11-14-2012 03:00 PM
Wait a second - it's 2012, the 21st century! Why in heavens name would someone still shoot film? Easy! I dont like digital.
Now, mind you I do think that Digital has it's place, but I just like the look of film SO much better. It's got better dynamic range, better colors, I like the look of the grain - I just think it's a superior format. M'lard, if it please the court - here's exhibit A and B:
and
Both pictures are taken within seconds of each other, both are straight out of the camera (save for the film, which I underexposed slightly, so I increased it an f-stop or two). Otherwise, I didn't touch the colors, enhanced them or otherwise touched them up in any way. The top one was shot with a Rebel K2 on Fuji Reala and the bottom one was on a Rebel XSi, and I think the analog version looks WAY sexier.
The other area that film has it over digital? Black and white shooting. Digital B&W looks so flat, so bland. The contrasts aren't very strong, the blacks are tepid, the whites do nothing for me. Film, on the other hand looks really nice. Something like this shot just wouldn't look nearly as nice in digital:
The other selling point - at least for me? The quality of my shots has gone WAY up since I started working with film again. Why? Because of the limited resources. With digital I found myself spamming, shooting with a pray and spray attitude, firing off 400 shots on an outing without blinking an eye. 375 of them I would never look at again, with 10 or 20 being any **bleep** good. With film, I'm constantly asking myself "Why am I taking this picture? Is this worth expending one of my 36 shots on?" - and many a time, I find myself backing away from a mediocre picture without pulling the trigger.
One more consideration? Permanence. Take a peek at this slideshow: http://www.time.com/time/audioslide/0,32187,1920419,00.html - slides from the great depression that look like they were shot yesterday. Can we honestly say that .jpg files will be a viable format in 75 years? Will it still be viable in 20? Hard drive crashes? Remote Servers go down? Flicker goes out of business? Big deal - I still have the original negatives and slides sitting on my shelf. All it costs me is some work to rescan all my material. If I take a box of slides and CD and leave them on the same shelf for a hundred years, the slides will be viewable. The CD will probably have fallen prey to CD rot and faded dyes (and that's not considering if we'll even have CD drives by then and if we'd even have the right file format to read them).
Case in point, recently I've been scanning a whole bunch of old film for my mom that was shot back in the 40's and 50's - and despite them sitting untouched and forgotten in the damp, dusty basement under less than ideal conditions for some 60 years, the photos still look pretty good. Somehow I have doubts that a box of CDs, stored under the same conditions, would anything close to resembling usable in 2074.
Again, Digital has it's place, this isnt suppose to be a X is better than Y thread (lord knows the internet is full of those). Just my reasoning why I like one medium over the other.
11-15-2012 03:35 PM
So I'm the only one shooting film here? How sad!
Perhaps this will inspire you
(Shot on Kodak Ektachrome E100VS with my Alien Bees)
(Shot on Kodachrome 64)
(Shot on Fuji Velvia 50)
11-16-2012 12:03 PM
Yes, you are...
Read my post about a small manual focus FF camera. We are lonely. Todays photography is about zack-bumm high tech autofocus, high resolution, framrate, shutterlag imageing machines I like film, but would welcome the digital version of the ancient passion there was, when cameras were simple and needed some passion. Here in Switzerland analog film became very expensive. So lucky you, if you live in the US...
Best regards, Dave
11-16-2012 12:48 PM
@Great_Beyond wrote:
>... Otherwise, I didn't touch the colors, enhanced them or otherwise touched them up in any way.
Which is why the film image looks better. Processing a RAW file is part of the image making process and simply taking default settings and saving a jpg obviously isn't going to get the best results.
11-16-2012 03:23 PM
My biggest regret was selling my Canon RT.
Still shoot with a Mamiya TLR.
05-22-2013 04:15 PM
Lately I've been shooting slides - this stuff is so georgous - seriously, check out these colors:
I also just picked up a old Mamiya Professional C3 TLR - I've not posted anything yet, but it looks so astounding for a 55 year old camera. . . .
05-22-2013 06:57 PM
I'm sorry but I much prefer the digital format. I've shot plenty of films (negatives and slides) in my days way back to the early 70's, developed my own prints, etc. . It was OK, digital is much better. Each to his own.
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