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Comment by inamberclad | Hacker News Reader

I keep all my negatives because they're the physical artifacts of the experience, but they're really blown out of the water by slide film positives. Instead of the color inverse, the slide film holds the honest-to-god image of whatever you photographed perfectly. No color tricks or prints needed to display it. It will never be as perfect as digital, but it's surprising how close it can get, especially with slides. There's something visceral about holding a piece of film to the light and seeing an exact image projected right back.

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What I appreciate in film is that with the development of technology, we can extract more information out of it, retroactively. This is a big contrast to digital media, where the information is coded as-is, and with increasing accuracy, we can only hope for a more reliable reading of the same thing. For one thing, film's analogue information density enables us to have 4k or even higher renders of the original footage, instead of relying on the versions rendered for their then-current time.

Except CGI, which were often rendered to a specific resolution but transferred to film. Restoration efforts or remasters then have to redo those effects, and often the source of the effects were lost because never archived and shared.

Also, some restoration of old black and white films with AI upscaling try to counteract bad early films or films that degraded.

Indeed, all post-processing will need to be done again, and sometimes they do a questionable job, like in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So there is a lot of challenges with a remaster.

Still, the possibility to extract more information is there, which is a plus for film. With AI, I feel the opposite. I like it that it's fun, but I dislike it that AI creates new information. What's again exciting for me is the possibility of extracting information from a moving picture from movements, and over time. I think these two angles are currently under-utilized, but hold much potential, once we discover more techniques and throw more processing power over the problem.

The same thing will likely be true of raw files, as we get better (and probably machine-learning based) algorithms for decoding those into standard image formats. I wonder what fraction of projects currently preserve their raw files?

At some point you're extrapolating new information, not unpacking encoded existing information.

That would also be true with analog film when you start reaching the film grain size.

I'd be curious about the fidelity floor in analog vs digital optics.

I'd guess(?) that you might be able to do more information reconstruction from analog + lense parameters + film parameters than digital + lense parameters?

Simply by virtue of digital being quantitized at some point.

(But signal processing is far outside my area of expertise, so honestly curious)

https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/ is the current max res standard for bw film. Try getting that from your monochrome Leica

Topaz AI does is with some degree of success, but it starts to fall apart fast. You can use it for creative projects. Nick Knight used it to great effect when he was working on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvaU7rtV9LI but please remember that the final images had a lot of human tweaking and painting, so no, AI will not turn your iPhone snaps into a Dutch master's painiting.

Modern sensors can get more information out of the same rectangle in the image plane than the chemical reaction of a film negative, close to the optical limits of the camera lens. The highest resolution single-frame shots may still be on (large format) film, but only because you can have a film negative that is e.g. 8x10 inches, and sensors that big would be absurdly expensive.

To be honest though, trying to squeeze every bit of information out of the optical system is not usually particularly important, and cameras that you can easily hold up to an eye with your hands are usually more convenient than larger cameras. You can get amazing pictures out of any film SLR or any digital SLR from the past 15 years which you can print up to quite large sizes with sufficient resolution. The medium format cameras pictured in the article, or some current state-of-the-art digital camera, will get you slightly better poster size image, but most photographers aren't making fine-art posters.

Twin-lens reflex cameras, view cameras, pinhole cameras, polaroids, etc. can be fun to take pictures with though, just for the novelty. Every type of camera requires its own process and makes pictures with its own point of view. Square negatives take a different approach to framing compared to rectangular ones and a TLR around your neck is located much lower than face height. With a view camera, you always have a tripod and each picture takes a lot of work, but the camera lets you tilt the lens relative to the film plane, which changes the slice of the field of view in focus. Etc.

Funny you should say it when I just finished developing four rolls of medium format film...

Modern sensors are indeed challenging the resolution of film, but only because we stopped developing scanning technology as well as chemical film formulations. A 60mp full frame sensor is more or less equivalent to a standard colour 35mm film frame, but all those photos taken on sensors with lower resolution are stuck at 24mp, 20mp, 12mp, 10mp, and less. But even a 60mp sensor can't match the resolution of https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/ so we have a long way to go in the digital realm. The largest digital sensor you can buy or (more realistically) rent is a 150mp from Phase One and that's only 6x4.5cm, the smallest medium format frame. Digital can't currently match anything above 6x4.5 and that's what will keep film going for a while.

Another issue with digital is the lack of latitude. It was pitched against colour positive slide film when film was still popular, because that was the pinnacle of colour reproduction (and still is) but it suffers from the same issues as colour positive film--you really have to nail your exposure. However, when you see a well-lit, sharp, properly developed 8x10 colour slide film, you really don't care for digital the amount of detail beats the crap out of the highest rest sensor. I shoot Fuji GFX100 and while it is an excellent camera, it cannot easily do what I can do with my 4x5 camera in terms of movements unless I buy a Cambo Actus.

I really wish camera manufacturers kept making film cameras, because both technologies, digital and film have their uses and there is no need to abandon one for the other, they can happily exist together. We don't argue that watercolour should be ditched for oils or vice versa, why not keep making both digital and film cameras?

Camera manufacturers stopped because the market collapsed, not because the product was inherently bad.

It's somewhat comparable to the markets for slide rules or professional drawing compasses, which have both completely disappeared.

Yes and no. Film photography is an important artistic tool and still has applications in industry and science. Just like we don't say we don't need colour pencils or oil paints anymore now that we have iPads, we should not be ditching film photography. It is possible for it to exist and thrive. Look at the market for film simulations for digital cameras. There is no market for digital sensor simulations.

Drawing compasses are also still important creative tools. But there are tens of thousands (millions?) of excellent used ones in great condition stashed away in people's attics and 99% of professional users switched to CAD, so the market is gone.

> There is no market for digital sensor simulations

Digital sensors strive to neutrally record as much data as possible about the scene. The creative appearance part is done in software later. You're comparing apples to oranges.

There's also no market because simulating a shitty 1998 digital camera with low resolution and JPEG artifacts is not hard to accomplish using Photoshop if you really want.

> Drawing compasses are also still important creative tools. But there are tens of thousands (millions?) of excellent used ones in great condition stashed away in people's attics and 99% of professional users switched to CAD, so the market is gone.

That comparison is not fair. Drawing compasses are less complex in terms of mechanical and optical design and manufacturing than film cameras.

> The creative appearance part is done in software later. You're comparing apples to oranges.

You are right, digital is designed to have no opinionated look. It is sterile. And funnily enough most popular LUTs are simulating old film stocks.

Drawing compasses are precision instruments, quite complex to manufacture and adjust, which involved hundreds of tiny design and manufacturing improvements over several centuries of expert craftsmanship (practical knowledge now lost, except some textual summaries in 19th century books, 20th century catalogs, and scattered patents). You can't buy anything made today that is anywhere close to the quality of professional compasses from the late 19th century, and quite likely never will be able to again in the future.

> It is sterile.

A good Photoshop operator (or with more time and effort and less capability, a good dye transfer printer with a working darkroom, starting from the most "sterile" negative you can imagine) will blow any film stock you like totally out of the water.

You like having a large company's engineers force their creative preferences about color interpretation onto your art. Other artists prefer to deliberately make those choices for themselves.

Neither workflow is inherently better or worse, but some approaches are better suited to some personalities and artistic goals.

That's not an accurate belief. Every film has an engineered characteristic curve; a different look. Which wouldn't happen if they were faithful.

The same thing is true of "raw" digital files; manipulation by the engineers is involved, even if the photographer does nothing.

You’re right of course, which is why Fuji sells both Provia and Velvia. However the slide is still the image. It’s not a perfect reproduction of the scene in front of the lens, but there’s no subjective choices to be made during printing and/or scanning to invert it. Stick it in front of a light and you can see the image with the naked eye just as it exists on the film. I think that’s what OP was getting at.

>there’s no subjective choices to be made during printing and/or scanning

Same could be said about a simple smartphone photo, but they hardly hold the same respect.

I personally get the same feeling, but as hard as I try to define where the "honest analog" ends and the "manipulated uninteresting lies" begins, the more blurry it becomes. At the end of the day, there is no honest representation at all, as many people manipulated the analogue photos as well.

In the end, we still make pictures for our eyes that are more sensitive to green.

Most bird would probably think our pictures are quite unfaithful of what they see, and most bees would argue that the pictures of the flowers we take always clearly lack the UV patterns found on so many flower petals.

So it’s subjective all the way through the stack (Down to the brain’s interpretation of the signals)

It's in this digital age, where I seem to have an infinite roll of film, that I have come to appreciate not the look necessarily of analog but the scarcity of those photos.

I have medium format cameras, a few 35mm, and I take them with me from time to time when on trips for example. There is certainly much more care per shot since I have so few (especially with the medium format that has only 12 shots per roll).

For better or worse, the anticipation, waiting for the film to be processed, is something of course not shared with digital.

And further I linger over the photos more afterward because of how precious they are. And when you capture a "happy accident" — perhaps an interesting, artistic looking light flare in the right place, the film shot becomes even more precious.

“Honest-to-god image” isn’t. All perception is subjective.

It’s more perfect than digital.

Consider this about the original slide: it was physically there with the photographer when the photograph was taken.

It is stained with the chemically-captured energy of the actual light that bounced off the subject, in a form that you can visualise with your naked eye.

If that is not perfect I don’t know what is.

(Yeah, the dynamic range sucks compared to digital. But then some digital cameras suck compared to others)

Slides have three-dimensional form and feel, because light doesn't just pass through the layers of emulsion, it bounces inside. This is also what made dye-transfer prints look so good. Sadly, that print technology is no more.

I shoot digital, and only black and white film, these days.

(I need to build a darkroom so I can print again)

But the thing that really hooked me deep into photography was 6x6 transparencies from a Rolleicord. Velvia, incident light meter, sunny day, job done.

Downvotes on my earlier comment suggest that people haven't had this experience: no matter how great, practical and useful digital is, there is something mesmerising and emotional about a great transparency.

These days I get my visceral buzz from assembling my own simple lenses.

Try 8x10 transparencies. You will be hooked.

One day... building a 4x5 is next.

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