Kodak increases film production capacity to meet commercial, consumer demand
rochesterfirst.com
rochesterfirst.com
35mm cameras are still quite affordable, can’t say I blame people for wanting to shoot film!
Maybe this will help reel in medium and large format film prices, where film really can do unique things that digital sensors still can’t quite capture.
That said I love the Nikon Z I have.
If you want the best of both worlds, Amazon has about a zillion "toy" cameras that print to thermal receipt paper. Designed for children, who love carrying around a camera of their own , but people of all ages enjoy receiving a black-and-white (but surprisingly detailed) photo available within seconds. (The photo is also saved to SD card.) Receipt paper is available everywhere and works out to be about one cent per photo.
You don't have to hyper-process smartphone photos, there are plenty of apps that let you just take a "normal" picture.
And the colors from a CMOS image sensor are far more accurate -- i.e. "authentic" -- than the responses from color film. Every type of film is, well -- opinionated, let's say. It has its own look. Which can be nice, and you can simulate it digitally as well. But it's less "authentic" to reality, not more.
What would it mean, then for one art technology to be more "authentic" than another?
How could you ever say that film images were more authentic than digital images? Would you say watercolors are more authentic than oil, or vice-versa?
I can understand how one filmmaker might capture a more "authentic" experience of a topic in their movie than another, via their knowledge and written script and direction. Someone who deeply understands their subject.
But I fail to understand how shooting on film vs digital would change that (unless you're aiming for a certain historical look).
Used in this context, it's a word that has a fuzzy definition but enough common overlap between everyone's definition that it still works to convey an idea. Its more of a common parlance definition than a strict dictionary one.
Authentic generally means "not fake" -- not a replica, or else experiencing period art using period implements.
E.g. playing retro video games on CRT's is more authentic to what the gaming was actually like in the 80's.
Or playing Bach on period instruments is more authentic to how he would have heard his music performed.
Or making sure you have period-appropriate architecture and props and clothing in a period show.
But the idea that old is inherently more authentic than new is a bizarre idea to me. I would disagree vehemently with that notion -- it seems a kind of harmful prejudice against the present, in favor of the "good old days".
Is that really what people think authenticity is? Just... being old? It seems totally wrong to me, but I'm open to hearing if that really is commonly understood meaning.
I wouldn't say watercolours are more or less authentic than oil paintings, but the two physical media are definitely more authentic than digital painting software which attempts to simulate watercolours and oil paints. One is a simulation, the other is the real thing.
There's also a more intangible aspect to authenticity, often termed authenticity of experience. For film photography, in the context of the article's report on growing film sales, the subject of the experience is the photographer's. Making a photograph with a film camera is a more authentic experience because it is more manual, more hands-on. There are, of course, late-model film cameras with highly sophisticated light meters and fully automatic exposure programs but those aren't what I am referring to.
I am talking about older film cameras such as Leicas or Hasselblads or even large format view cameras. The process of making a photograph with one of these tools is very mechanical, very deliberate, and very far from the software-driven "point & shoot" style of smartphone photography. In many ways, this physicality of process is analogous to the authenticity of experience people get from driving a car with a manual transmission. It makes them feel more connected to the process. It gives them a lot more control and freedom, while also giving them a lot of freedom to make mistakes.
Although we might think the latter a bug rather than a feature, when it comes to art the process of learning is all about making mistakes.
edit: I think the adjective I'm looking for is 'candid', perhaps.
1) They’re overly green because the greens of the RGGB color filter array are more sensitive to light than the other colors. This needs to be corrected with nontrivial auto-white-balance algorithms (not only the green bias needs to be fixed but other scene-dependent factors)
2) The Bayer pattern of the color filter array creates a checkerboard color pattern that needs to be fixed with debayering/demosaicing algorithms - again nontrivial if you don’t want to create artifacts or overblur with simplistic interpolation approaches, and there are even ML algorithms that do this now.
3) Bayer RAWs are linear in photon intensity which is not accurate to how our visual system compresses the high dynamic range. Therefore, various tone mapping algorithms are required to reproduce a natural-looking tone/intensity map of the scene.
4) Small sensors can’t collect enough light and this inhererently results in noisy raw images that need to be denoised. There are a lot of different denoising approaches (including modern that are basically all ML), but care needs to be taken as this is one of the places where it’s easy to generate an overly-processed image.
There are a lot more steps that happen in a typical image processing pipeline, while yes can be tuned in non-ideal ways to produce overly-processed-feeling images, but are at the end of the day necessary if you don’t want something that looks like these: https://images.app.goo.gl/neJCHk5QsVt68XpL7
The main point is actually what you say in #3 -- that they are linear. That's what I mean by being accurate.
Compressing the dynamic range is an artistic choice that will not make an image look like what our eyes see. Film, for example, is more tolerant to overexposure because it has a nonlinear response -- but that's objectively incorrect. Our eyes already compress the dynamic range in a kind of ~logarithmic way. So you don't want to do that on image data, or it ends up being done twice! Which is precisely why bad HDR images can look so fake. Artistically you'll always have to deal with whether you want to compress dynamic range and how.
But my main point stands -- the data coming from CMOS is objectively accurate in a way that film is not. It's linear. It's not compressing range at the top or anything like that, or oversaturating certain colors, etc.
That's very interesting, I wasn't aware of this feature. I Googled and on Samsung smartphones it seems to be called "Motion Photo". I'll check it out later, thanks for the tip.
To go further: Given the failure of apple vision pro, I feel sad about the slowed adoption of Spatial Video. The experience of seeing the spatial video of a loved one who has passed on was incredibly profound for me -- in my specific case a beloved pet -- and I think it would be for many others too. Like live photos, spatial video brings an entirely new dimension and fidelity to my recorded memories, and they are priceless.
I can go to a sports game with a digital camera and come back with 700 images. It would cost hundreds of dollars to do that with film.
It used to be that wedding photographers had to use a medium format camera to shoot group pictures, now you can do it easily with a 35mm digital camera.
Last year I came back from a volleyball game completely defeated. Some of it was my lack of skill but some was a lack of light. Some other photogs recommended DxO software which does digital noise reduction. I can now shoot at ISO 10000 or more and have very little sign of noise.
I had fallen out of a photography for a bit last summer but then went out for a hike planning to get back into it. I realized when I was out there I'd put the wrong lens on. I had planned to use a really good Zeiss lens but instead I had the cheap lens that came with the camera that has the ugliest bokeh of any lens I've seen that isn't a trick lens. I figured with noise reduction I could stop the aperture as much as I could which I found turns "ugly" into "opinionated" and with some
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking
to take back a little of the softness of the small aperture and color grading I developed what I call the "Monkey Run Style".
https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3l6vvs62jlg2g
You could have taken pictures like that with film but would have needed a tripod.
Cool, but there are other use cases. I shoot maybe 10-15 rolls a year, I remember vividly every single time I pressed the shutter for the few dozens shots I truly love. Compared to my backlog of thousands of digital snapshits I never even bother looking at... Hundreds of gigs sleeping somewhere on one of my portable hdds.
Meanwhile my film pics fit in a thick binder, 10 years of pictures, usually looking at the negatives from arms length is enough to identify them and remember when/where I was, with whom, &c.