Film vs. Digital
kenrockwell.com
kenrockwell.com
Being able to use a smaller sensor format at the same or better quality is of critical importance, because it allows the photographer to use smaller, lighter, brighter lenses. A digital MF system can happily be used handheld, whereas a 4x5 camera demands a very large and heavy tripod to work at all. Large format lenses are so slow and the cameras so bulky that a mere gust of wind can ruin an image.
That's at low ISO. Start cranking up the sensitivity and digital is in a world of it's own. A Nikon D3s will produce useful images at 12800 ISO and very clean images at 6400 ISO[3].
For any serious use, film is absolutely stone dead. It still has a place for hobbyists and students, for whom the much cheaper equipment makes up for the inconvenience and poorer quality. For any serious use, digital is vastly, incomparably better than film.
[1] http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml [2] http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml [3] http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/digitalcame...
> For any serious use, film is absolutely stone dead.
There are plenty of fabulous artists still shooting film with view cameras and getting great images.
For example, are you going to tell me that Burtynsky isn’t serious? (Note, he’s also taken some pictures w/ a Hasselblad w/ a digital back in the last few years, where setting up a view camera is not feasible. But as far as I know the bulk of his pictures are still taken on film.)
“film is dead for ‘serious’ uses where serious is defined as ‘a client paying by the hour’”
then, instead. But generally clients paying by the hour care about “bang for the buck” and “timely” and “good enough” more than they care about absolute quality, so that’s sort of a different use case than fine art photography.
I really don’t see why there should be any problem with a writer or guitarist using whatever equipment they want. The product is what matters here, not the tools. Basically, your definition makes journalists serious but novelists not, and orchestra members serious, but rock band members not. Eh.
The best prints that I've seen from digital imagers, including modern full-frame 35mm digital cameras, look miserably blurry if you approach the print closely enough to read the caption. From 15 feet away, they look nice and sharp... my prints from 4x5 look every bit as sharp from 15 feet away until you stick your nose on the print -- and all you keep finding is more detail.
The other thing that the digital fanputzes ignore is that with the exception of the Foveon, DIGITAL SENSORS ARE MONOCRHOMATIC. They invent most of their color information through interpolation because THEY CANNOT RECORD COLOR.
If you want high ISO ability, digital rules the roost. If you want fast turnaround, you go with digital. If you want the best color and maximal detail, you use film -- the bigger the better.
Even Jack Dykinga, who switched to using multiple exposures stitched together for his commercial work, says that for fine art images, he still uses 4x5 film, because not even stitching 15-20 full 35mm frame digital images together can match an image from a 4x5 sheet film, especially if you use a drum scanner.
The best way to see the comparison in person would be either to see my prints (easy if you're in Seattle) or order one or two large prints and see for yourself.
However, there are still some examples online done by people who are skilled photographers, and who know a thing or two about scanning... plus, unlike the folks who did the comparison for the luminous landscape, this guy uses a GOOD scanner. (He's also the person who got me started with large format photography, so I had a chance to spend a week photographing with him in the Smokies, and got a lot of instruction from him.)
The biggest problem with this article is that he assumes that film has infinite resolution. This was just as ridiculous in 2006 as it is today. Anyone who knows a thing about analog encoding techniques will instantly spot the fallacy in this argument. The resolution of film is certainly more "organic" in nature, but it is not even remotely infinite. Film has grain, and while it is difficult to pin a precise equivalent PPI on film grain, it is nevertheless the case that you cannot exceed the resolution of the grain.
Since 2006 the resolution of full-frame digital sensors has vastly surpassed film, and with Canon's announcement of a 120MP sensor, and the mainstreaming of 4K digital video, there seems to be no end in sight. As it is, the biggest bottleneck to resolution is now the glass. It is becoming increasingly difficult and more expensive to create glass with enough clarity, and low enough distortion to take advantage of the higher MP sensors.
> The biggest problem with this article is that he assumes that film has infinite resolution.
No he doesn’t.
> Since 2006 the resolution ...
If you look, this article is from before that. So what’s your point?
> As it is, the biggest bottleneck to resolution is now the glass.
The glass has always been one of the biggest bottlenecks. Which is why bigger and bigger megapixel counts aren’t always so useful.
"20 years from now we can re-scan our film and get 2029-level image quality."
...
"You can't go back to a raw file and get more resolution. With film, you don't have to make a resolution decision until you scan it.
With film, you can scan at any resolution. With film, you can scan it again in 30 years with whatever technology we have then, because you still have your original raw image captured alive and well."
...
"Real Raw needs no noise reduction.
Details and textures are always crisp and clear on film."
Anyway, low-ISO film has very very good resolution, I expect often exceeding the resolving power of the glass. So making it higher than that (that is, adding megapixels) doesn’t help anything.
If you want higher resolution than a 4x5 negative (and I’m really not sure why you would, since a 4x5 negative will let you print crystal clear images at poster size or larger, so frankly this is all pretty academic and kind of a stupid argument), try an 8x10 negative. I’m almost certain there’s no widely available digital back that comes close to the resolution you’ll get. (If you had more money than you knew what to do with you might be able to get some kind of neat custom part or something).
* * *
Anyhow, Rockwell is an anti-raw-format zealot (he just does jpegs), as well as a view camera user, which is why the article you are linking to is doubly biased and stupid. But so what? If you figure out what his opinions are, it’s pretty easy to discount them when reading his essays; and, for instance, the essay you link can mostly just be ignored altogether.
As far as infinite resolution on the film: any analog source can be sampled at increasingly higher resolutions, and at some point it will be virtually indistinguishable from the original. However, higher res samples will always have more data from the source, though marginally less useful. Based on this, you can definitely state that film has infinite resolution.
At the time there was a lot of sensationalist noise that film was "dead", and I think that's why he spends so much time focusing on the virtues of film photography.
We lost Kodachrome, we lost Polaroid (for a while).. I think there's a handful of folks trying to make sure that with the influx of interest in digital photography that people are aware that film still exists and does a few things that your digital camera doesn't.
You may not recall, but at the time, 2006, there were many articles declaring the death of film. The film market was rapidly contracting, Agfa had recently gone bankrupt and Kodak was cancelling lines left and right.
The popular opinion was that film would be gone "in 10 years" and Ken Rockwell -- love him or hate him -- was QUITE the agitator for suggesting otherwise.
Happily for those of us who enjoy shooting film, he was correct. Film is the right tool for some jobs and digital is the right tool for others. Film markets stopped contracting and now we're even seeing some new and interesting lines (new Maco/Rollei emulsions new Polaroid integral films, etc).
That's putting it lightly, most in those circles say "Ken Rockwell is a douche."
The grey card is also the key to getting professional negative printing done as well. (And there were several entire industries dependent on professional labs. Portraiture, weddings and forensic photography were almost always done on negs, usually Kodak Vericolor 160 shot at 100 or 125, later split between Portra 160 and Fujicolor Reala; the prints from transparencies were too garish for skin tones.) Think of it as "white balance" for film. One standard 18%-grey exposure with push/pull instructions would do for both souping the negs and printing. Get the grey right, and all of the qualities of the light, including filtration, come in the package (modulo reciprocity failure if you print murals from small or medium format).
[Okay, I'll admit it -- as a photographer, I was an immaculate technician but no sort of an artist. It still bugs me that guys like this guy and David Brooks can make a living at the game without knowing any of the voodoo behind what they do. In our world, it's as if Larry Wall really did create Perl accidentally by falling asleep face-first on his keyboard. It ain't right.]
Then he says that digicams are more expensive, and that film cams and their lenses last forever. The thing is that, in general, the lenses for 35mm cams are generally usable for DSLRs as well. My Pentax DSLR can accept any lens ever made for any Pentax 35mm.
While he does mention workflow as an advantage for digital, I think it deserves greater emphasis. That's not just because there's no need to send out to a lab (or go in your own darkroom with all the chemicals). It's also because of the availability of tools like PhotoShop, allowing us to do all kinds of post-production. Basic editing like exposure correction you could do in the darkroom. But color balance pretty much requires that you shift to digital. And of course there's really fancy editing like removing unwanted objects, changing sharpness and contrast, etc. The extreme flexibility of digital images is a killer feature.
Digital is a great to learn exposure, because you get results so quickly. You can see immediately the effects of over or under exposure.
But film has a much greater latitude than digital. That is, it's very easy to blow out your highlights on a digital camera. Have whites that are completely white and ugly.
With film you get a nice curve on your highlights, and so you can preserve more detail. You also get that thing called grain, and a physical product.
Shooting film costs more, but you can get great results with less computer editing.
But really, there is no great battle. There's a place for both. My own personal preference has been film for black and white, digital for color.
However, the media and the camera that shoots it is a tool. Large format glass plates are not the right tool for a wedding. They are better suited to portraiture or landscapes.