Photography Thailand Forum

[Adzz]

An Old Hassy CM body will work with almost any digital back..... No upgrade there... Just replacing a years film bill for a digital back when they first came out..
A lot of  Sinar and other large format kit, just needs a conversion kit to go to digital.
Mark is right you dont need to change everything all the time.
Even computers that we use for post production are on a lower upgrade cycle now..

[tingtong10]

A great article, and I think Ray got it spot on.I had a pentax 645 many years ago, and at that time my main pre occupation to earning some money was shooting weddings, yes, Film at time was a laborious task,but I know look back at some of those shots and can see why people still shoot with film.
        Ray was spot on,I am now in the digital throws of photography, I can now shoot off more pictures and not have to incur extra cost, but the sense of achievement is lacking, all my input on film was my imput,I had to work at it, to produce the desired results,and a good picture is worth a thousand words.
        Digital for me, lacks that certain amount of achievement, I recently purchased some Carl Zeiss lenses for my Nikon, these are manual everything,(yes, I know I can use them in A) but why buy them if you're going to do that, and with these I am now having to think more,and that certain sense of achievement is coming back, I do not want to sit in post production for hours on a computer, I want to be out with the camera.
        Anyway Ray well done, I just had to comment on that one too!!!!

[Hawaiiman]

The long history of photography has a wealth of film images that are remarkable in every way. All one has to do is look around on flickr to see an amazing number of at best forgettable images captured with multi thousand dollar dslr's, processed by near thousand dollars worth of software on an expensive computer. In painting class we were assigned to paint with one color, or two. The art was still either great or not. Resolution, saturation, tonal depth, dynamic range, etc, etc. are only coincidental to art.
 As far as replacing a dslr every few years, I'd be willing to bet a 90 year old folding camera can produce display quality images, I doubt a 90 year old dslr will even function, and will the then current version of PS will run the old version of RAW?
I have a lot of admiration for a photographer who can set up and take a beautiful image "cold". on film. Being constrained to use an external light meter, and balance out the available light by good planning, composing the shot on the ground glass without cropping and perspective correction, etc. can certainly sharpen ones skills. If one relies more on software than pre-visualization and physical manipulation on site, something gets lost. Maybe if new photogs all started with a speed graphic, they'd turn out better.
 100 years ago most people used horses, and what we call cars were "horseless carriages" competing in the same class...transportation. Maybe we should coin a new term, digitography (?) so the two forms could be over the semantic confusion and peacefully go their own ways.

[Marc Schultz]

The long history of photography has a wealth of film images that are remarkable in every way. All one has to do is look around on flickr to see an amazing number of at best forgettable images captured with multi thousand dollar dslr's, processed by near thousand dollars worth of software on an expensive computer. In painting class we were assigned to paint with one color, or two. The art was still either great or not. Resolution, saturation, tonal depth, dynamic range, etc, etc. are only coincidental to art.
 As far as replacing a dslr every few years, I'd be willing to bet a 90 year old folding camera can produce display quality images, I doubt a 90 year old dslr will even function, and will the then current version of PS will run the old version of RAW?
I have a lot of admiration for a photographer who can set up and take a beautiful image "cold". on film. Being constrained to use an external light meter, and balance out the available light by good planning, composing the shot on the ground glass without cropping and perspective correction, etc. can certainly sharpen ones skills. If one relies more on software than pre-visualization and physical manipulation on site, something gets lost. Maybe if new photogs all started with a speed graphic, they'd turn out better.
 100 years ago most people used horses, and what we call cars were "horseless carriages" competing in the same class...transportation. Maybe we should coin a new term, digitography (?) so the two forms could be over the semantic confusion and peacefully go their own ways.

Interesting perspectives for contemplation. You raise some good points about mechanical parts probably going to function longer than digital or electronic parts, but I think the world has shifted to electronics on every level, cars included. So I am afraid it is the only way forward now. Short of not possibly being able to use my current DSLR camera 100 years from now, when I am already surely dead, I see the countless advantages of the digital workflow, over the older and more limiting analog workflow, to be vast. :jap:

[EdwardKaraa]

One thing to add about film, unrelated to quality, is that photographers used to make much more money with it. I know that I did, and I quit paying jobs just when digital arrived. As Marc mentioned, film and Polaroids were expensive but I used to charge them to the client with all other expenses, on the top of my daily fees. I made good profit on those extras too. Now I see photographers charging less per day, paying more for the filmless cameras, and doing more work in PP. Digital has been a blessing for the manufacturing industry but not so great for many photographers. It used to take real skills in the past just to come out with properly focused and exposed shots regardless of the artistic value. All this has been taken away now. This said I also embraced digital since 2003 and shoot now with a FF Sony and Zeiss lenses. I would not go back to film, but still remember it with a lot of affection :)

[Ray Evans]

Both Kodak and Fuji are releasing new film stock each year.

My friends in Japan tell me that the new Velvia 50 and fine grained Ektar and Acros is in such demand over there the shops frequently run out of stock!

Used film cameras on the big auction site now fetching silly money compared to a few years back.

Marry this with so much software now being marketed to reproduce the film look and one has to ask why?

I suspect we're going through a retro stage. Even the new digital cameras attempt to look like old Leicas (Fuji X100) and they're flying off the shelves.

The above is the digital version of my Konica Hexar AF and provides 12MP and a native 34Mb image. My Hexar images double this with ease!

My film stock images consistently outsell my digital stuff both in quantity and premium despite representing only 20% of my portfolio.

The cost of film - what cost? Compared with the thousands of dollars for the latest digital wonder machine (Leica M9 $7K!) I can buy and PP a heck of a lot of film.

The suns out, I'm just loading my Contax AX with a roll of Velvia. Bliss!

[EdwardKaraa]

I certainly agree with you that there has been a revival of film in the last couple of years, probably by new photographers who only experienced digital, and would like to go back to the roots, so to speak.

I also much prefer the film "look" and its infinite resolution (though lacking in sharpness mostly due to the film "thickness".

I myself have quit digital for 2 years (2006-2007) and bought an entire Contax line of camera bodies and lenses. However even though I love the medium, I quickly found out that:

- My favourite most professional lab in Bangkok regularly scratched my chromes and left drying marks on them.
- One roll of Velvia with processing costs about 12$, so less than 250 rolls can buy me a 5D2 or an A900 (my A900 is at 17000 actuations so it has largely paid for itself in terms of film cost)
- Scanning with a Nikon Coolscan L5000 was very time consuming, much more than processing raw files.
- Archiving and storage of slides and negatives takes a lot of time and space, while the last 9 years of my digital archives fit on a small 500GB external hard drive.
- Maintenance and finding parts for my Contax gear (the cameras mostly) was quite hard.

This is when I found out that film is not for me anymore. It's just too much work and high expenses.

I still love to look at film photography though and still can see the subtle nuances that make it to my eyes the superior medium.

The cost of film - what cost? Compared with the thousands of dollars for the latest digital wonder machine (Leica M9 $7K!) I can buy and PP a heck of a lot of film.

[yingxuy]

I believe the latest 60-megapixel Hasselblad finally the equivalent of 120 film and 39 million pixel resolution sensor requires the equivalent of 35mm film. Low-resolution digital will never be achieved.