather than above... meanwhile, if I scrape together the pennies to get a Digi-Fish... expect it to be useful; full round, you are only capturing an image on about 3/4 the sensor area, and if you take a square crop from that, less than half.
And I can utilise that extra resolution; I mean I might not print much, but nice to know I could.
So, while I dont NEED the capability of the camera I have... I know I can exploit a fair bit of it's versatility...
As has been said; film isn't any great handicap; I can do and do with almost as much ease everything I might want to do with digital with the kit I have, and probably do it 'better' in most cases. And at £1 a roll or less I hunted around or bulk-loaded, and £1.50 straight dev, at ASDA or less if I cracked out the tanks and kitchen sinked C41... I could take an AWFUL lot of film photo's, for the £400 odd quid I have spent on a DSLR & kit in the last six months, and am likely to spend replacing digital hardware as it reaches the end of its shorter service life.
AND it wouldn't necesserily be ALL that much of a ball-ache in extra 'work' to get pictures to screen. I can kitchen sink a roll of film in about half an hour or so; ie faster than a mini-lab, without having to wait for opening hours! Then an hour, hour and a half sat at the PC, I can scan & dress the pictures and have them up to Face-Book, in NOT A LOT more time than it would take to clear down the SD Card; preview and dress the pictures from that; re-size and up-load them. BUT! Its a heck of a lot less effort and hassle!
Convenience.
It's about ALL digital has to offer. At least at point of capture.
Digital Dark-Room? NOT having to make mess in the kitchen mixing chamicals? NOT having to black out the bath-room or sit under the stairs with the enlarger and hypo-fumes.. THAT is what digital removes most of.
And the PC puts an awful lot of quite elevated dark-room techniques in the hands of people who other wise would never be able to envisage them, 'at the touch of a button'... AND makes them a lot more reliable.
Like I said, even Pamnorama-Stitching is nothing 'new' to the digital age.
I've sat in the dark room, with a strip of negs, a piece of 10x8 cut into four 10x2 strips, and a marker pen, trying to index 'dots' to blend exposures from each neg to create a 'seemless' panorama... NEVER succeeded... but have tried it, following other folk who created stunning 'composite' prints in the days before desk-top computers, that can lgive such 'skill' to any numpty with enough money and the inclination.
Why DON'T I shoot film? Well, I still do! Where I reach the limitations of Digi-Kit. OR where 'convenience' isn't really needed or so useful.
My Sigma MK1 is sat on the shelf next to me with the Panomar 12mm on it, as I don't yet have a fish for digi. Ikon is sat under it with a roll of B&W in it. And there's a Konica compact loaded up sat in the car door-pocket.
"Better" remains subjective... and situation dependent, and what's 'appropriate' or 'best' for the job at hand. Both medium have their merits, that can be exploited to best effect.
Good cameras don't make good pictures.... good photographers make good pictures by making best use of the best camera they have for the picture they want to take.
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