Comments on: Way too many photography words

By: Kevin O'Mara

Kevin O'Mara — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:00:48 +0000

Walter, I don’t even know what to make of that thing you just said, but it was interesting. I will consider this reinforcement that I am a digital creature.

By: walter

walter — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:10:28 +0000

i’m gonna try and surprise myself and keep this really short:

1) Great experiment
2) The answer, i don’t think, is found in a technological understanding through a/b comparisons of digital/film, but a holistic spiritual meditation on the entirely different natures of digital and analog
3) O’mara: you are a digital photographer. Just like you can’t give Segovia a Les Paul and a stack of hi-watts and expect anything all that impressive. And much like Pete Townsend couldn’t get squat out of the spanish guitar, your photos are not analog. You are a digital creature. The emotional content of your photos are strangely digital. They properly giggle and ache in the digital realm.

By: super-structure | Jason Coleman

super-structure | Jason Coleman — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:19:17 +0000

[...] “Escape” by Jason Coleman – I’ve recently gotten excited (re-excited?) about photography and learning how to take better pictures. Kevin has a great post and some interesting discussion on his blog about his film vs. digital experimentation. I think, for me, one of the key reason why I only want to shoot in digital, regardless of quality, is the ability to let myself make many mistakes to learn from. Were my camera a film, it would sit mostly on a shelf for fear of taking bad photos. I never had much appreciation for photography until digital allowed me to experiment with it. I never had that feeling with film which no matter how simple the camera, always gave me too great a disconnect between action and feedback to meaningfully learn anything. Related Posts:No related posts [...]

By: henry

henry — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:46:18 +0000

I agree with JJ. The only real differences apparent in these examples is in the processing. And even comparing prints you would still mostly be noticing things that had nothing to do with the image quality but the type of printer used.

That being said, the tonal range is a bit greater with film than with most sub $2000 DSLRs. No real question about that. And with large format negatives like 4×5 the difference is even wider. But it really isn’t that big of a difference, and with the ability to compose an HDR image with digital the scales even out.

The only real thing I notice between the digi/film images is the sharpness. Digital cameras just produce very soft images without any sharpening done in post processing, whereas film is sharp right outta the camera.

The slightly better tonal range of film just isn’t worth the extra hassle in my opinion.

By: JTJ

JTJ — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:24:07 +0000

If you would be getting your photos done “straight-to-CD,” It’s probably best to stick with all-digital.

A DSLR -> Photoshop -> Online workflow is actually much more ‘professional’ than SLR -> one-hour-developing -> CD -> Photoshop -> Online. Whenever you introduce the one-hour people/machines into the process, you’re creating a quality bottleneck that reduces the best photos to near-point-and-click quality.

Now that I’m thinking about it, when we say that a digital photo workflow is simpler than a film workflow, we probably don’t even realize that there’s even more of a complexity difference when you are doing ‘professional or pro-sumer’ photography as opposed to snapshot photography.

By: Kevin O'Mara

Kevin O'Mara — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:00:49 +0000

Aha, yes, that is a very valid point you make there regarding auto curves and whatnot. I should specify that all my opinions here are regarding how I would most likely get my photos done not the true digital versus film comparison. Thanks for the thoughts on that.

By: JTJ

JTJ — Mon, 07 May 2007 02:38:29 +0000

First, let me say that this is a good article for starting film/digital discussions. And while I think that your examples can show some some basic differences, I’m afraid (other than the CA fringing) that you’re mostly comparing your digital camera against the scanner that scanned your negatives. To really compare tonal range, color saturation/vibrance etc, you really need to look at prints. There is a lot more info on that film than is contained in those files on the CD.

The first thing that I noticed when I got my CD back today after film processing is that the digital images are much more contrasty than my prints used to be. My guess is that the scanner is doing an auto-levels/curves adjustment.

And speaking of auto-adjustments, the photo print machines at one-hour places also do auto adjustments on your prints. To really know what kind of tonal range you’re getting, you need to take your negatives somewhere that’ll do a print by hand for you (e.g. TTU photo services). They will be able to pull out more tonal range than a machine. Then, you really see what film can do.

By: DoubleT

DoubleT — Mon, 07 May 2007 01:56:33 +0000

Very cool, dude. I’m pleased you took the time to compair the two side by side.
Even if one finds subtle improvements in film image quality over digital, the cost of film and the inconsistancies of consumer level film development have me on the side of digital. The only practical advantage that I can see in shooting film is true focal length.
Celluloid is to photography as Harley Davidson is to motorcycles. “Oh my God, single pin crank just feels so much better!” Kiss my ass.
Sorry. How did we get on motorcycles?