Very good points, Chris. People keep pushing the line that digital is cheaper to shoot than film. Regarding which medium really is cheaper, of course it also depends on how many photos you tend to shoot per year. For people who don't take many photos at all, I think film is the perfect choice. If such people (who mainly shoot photos during birthdays and Christmas only) chose the digital route, they would spend unnecessary money constantly upgrading their digital equipment every so many years as the technology evolves. Whereas a good film camera would last them for decades and the only ongoing costs would be the few rolls of film that they shoot each year. And for those people who do shoot lots of photos, film still offers some benefits, particularly for night photography like I do - for example, mechanical shutter on older cameras which free you from worrying about batteries if you do lots of time exposure work. Additionally, the ability to do extremely long time exposures without generating ‘noise.’
Now for photographers who work with high resolution images and want very large prints with exceptionally high quality, I would say that film would be the less expensive option here. There’s a local pro lab not far from me that has two large prints for display on a wall (over a meter high) of female portraits taken with a digital Hasselblad camera. The image quality is stunning – they look beautiful. Even though I’m more of a film person, I have no problems with the quality I see here; I was very impressed. However, the high resolution digital camera that took these photos has a AU$40,000 price tag. If I wanted to produce large prints of very high quality, I could buy a large format film view camera for a tiny fraction of that price. In fact, on eBay, Ive seen many large format view cameras going for a couple of hundred dollars, and sometimes less. Granted, large format film is very expensive. Though I find it hard to believe that I would spend $40,000 worth of 4x5 lf film (or even half that amount) over even a 10 year period. Remember too that because the $40,000 camera is digital, it is inevitable that it will be outdated eventually and superseded by another camera in it’s class, it may even become obsolete. By then, prices for such specialized equipment may have come down so the new digi camera may even cost half of that of a Hassey - $20,000 or perhaps less. So that $20,000 (or maybe even $15,000) would be added on to the initial $40,000 which puts the cost of the digital equipment even further from the several hundreds of dollars that one could invest in a large format film camera, in addition to the cost of shooting and developing lf film. And being of a very simple design, an lf view camera will last an extremely long time and will be free from expensive electronic repairs.
Cost savings aside, I’m not saying that a large format film camera would be a better choice than a high resolution digital camera. For one thing, view cameras take time to set up so photographing of spontaneous moments is unlikely. Your subject matter is more restricted to subjects that are still or slow moving. I would imagine that a digital Hasselblad camera would be more versatile in this respect with faster handling capabilities.
Bright side to the rise of digital
Moderator: Andreas Wideroe
"35mm. The Super8 of the still film world."
Ive often thought the same thing. That 35mm still is the equivalent of super 8 in that these were the formats most popular with consumers in the days when film was most popular.
I also think of medium format as the equivalent of 16mm movie film as these are the formats that attract a wide mix of amateurs and professionals.
With a similar line of thinking, large format can be considered as the equivalent of 35mm and 70mm movie film.
Ive often thought the same thing. That 35mm still is the equivalent of super 8 in that these were the formats most popular with consumers in the days when film was most popular.
I also think of medium format as the equivalent of 16mm movie film as these are the formats that attract a wide mix of amateurs and professionals.
With a similar line of thinking, large format can be considered as the equivalent of 35mm and 70mm movie film.
I agree, but I could also say that this difference is more noticeable on motion film than still film.Nigel wrote:I shoot a lot of 4x5. It can't be beat...We are talking about 35mm. The Super8 of the still film world.
Where I'm working (industrial photography) we're shooting mostly 5x7 and 4x5, and I feel it's a bit too much quality considering the pictures are usually printed on catalogs or magazines (unless the stills are used for big size street adverts and so on - that's another story). I guess the main reason we're shooting large format is because you can extend the depth of field or adjust the perspective easily with a rail camera.
Also, I used to work for a press agency - they always asked for digital images, not even raw files but low res jpg because they were intended for newspapers and they had to be sent immediately for publishing (this is probably why they don't want you to give them a file, because scanning requires some time and they usually don't have any).
My thought is now high quality is a niche market in still photography (with some exceptions, of course), while it's the main goal in motion picture, because anyone shooting a movie would like to see it projected in a theater, where frame size really matters.
Depends what you are doing.Nigel wrote:I shoot a lot of 4x5. It can't be beat...We are talking about 35mm. The Super8 of the still film world.
Good Luck
I could hardly take a 4x5 sheet camera to the USA with me on Wednesday, and certainly couldn't carry it around with me.
Whether digital or film is better really depends on what your priorities are. As a film enthusiast, even I use a digital camera if I am just taking snapshots of friends (usually at drunken parties and clubs). I rarely want to make prints of these, and often end up emailing the pics or posting CD's out.
However when I am travelling on holiday or visitng somewhere of special interest I invariably use film for a number of reasons. Certainly I wish to show the photos to family and friends, but not necessarily send them out CD's of every photo to people who were not there. So I usually use 35mm print film...sometimes I use slides especially if I am going somewhere special as nothing beats a genuine slide show and in addition I can have prints made.
Film is still cheaper if you want to have prints made, or so I find. And the quality is still better than digital, in terms of contrast and colour reproduction. I am yet to see a digital print that can be passed off as film...and as for B&W....
The government says that by 2010 30% of us will be fat....I am merely a trendsetter 