Whaich situations require film, which require digital?

It's like Cooking.

I could go to M&S and pick up a ready meal, nuke it for a few minutes and eat it. Sure, it would give me all the nutritional bits and pieces I need (with maybe a touch too much salt and fat).

But,

I love to buy all the ingredients, prepare them and cook them. It gives me great satisfaction and helps me learn about food.

Of course, I do still order a pizza and scoff it without so much as a moments thought about who, how etc etc.

Same with film and digital.

Vive la difference!








ps. of course I no longer can pop into M&S for a ready meal or order a pizza - not unless the delivery boy can jump on a plane (and still offer 45 minutes delivery or free).
 
Timing said:
It's like Cooking.

I could go to M&S and pick up a ready meal, nuke it for a few minutes and eat it. Sure, it would give me all the nutritional bits and pieces I need (with maybe a touch too much salt and fat).

But,

I love to buy all the ingredients, prepare them and cook them. It gives me great satisfaction and helps me learn about food.

Of course, I do still order a pizza and scoff it without so much as a moments thought about who, how etc etc.

Same with film and digital.

Vive la difference!








ps. of course I no longer can pop into M&S for a ready meal or order a pizza - not unless the delivery boy can jump on a plane (and still offer 45 minutes delivery or free).
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Love the name btw - a bit egotistical perhaps :thinking: as we all know...

"Timing is everything"

:LOL:

And I get what a few of you are saying, honestly I do, but you're on about a journey which encompasses the arrival as being the whole Photography thing; whereas I see the only Photography bit as the venue or finished meal in front of you

The capture of that scene is it all for me, quite how I get to that point is irrelevant. So I don't care whether it's a Nikon, Canon, Zenith, film or digital - and once I've captured something great (in my opinion obviously) I really don't care how the image is processed afterwards too, or even necessarily who by

[though I probably developed that line of thinking in my film days as I never had a darkroom; and when playing in them found it boring]

I've eaten in several of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants and the food has always been fantastic - but I don't care how they did it & with what utensils, nor do I want to learn how to do it myself

Make sense?

DD
 
No situation requires Film anymore. It's just a case of enjoying the process.

There's no argument, there's no pro's or con's. It's as simple as that.
 
DiddyDave said:
Love the name btw - a bit egotistical perhaps :thinking: as we all know...

"Timing is everything"
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Thanks, that's what I tell my wife.......

The Tim bit is hopefully obvious, the Ing bit is from my surname.

Anyhoo, surely the Ramsey example is analogous to:

I'll take that - 'Click' - and there it is in front of you ;)

As frequent traveller - that works for me as well (he says as he's about to go to a restaurant with Fuji F30 in his pocket).
 
Timing said:
Anyhoo, surely the Ramsey example is analogous to:

I'll take that - 'Click' - and there it is in front of you ;)
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Nope - for me the preparation is in seeing the shot, working the light, faffing about with composition & exposure; going back another day, and another until it all falls into place - I don't just 'click' anything

DD
 
Hmmm, what a great thread...Joxby summed it up well for me when he said ''Digital is too clean, it looks manufactured, man made....synthetic.''

While I really enjoy digital, I love using film. I love the look most of all. I have tried to duplicate the look with digital using filters and techniques, but to no avail. It looks even more fake to me. Of course I do not have any PP skills to speak of, so I am stuck. Still, I am a newbie who has been shooting digital for going on 9 years now, but film only for the past 1.5 years. I have went backwards. :) Now I shoot more film than digital by far. I have 5 film bodies in my truck most of the time and are all set up a little differently.
 
Jayst84 said:
I'd like to see you do an 8 hour exposure on a digital sensor. Or a contact shadow-gram.
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What situation would require an 8 hour exposure? If you don't mind me asking.

Contact shadow-grams (photograms) are easily replicated in photoshop. As I say, something that takes away from the 'fun' of the hands-on process in the darkroom.

Don't get me wrong, I love film. I love it to bits, but aside from it being a fine-art/hobby based medium - it's lacking in benefits over digital.

p.s. A little less hostility please.
 
One other great thing about film is shooting in the cold, the other day when it was -5c the batteries on my digital drained very quickly, was a pain keep changing them all the time.

I think extreme long exposures are useful for doing star trails:)
 
Grant said:
What situation would require an 8 hour exposure? If you don't mind me asking.

Contact shadow-grams (photograms) are easily replicated in photoshop. As I say, something that takes away from the 'fun' of the hands-on process in the darkroom.

Don't get me wrong, I love film. I love it to bits, but aside from it being a fine-art/hobby based medium - it's lacking in benefits over digital.

p.s. A little less hostility please.
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There wasn't any hostility mate, sorry if you read it as such.

8 hours was an arbitrary exposure to make a point. We all know for any extended exposures film is going to win though, apart from the hassles of reciprocity failure. So, that could be star trails as Blinkerz says, or any number of other landscapes, starlit landscapes take quite a while to expose for example.

Replicating shadow-grams, etc in PS seems odd, how would you go about it?
 
Jayst84 said:
There wasn't any hostility mate, sorry if you read it as such.

8 hours was an arbitrary exposure to make a point. We all know for any extended exposures film is going to win though, apart from the hassles of reciprocity failure. So, that could be star trails as Blinkerz says, or any number of other landscapes, starlit landscapes take quite a while to expose for example.

Replicating shadow-grams, etc in PS seems odd, how would you go about it?
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A little research tells me it's the other way round, now.


In short, digital handles long exposures better than film. Film has reciprocity failure and digital does not.

Film essentially 'forgets' the odd stray photon while digital keeps counting. You'll notice that 99% of astrophotography is done on digital now. I understand that exposures tend to be around the minute or so and then 'stacked' to cancel out the effects of noise and reveal the low intensity subjects.

As I understand it, Nikon has the preference of truncating this low level data (presumably) to make their images look cleaner. See this evaluation http://www.astrosurf.org/buil/20d/20dvs10d.htm
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As I say, Digital has taken over Film in all aspects of photography. But Film is still very much used today, as it's the process that people enjoy, just as much as the outcome.

There's really no argument!
 
I do my own research and I know very well digital and film side by side for...well, what do you call a long exposure, I mean if you are used to shooting fractions of a second, 1 minute is a long time I suppose, but I always think of long exposures in hours, anyway, that doesn't matter....say 10 minutes, the film product owns the digital product.
I dunno about that link, all I can say is, all my long exposure digital shots are as noisy as hell, and my film is a smooth a slugsnot, :shrug:

You're right, there is no argument, the justification for using film can be as simple as you want to, you prefer it for given situations, for reasons already detailed.
Given that is the case, nobody has come up with a satisfactory alternative that meets the criteria in full, there will always be a difference used to explain why someone would want to use one or the other, because the two processes are inherently poles apart.
 
joxby said:
I do my own research and I know very well digital and film side by side for...well, what do you call a long exposure, I mean if you are used to shooting fractions of a second, 1 minute is a long time I suppose, but I always think of long exposures in hours, anyway, that doesn't matter....say 10 minutes, the film product owns the digital product.
I dunno about that link, all I can say is, all my long exposure digital shots are as noisy as hell, and my film is a smooth a slugsnot, :shrug:

You're right, there is no argument, the justification for using film can be as simple as you want to, you prefer it for given situations, for reasons already detailed.
Given that is the case, nobody has come up with a satisfactory alternative that meets the criteria in full, there will always be a difference used to explain why someone would want to use one or the other, because the two processes are inherently poles apart.
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I appreciate that - but he was stipulating that the process astro-photographers use isn't one single long exposure, it's multiple short exposures that are stacked onto each other.
 
Grant said:
I appreciate that - but he was stipulating that the process astro-photographers use isn't one single long exposure, it's multiple short exposures that are stacked onto each other.
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Yes, but you quoted Jay whose talking about 8 hour noise free exposures, suggesting what he posted is no longer true because....and then quoting reciprocity failure from the 1 minute stackers club.

:)
 
Grant said:
No situation requires Film anymore. It's just a case of enjoying the process.

There's no argument, there's no pro's or con's. It's as simple as that.
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And if you go to the National Portrait Gallery and see Annie Liewbowitz exhibition and those portraits of the queen, (shot on slide film) you might find it a tad difficult to convince the lady to ditch the film!

There is plenty of arguement in favour of film. The two processes are completely different one being electronic and one being chemical.

A lot of my favourite images were shot on film.
 
Yep, I shoot a heap of frames on digi and stack them for star trails and the like, way better than film for controlling ambient light near built up areas.

But on any exposure of real length, film wins, without question. For noise/grain handling up to a point, and then the fact that your digi sensor will simply 'give up' after a while, before your batteries do.
 
Wow, what an interesting thread...:)

In the nature of entente (or whatever it is), trying to bridge the gap and learn about digital, I got a few lessons from the missus on photoshop. Here's my 1st attempt at tidying up an image, my FIRST PHOTOSHOP EVER, you saw it first here folks.
Now you know I love my film, but I couldn't have done this in the darkroom....!:LOL:


Before....

9thJan08_3_forum.jpg




After....
no_fence_forum.jpg


I must admit I was still surprised at how quickly this took. I'm impressed by it, but it was nowhere near as much fun as mucking about in the dark!:LOL:
 
Currently being a uni student I will shoot whatever the brief asks for. When it comes to my personal project in the third year I get to pick my own format. If I get enough time I would love to do it in LF. I prefer the aesthetic quality of film. Plus I think people can appreciate what goes into film work over digital. I know I do.

How many people do you know shoot digital and try to make it look like film? Now how many people do you know that shoot film and try and make it look digital?
 
Mike V said:
Now how many people do you know that shoot film and try and make it look digital?
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Does scanning your negs to stick on here count as trying to make your film look digital?:LOL::LOL::LOL:
 
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