“We have decided that the time is now right to take 35mm cameras out of the frame.”
Daddy, why aren’t your photographs flat and over-sharpened? Why are things naturally out of focus in the background instead of blurred later by Photoshop? Why do human beings look human and sunlight look warm? Why can you take pictures in the dark? Dad? Why?
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Why?
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Why?
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Two digits up to this trend. I buy only classic cameras anyway — Pentax S1 was the last and the present one is a Fujica of similar vintage. Stunning versatility and a great lens, cost negligible.If you do available-light candid portraits indoors as I do, digital cameras are the kiss of death.
Dunno, my Nikon D70 is no less capable at doing any of those things you mention than my Nikkormat FTn, and because I don’t need to buy film or pay for it to be developed I’ve probably shot more with the D70 in a year than I did in ten years with the Nikkormat.
I work in film and TV so the death of 35mm isn’t too much of a surprise. I’ve been expecting film companies to die out for a few years now and have a feeling the extinction could be as swift as that of the dinosaurs.
I hope they still sell disposables in Heathrow though. I’m doing some volunteer work in Kenya soon and don’t wish to have to get a digital. At least my mostly manual SLR could survive a drenching.
Just wish I had a flat big enough to accomodate a decent darkroom!
“Cost negligible”. For the camera, yes. For the film and developing, no. And how much longer do you think Kodak and Fuji will continue to make film for, if no-one is selling the cameras? There hasn’t been any pro demand for 35mm film for years.
There isn’t anything a 35mm film camera can do that a DSLR can’t. Film only survives in pro studios as medium format, and even that is going the same way as 35mm, with digital backs tethered to PowerBooks. The art director can see instantly whether you’ve got what he was after. Try telling him you’ll send the proofs in a few days- that’s the kiss of death.
The truth is that a DSLR is a film camera, just with a CCD instead of film. It bears even less resemblance to a point-and-shoot digital than a film SLR bears to a film point-and-shoot, because in P&S digital the sensor is tiny. This gives the virtually infinite depth of field that Damian referred to in his post, and also the relative light insensitivity. The CCD in a DSLR is much, much larger, and has the same sensitivity as film (in fact you can switch ISO on the fly).
Check out this week’s Observer Sport Monthly. There is a superb composition of Lance Armstrong’s face and a lobbed bottle of water in the middle of Le Tour, blown up across two pages. It was almost certainly taken by a pro with a top-of-the-line Nikon DSLR. It is almost completely ruined by digital compression, pixel noise, untrue colours, and an edge enhancement algorithm that can’t hold up at that level of enlargement. Taken on film it would have been a work of art. Instead it looks like a screen grab from a TV monitor.
Once CCDs in digital SLRs are big enough and sensitive enough then film will die forever, but they aren’t there yet. That said, I am tempted by this. It’s particularly apt that the background in the promotional picture for the camera should be so obviously blurred with Photoshop.
Cinema distribution could get stuck in this rut if digital distribution is rolled out too soon. To think that lots of films being released now have only been mastered at 2K resolution. (The VFX work may have been done at 4K prior to downrezzing.)
At least the field of amateur photography won’t get trapped in a techno rut due to outdated standards like CDs. I’m holding out for a little longer before I get rid of my SLR.
I’m having fun with the D70 even though I’ve got a variety of cameras all the way back to my Dad’s 1950 Leica (can’t recall the model). I find being able to switch ISOs to be useful.
I still get out the Pentax Spotmatic and shoot a roll. I love looking through that viewfinder. I’d wish for Dad’s Speed Graphic but I don’t have space for a darkroom. Oh, the thrill of seeing a Panatomic-X print materialize in the developer. :::sigh:::
PooterGeek’s observations are unanswerable and obvious to the eye (sensitive to minute differences in the level of resolution).
It’s the old story with this technology: digital must be better (yes, professionals have lots of business reasons for using it) –– but it isn’t any better for images than it was for sound. The public is paying well over the odds for these horrible little “digital” cameras with minimal capacity and resolution (and no adaptibility whatever) but for someone with a passion for a hobby like me, its vinyl and photographic film, ta.
The notion that anyone is going to stop making 35mil film in the near to middle distance future seems unlikely to me.
Check out this week’s Observer Sport Monthly. There is a superb composition of Lance Armstrong’s face and a lobbed bottle of water in the middle of Le Tour, blown up across two pages. It was almost certainly taken by a pro with a top-of-the-line Nikon DSLR.
Either a Nikon or a Canon, but most definitely a DSLR.
It is almost completely ruined by digital compression, pixel noise, untrue colours, and an edge enhancement algorithm that can’t hold up at that level of enlargement.
It may have been ruined by digital compression, but that may have happened at any point in the workflow, from download onto the photographer’s Mac, through transmission to the newspaper, and the editing and compositing process at the newspaper itself. The camera may not have been responsible.
Even if it was digitally compressed in the camera, it need not have been. I shoot all my pics RAW, ie uncompressed. As to the pixel noise, have you not noticed that film is grainy? Untrue colours: film is not magically able to capture colour perfectly, and has shortcomings in this department as well: perhaps reciprocity failure rings a bell? How about “photographic dies may change colour over time”? The edge enhancement algorithm may have only been used because of the level of enlargement: the published image may have been only a tiny portion of the original image. The picture editor might have used a similar algorithm to salvage a film picture from the obvious grain blurriness caused by a similarly high degree of enlargement of a film frame, especially if very fast film was used; sports photographers routinely used the fastest film available to get the highest shutter speeds.
Taken on film it would have been a work of art. Instead it looks like a screen grab from a TV monitor.
A 35mm film camera is inherently no better at producing works of art than a DSLR. If you could have posed Lance and the bottle in front of a view camera with an enormous piece of film in it, sure, it would look better than a DSLR picture. But it would look better than a 35mm film picture as well. An extremely enlarged bit of 35mm film does not magically retain the same characteristics of the entirety of a picture exposed in a 4×5 view camera.
Although I haven’t seen the picture in question, is it possible the editor tried to make it look that way? Just as some film development techniques emphasise grain for effect, so there is an aesthetic that emphasises the digital nature of an image.
Once CCDs in digital SLRs are big enough and sensitive enough then film will die forever, but they aren’t there yet. I disagree with this in its entirety. CCDs in DSLRs are big enough and sensitive enought to replace 35mm film SLRs. The digital backs used in medium format cameras (at 25 megapixels) are definitely big enough and sensitive enough for advertising and studio work. But digital could not currently compete with a large format view camera, and it probably never will. Large format photography was not killed by medium format, nor by 35mm, and it will not be killed by digital, because it is the perfect technology for its natural applications, eg landscape photography. None of its shortcomings matter in that field. Digital can add nothing. So film will not die, at least for that niche application.
Come on in, the water’s fine! Keep your film cameras: I still have mine. I just never use them…
Dave F,
Apart from reel-to-reel tape, which is unutterably lovely to listen to, I have to say that I am on the other side of the sad old git fence when it comes to sound. Even a well maintained and set up quality turntable playing a dust-free record can’t rival a good CD player heard through the same gear. (And SACD/DVD Audio or whatever fancy-schmancy new format they’re trying to sell us this week is wasted on 99% of listeners.)
The CD standard was fine when it was first devised; it’s just that, back then, the original players and the intended-for-vinyl masters that commercial CDs were made from sounded horrible. Those early problems have tainted the medium permanently for many listeners, but things are so much better now.
These days, if your CDs don’t outperform your vinyl you need to get some decent D-A converters / filters / amplification / loudspeakers—or donate your hearing to science. There aren’t many adults around who can hear frequencies higher than 17kHz. The flaws in images from expensive digital SLRs compared to images from cheap 35mm ones, however, are visible to unaided eyes.
Stephen,
With reference to one of your points, something that analogue images and analogue sound have in common is that they degrade gracefully. When they distort reality, they do so in a way that most humans (regardless of their vintage) find pleasing: tube amplifiers produce euphonious harmonics, film grain signals “authenticity”. In contrast, digital audio distortion is nails-on-a-blackboard nasty and pixels look naff. So, if the Armonstrong pic had been blown up hugely from a 35mm negative the result would have been more Seurat than Playstation.
Dave F, I’m not talking about point-and-shoot digital cameras with minimal resolution and no adaptability whatever, I am talking about a digital SLR, with 6 megapixel resolution and every control found on a film SLR. And I didn’t say digital must better; sometimes it isn’t. But it’s just as untrue to say digital must be worse.
Damian, you cannot know what flaws are produced by expensive digital SLRs by looking at pictures printed in magazines. A hugely magnified film negative or positive doesn’t look Seurat, it simply looks blurred. And it’s possible to screw up any image, film or digital, if you don’t know what you are doing in post-production. It’s far more likely to happen to digital given that the depth of experience isn’t there. This doesn’t mean there is something inherently wrong with digital cameras in their current incarnation, just as there was nothing inherently wrong with the CD standard.
If you shoot raw, don’t compress ever, take care to use Photoshop properly, you won’t be able to tell 8×10 or even 12×14 prints from 35mm film.
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