The photographers who refuse to abandon traditional film cameras
bbc.com
bbc.com
It all boils down to about one or two stops, but by how people argue about it you'd think one was shooting with a Fisher Price Barbie camera and the other a Large format Hasselblad.
Honestly photography is all about: Skill (practice), luck, and branding in that order. You can improve your "luck" by being at interesting locations or events for your style, but ultimately sometimes you get the shot and sometimes you don't.
I just said people spend an insane amount of time arguing who is a "real" photographer because of that difference. Like "you cannot possibly shoot wedding on APS-C!!!" until it became the most popular format for weddings, and now it is "you cannot possibly shoot wedding with m43!!!"
If you look at digital sensors in a historical perspective, an APS-C camera sold today is better than a full frame camera sold in 2009. Let that sink in. A m43 sensor sold today is better than APS-C sensors sold even in 2011 (by Canon).
So if people aren't "real" photographers today because they have a smaller sensor, then by logical extension everyone who shot digital in 2004-2010 isn't a real photographer either.
And how do you define "better sensor"? I can always find a case where a "crap sensor" beats a "good sensor". As an example, if you're shooting a closeup of a helicopter in flight, the sensor in a $150 point-and-shoot will outperform a $5000+ Canon 1Dx, just because of the shutter design. And the shutter is an integral part of the sensor for CCD chips.
The thing is that you can say this for just about anything where someone can take himself (or herself) a little too seriously, whether it be cameras. coffee, wine, vinyl records, operating systems or programming languages.
Myself, I buy cameras that suit my shooting use cases, and more often than not, a small sensor is perfectly fine. I went from using an APS-C sensor to using 1" and 2/3" sensors, and have been perfectly happy with my transition, although I'm sure some camera purists would scoff at my choices.
If this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend picking up a film camera and giving it a shot. I put together a blog post a few months back describing a full film kit you can put together for under $200, complete with film developing: http://www.ishootfilm.org/blog/2014/10/18/10-the-best-film-c...
And, if you are interested in learning more about developing your own film and making your own prints, I have a list of darkrooms (and photo labs) here: http://www.ishootfilm.org/businesses
[1] Like, 'every day' regular.
[2] I still do. I took a couple hundred photos at a friend's birthday party last night with my digital Fuji X100S.
It isn't confined to products either.
This is a recurring thing– whenever things get faster, there is an artfulness that frees up in being deliberately slow. Pretentious maybe, if you pretend that it's somehow "better". But it can also be really heartfelt.
Ah, the old appeal to tradition.
And besides, it is more than that. We are human beings, our brains are designed to interact with physical objects, and when you move all of the physical objects like CDs, photos, DVDs, etc into an existence of pure information, what you end up missing is that satisfaction of holding a physical object in your hand and experiencing it with all your senses, like we did with jewels or tools centuries ago.
How did digital life cheapen substance? Because I can no longer get on stage and touch the actors in movies? When it comes to photographs, specifically, the difference between the phone screen and a piece of paper is a hell of a lot less than the actual thing in the photograph and the photograph itself. If anything, your argument is against photography as a whole.
Because you can't view digital content without a computer. At a fundamental level, your interaction with it must be mediated with the aid of a third party. Nobody thinks digital lacks utility but it is inherently ephemeral.
If I give you an old photograph to look at, then all you need to look at it are your eyes and whatever light happens to be about. If I hand you an SD card, you need to go and find some sort of computer to stick it into, as well as a source of power for said computer, although I think that latter consideration might cease to matter in a couple of decades.
I have no idea about the how, but it's not hard to understand that bits are fragile and totally dependent on a huge network of many technologies.
I spent last week in Europe looking at ancient buildings and incredible art. Some of this stuff is literally millennia old - but people are still queuing around the block to see it.
If you build something out of atoms, that sucker stays there - not quite forever, but some combinations of atoms can easily outlast many human lifetimes.
Compare that with bits, where file formats, storage media, operating systems, and basic hardware all keep changing and content preservation is hit and miss. (I have video files from the late 1990s that are unplayable now.)
Code is even more fragile, especially if it's heavily OS- or framework-specific.
So people like physical stuff. It can survive without power or a reader device. That makes it more reassuring than a transient digital content blip that's gone before your kids have had a chance to experience it.
My display medium is print even though my capture is digital. I print almost exclusively on large format paper. The output medium is what I want to control in my photographic process.
Sharing your work and discussing it seems far more important than what medium it is created on...
The major one that keeps many artists coming back is medium/large format. It's much much cheaper to get an extremely high resolution photograph on film. Medium format is something like 100 megapixels, and it costs about a dollar per shot after initial expenses. The higher resolution might not matter on monitors, but it makes a huge difference in size limitations and sharpness when printed, and prints are generally the goal for artists.
True large format like 4x5 costs something like $10 a shot depending what film you use (I've heard it can cost a lot less if you shoot cheapo medical b&w), but has insane resolution, measured in gigapixels. You can print it wall-sized, no problem. On top of that, you can only perform the full range of movements such as tilt shift and correcting for some types of perspective distortion on a large format field camera.
This stuff does not matter for photojournalist or weddings or sports, but many professional artists still choose film. They never really stopped. This is in contrast to DJs, the largest supporters of vinyl through the 90s and 00s, who seem to have mostly stopped spinning vinyl unless they're scratching.
As a hobbyist, I appreciate that film makes me think more about each shot. I hate the immediate feedback of digital. I love film's tactile nature. I love turning off the screen and hitting the darkroom. But for me, I agree it's definitely a lifestyle choice.
It is interesting though, that the "analog vs. digital" takes place both in photography and music in both the production and consumption stages. You can record analog or digital and listen to analog or digital sources of the recording. Likewise with photography, you can use a digital or film camera and then you can view the image on a print from a darkroom or on your computer monitor.
It seemed as though you were using the term "hipster" to imply vinyl was more about style and trend. If that is the case, I wouldn't characterize the sonic differences between analog and digital recordings as simply "hipster" differences. There is a quantifiable difference between an analog and digital wave. Not saying one is better than the other but they are different.
Your argument that the differences with film vs. digital seemed to boil down to the economics of the two mediums not any aesthetic difference. That is interesting because off the top of my head I don't think there is any scenario in music recording where it becomes cheaper to go analog. I believe, in general, analog recording is more expensive.
> Your argument that the differences with film vs. digital seemed to boil down to the economics of the two mediums not any aesthetic difference. That is interesting because off the top of my head I don't think there is any scenario in music recording where it becomes cheaper to go analog. I believe, in general, analog recording is more expensive.
You are correct, my apologies. From the producer standpoint, analog recording techniques offer few benefits compared to digital.
I didn't argue from an aesthetic viewpoint because I don't think the aesthetic viewpoint is worth arguing about, in that it's generally a non-productive conversation that ends up in "well I prefer x because it feels better than y". Although, I will argue one particular point: I find that vinyl creates an "equalizing" factor when listening to older music alongside newer music, whereas the increased clarity and lower noise floor of digital makes 50s/60s/earlier recordings sound considerably worse than contemporary recordings. A result of this is that when listening on vinyl, I am better able to look past poor recording quality and make decisions based on artistic quality. This, however, is merely a personal preference.
> It seemed as though you were using the term "hipster" to imply vinyl was more about style and trend. If that is the case, I wouldn't characterize the sonic differences between analog and digital recordings as simply "hipster" differences. There is a quantifiable difference between an analog and digital wave. Not saying one is better than the other but they are different.
I will direct you to this very enlightening page: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29 -- in my view, the only quantifiable differences in audio between vinyl and digital is that vinyl has a worse noise floor, a generally smaller "usable" frequency spectrum (the highs deteriorate pretty quickly), and includes surface noise, hum, rumble, etc.
I think the revival is hipster. I collect vinyl because it's often the only place to find certain genres of music (such as western swing and classic honky-tonk country), but I am generally hesitant to buy a pressing of a contemporary recording. I will do it, though, because I like having the physical product, but that is a stylistic decision more than one based on necessity/actual audio differences.
There are two ways in which shooting film can give objectively better results than shooting digitally. The first is that a Zone System practitioner can wring an exacting exposure from deepest shadows to highest highlights in a single shot. That's especially true when using sheet film (with roll film, you're pretty much stuck with one development for the roll unless you're quick with scissors and can do development by inspection). There are no alignment problems, no interpolation, and no de-ghosting to perform, just a hell of a lot of dodging and burning, note-taking and test prints. Combining Zone System shooting on film with good scans and digital manipulation and printing is, in a sense, getting the best of all worlds for enlargements. And if you shoot colour, it's really the only practical way to use the Zone System, since reciprocity failure between channels meant that wild dodging and burning was always a bit of a science experiment with filters, etc.
The second is contact printing. We are a long, long way from being able to produce digital prints that are even in the same ballpark. Yes, they're tiny and jewel-like (unless you're shooting really large formats like 1114 or 16x20), but they repay a close look with an astonishing detail and depth. Not quite as much as a high quality direct positive (a good Daguerreotype is almost unbelievable, even if you forget that it's probably on the order of 150 years old and was made with a lens that is absolute garbage by modern standards), but more than a little impressive nonetheless. A contact print (assuming the picture has artistic merit at all) can still suck me in for an extended stay in a way that no enlargement, dye sub or giclée can. Who knows? We might even have been there* digitally, except that our printers became literally good enough for most purposes a few years back; only a fanatical devotion to ecstatic experiences with small prints by someone in a position to produce a printer is ever going to change that.
I would love to see some large format contact prints someday. It sounds incredible. An artist in the area was doing tintype portraits and I got to observe. I wish I remembered more of how it looked, but after a 6 second ("manually timed") exposure, the result was beautiful. I've always loved making small enlargement prints of my 35mm negatives, but being able to contact print sounds so valuable.
Do you ever miss the large format bodies, though?
It might be that those that like to stay with film don't like the effect of most digital sensors. If you search on photography forums, plenty of people are displeased by digital look, and if you have a perfect color vision (like I do), it sometimes hurts... There is of course a lot of nostalgia and desire to be different while sticking to film. Technically in most measurable characteristics digital sensors vastly outperform film, yet there are some subtle characteristics we perceive they have hard time to replicate (like microcontrast).
Of course, some digital cameras bring their own "artistic license" to the mix, like Canon is known for pleasant color palette and being very flattering to a model look, and many people then prefer such a look to anything shot on film which looks more realistic.
All these things when earned over years give you a deep respect for the medium.
A cheap amp and speaker with a DSP simulated tube sound being run through it will still sound like a cheap amp and speaker. There may be high end manufacturers making high quality guitar amps with emulation, but I'm unaware of them. They haven't been present in the music store on any occasion I've gone in to select a new amp.
The brands I'm aware of doing "tube emulation" in amps are brands I would never buy, at any cost. Behringer, Line 6 (and this is considered one of the good ones, honestly, and they do sound better than most, but are still cheaply constructed), Tech21 (again, decent, but not high end). All pretty shitty amps that happen to have a modeling DSP stuck in front.
I just did some googling, and it seems Roland is out front on making a reasonably high quality modeling combo amp (GA112). I'd be willing to bet that sounds as good as a real tube amp in the same price range, because the old JC120 combo was a great solid state combo amp...Roland knows how to make a high quality solid state amp, and they were on the front line of amp modeling. Of course, it also costs as much as a real mid-range tube amp, at ~$500.
I suspect there's a lot of cargo culting going on, as well. Guitarist knows their favorite recordings were made with tube amps, so they want a tube amp. So, any manufacturer wanting to make amps that are sought after, will make them tube amps, despite the many negatives to tube amps (requirement to bias them, requirement to periodically replace tubes, temperature sensitivity, etc.).
In short: We're probably buying into a superstitious belief that tube amps sound better than a modeling amp of similar quality. The only problem is we can't readily find many modeling amps of similar quality because they're targeted toward a price-conscious market and so they've cut corners everywhere and not just on the lack of tube preamp and amp circuits.
Not true - wet printing with silver paper is fundamentally unlike digital output.
Also, good restaurants do use wood fired ovens for pizza.
I don't think most people who enjoy shooting on film put it forward as better than digital. That's why you don't hear "a single argument in favour." It's not a question of better or worse.
As for your argument, "digital cameras can do everything film cameras do" is first of all wrong, and second of all irrelevant even if true.
Why wrong? Well, consider chemical crossprocessing, or the effects of expired film, or just the different tones of different types of stock. You might either be uninterested in such things, or think that these effects can be easily reproduced with postprocessing, but even in the latter case it's different, different skills are required, different tools, different mindsets.
Why irrelevant? Because at least some of the perceived value of film comes from the limitations themselves. That's something you can never get at through making the digital tools more advanced—in fact, it just gets worse. For someone who shoots on B&W film, the lack of color can be a feature. Even the small capacity of a film roll can be a boon; for example, it might give me a mindset of scarcity and significance.
There's a restaurant in Stockholm that only uses wood fire. I won't knock it until I've tasted it. And the presence of fire is something in itself, aside from culinary blind tests.
Yes, you will definitely notice this if you shoot alot - composition in B&W images is more about geometry and symmetry and texture, and you look at colours differently two, you are always thinking, that's a vivid contrast in colour but they will be the same tone of grey. Shooting colour with the intent to convert later, is as you say a different mindset.
also, modern digital cameras with EVF allow you to see B&W through the viewfinder.
Personally I'm happy with a 100% digital workflow. In fact these days I take most photos on an iPhone, and leave the SLR at home.
But I also know that film and optical filtering look different..
You can produce an imitation of a film look with digital processing. But it's an imitation. There are subtleties of colour, grain, contrast/brightness response, and differential colour resolution that are very complicated.
And different films respond in different ways. Everyone can see the difference between digital, budget Kodak, and a roll of Fujifilm Velvia.
And if you're shooting medium or large-format, that's a different ballgame again.
Don't believe me? Take some pictures of a fire. The film and digital versions will look completely different.
Is it worth the effort? For snappy snaps, certainly not. Digital kills it for convenience.
But if I worked as high-end commercial landscape, architectural, or art photographer, I'd certainly consider film for at least some projects.
No, I don't think it will convince them to shoot digital, which is a lost cause. I was more specifically arguing about the claim that it is a different art form, which I think is nonsense and pretentious
>Because at least some of the perceived value of film comes from the limitations themselves.
I agree with this and everything else you wrote. But my response to this is to see the advantage in scarcity of shots, and the limiting nature of black and white, and apply those restrictions shooting in digital.
But my response to this is to see the advantage in scarcity of shots, and the limiting nature of black and white, and apply those restrictions shooting in digital.
That has a certain rationality to it, but I don't think it's that simple. You could certainly tell people to just do it, but psychologically, emotionally, cognitively, it's not the same.
I'm not much of a photographer, but I know that with music software that has too many options, I end up confused, stressed, exhausted by possibilities. That's not inherent to the tools, it's just a feature of my limited psyche.
So I appreciate tools that are themselves "restricted." But when I'm actually using such tools—like simple guitar effect pedals, or simple portable recorders—I don't think in terms of restrictions. Because I don't have to think so much about the infinite possibilities of digital stuff at all. I can "get into a zone", kind of like driving a manual car.
When I do photography, I'm attracted to the notion of "contemplative photography," which some people might find weird. But it means among other things that the intimate physical aspects of the equipment are as important as anything. Dealing with a colorful menu display with choices of widescreen, pixel resolutions, presets, etc has a subtle cognitive presence that can be disturbing.
Instruments and tools are "user interfaces" or "user experiences." Sometimes the distinction between analog and digital is fetishized. The distinction between simplicity and complexity seems more important.
If your experience of film photography is sending a roll off and getting an envelope of prints back, then maybe, but if you are developing yourself, the development process involves all sorts of trade-offs of time, temperature, and chemistry, then wet-printing is more of the same, along with literal dodging and burning (do you ever wonder why the Photoshop tools are called that?). It really has very, very little in common with a digital workflow. So your point is one from ignorance.
I think he's kinda right there when he goes on to note that the resulting final image from a digital process can be visually adapted to emulate what can be achieved with film.
But I also think you're right to note that the craft of chemical development is markedly different to digital photo processing (photoshopping or what-have-you) [with or without printing].
It makes me consider typewriters vs. wordprocessors; or a potters hands vs. a jigger [or jolley].
To my mind the road travelled to reach a final artistic presentation can be important even if the evidence of it is not present in the form or image itself.
No, I don't think it will convince them to shoot digital,
Your whole argument is based on a false premise - that people who enjoy shooting film don't like digital. There are lots of us who like doing both. I like shooting 4k digital in film production because it has huge economic advantages. I like shooting still digitally because I can take 200 pictures in an afternoon without switching cards, and go back and check focus and exposure on the stop to know if I've got the shot I wanted or not.
Shooting film isn't about having a limited number of shots or shooting in black and white (although I do prefer black and white, but have no problem doing that from digital sources, plus there are even B&W-only digital cameras that trade away color options for might higher resolution). Instead it forces you to select your shots based on how things look and the much more limited shooting options available, as well as exploring the decidedly nonlinear nature of the film substrate itself. I'm interested in the artifacts that many try to engineer away in pursuit of accuracy, and would much rather use tools where those artifacts are more likely to emerge naturally than start with a perfect image and try to paint them on afterwards.
See, I just don't find that stuff interesting. Lens flare from non-coated lenses, light leaking into badly constructed film cameras, old film which has gone bad, weird colour shifts due to the imperfection of the chemicals used - none of these things contain any profundity for me. My interest is in the subject and the context of the photograph. These "artefacts" that you talk about are no more interesting than tool marks on a sculpture or brush strokes on a painting. It doesn't add any depth to a piece of art just because flaws in the tool are reflected in the final product. Otherwise you could make your sculpture 10 times more meaningful by refusing to use anything but a butterknife to make it.
Just to reinforce on the point of people wanting to continue with what they know and love, we still have people who mostly work on large format film or medium format film. Granted, the perception granted by the lenses for these formats, give you a completely different feeling from that of 35mm and smaller.
One thing film was better at than digital, at least a couple of years ago was dynamic range. You can have the bright sun in your filed of view and the surrounding area are not "blown out" (all highlights)
Like the other posters, I disagree that this is relevant. However, there are no practically affordable large format digital cameras, and the depth of field effects and resolution that you can get from a 4x5 or 8x10 view camera still can't be obtained digitally. (At 2000dpi, 4x5 is 96MP and 8x10 is 320MP. You can get that resolution from a decent consumer flatbed.)
I wrote this to address exactly this intuition about film.
But tl;dr, the experience of shooting film and digital have huge differences and the photos you get at the end are influenced by the process of taking them. They are not just pixels that exist in a vacuum.
If one likes the look of Tri-X, one could shoot digitally and do a lot of post-processing to replicate the look. Or, one could just keep shooting with Tri-X.
But fine-art photography necessarily must set itself apart from the masses. It's about selling a story to fine-art customers. And you can't sell the story of "I bought this camera at Best Buy and I sat in my livingroom pushing pixels in Photoshop on my laptop to make this image."
I know people who are grinding their own lenses. I know people who are making cameras out of box trucks. They are making film negatives the size of posters. You're not going to find a CMOS sensor anywhere near that size, for any price.
That said, I know people who are deliberately glitching their digital cameras to make different types of images. You can't do that with film.
And that's the point. Yes, if your notion of "fine-art photography" is the dime-a-dozen wedding photographer stuff you see in the background of every Medium blog, no, there is no difference between film and digital. But anyone can do that, thus nobody is making money off of photography like that.
We do have a sensor bigger than my iPhone and that thing is a monster.
Your final analogy might be better if it was stated as the difference between bbq over real coals/wood vs a gas grill with propane tank. Yeah they both cook the food. The gas grill is move convenient. But it ain't better.
I would agree that it's not a different art form. However I would strongly disagree that digital photography represents any kind of evolution. Digital photography is simply a new tool, nothing more, nothing less. It has its own aesthetic, process, and result.
The vast majority of people take terrible pictures and are undoubtedly better off with digital. It's quicker, it's cheaper, and it's easier. But when talking about a skilled photographer and printer, the differences between digital and analog become more apparent. Digital looks like digital, and analog looks different.
For your average snapshot, digital probably yields better average results. But in my opinion, I've not seen a gallery quality digital print that I thought matched the quality of the best analog prints. Digital looks strange to me, especially at larger sizes. (I think it might have something to do with the way edges get rendered.) That's just my subjective taste, others might prefer digital. I certainly don't hate digital, I just don't like it as much.
Regardless, I think the important point is that photography is an aesthetic art form, and therefore you are going to have people that prefer one or the other aesthetic. It's not a question of good or bad, they're just different. To say that "There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better" I think misses the ultimate point. The thing that digital hasn't been able to do, is look like analog.
P.S. Regarding your specious analogy of wood fire versus gas flame, if you can't tell the delicious, smokey difference between grilling over a wood fire versus a gas grill then I would suggest that your obsession with ease of use is just as ridiculous as someone obsessed with nostalgia.
Fwiw, there are certainly things that are extremely difficult to replicate digitally. Solarisation is one of them. (Don't get hung up on the camera bit. There is more to the darkroom than just a primitive analogue Photoshop.)
Yes there is. Film cameras can force you to take into account the additional limitations you have when you go about taking your photographs. If you're practising an art form, that is part of your art.
film and digital photography are two almost identical processes to produce the same end result.
End result? Sure, that's one part of the art. One part. It's an important part, but if you're talking about art, it's by no means all there is.
The interesting challenge will be that there is a certain level of industry required to support the manufacture of base film stock, and making the chemicals to develop it. As the number of users goes down, the base cost of that development is spread across fewer users (higher per user cost) and at some point nobody is will willing to pay the full cost of supporting the industry. It is, by definition, the equivalent of the power curve in flight, higher prices lead to fewer users, which leads to higher prices, until you are down to 1 user paying for all the costs. Sometimes you can recover if new manufactures can come in at a lower level but without that you lose the ability to support many ways in which film was used.
http://www.phonographcylinders.com/custom-made-phonograph-cy...
So early technology, like charcoal :-), easy to make the pre-cursors. And for some silver halide films that is still true (19th century tech). But as you get to things that got their start in the 20th century and required a bunch of composite things to be in place in order to exist, those things may end up outside of the range of manufacturability (at a market making price).
It will be interesting to see the things that fall out from that.
Regardless, probably one of the coolest aspects of analog photography is the fact that you can make all your own materials (e.g. pinhole camera, albumen print, etc.) There are also photography companies that cater to the DIY/maker crowd. Photographers Formulary is a great place to get pretty much everything you need for film developing and printing. http://stores.photoformulary.com/
For the hardcore photography geeks, two good reference books.
"The Film Developing Cookbook" http://www.amazon.com/Film-Developing-Cookbook-Darkroom-Vol/...
"The Darkroom Cookbook" http://www.amazon.com/Darkroom-Cookbook-Steve-Anchell/dp/024...
The wedding photographers shoot digital, because the market doesn't really want fine-art photos. They want whatever the current fashion is, and that's usually lots and lots of photos on a thumbdrive these days.
The fine art photographers are not only not shooting digital, they're shooting you-can't-even-buy-it analog. The only fine-art photographers I know who are actually making money selling their photography have all built their own cameras and are doing extremely niche stuff. They built the camera, they make the film, they do their own developing. The only thing they didn't make was the glass of the lens, practically.
Actually, scratch that, I just got tapped by one of them asking me if I knew anything about making lenses from scratch, so clearly the market is going there (I'm a sort of consulting scientist for people who know me).
And that's basically the art world in general. There are only two ways to make money from art: either mass-produce something that everyone can and will want to own, or make something so complex, so intricate, so massive that you can make your living for the year off of one sale. One is a monumental effort of production and marketing, the other is a monumental effort of production and marketing.
When anyone can be an artist, you have to go to extremes to set yourself apart.
Btw, if you had never seen photos made on a large format camera, find a gallery near you, and go see some prints. I'm yet to see a digital equivalent of that.
You can get large format scanner backs, but they take time to scan.
Sheet film is a huge cheap disposable sensor, just add a scanner and you are done if you want digital.
Flatbeds for large format are just crazy hard. Newton rings are almost impossible to get rid of. Not to mention all the film processing.
I'm actually thinking of making a scanning back from a scanner. You basically remove the light, and put it on the back of the large format camera.
That's true. But you can sometimes assembly lots of small chips into one larger sensor and solve a lot of the issues doing that causes in software after the fact.
I suspect it doesn't exist because the market is tiny and the R&D too expensive, rather than it being an inherent problem with the tech' itself.
I just don't think enough people, even pros, would spend $20K+ on one of these to justify the engineering, software, and marketing that went into it (and the level or risk).
> You can get large format scanner backs, but they take time to scan.
So recreating the original experience of large format then? :)
Why have you changed it? In what way do you think this title is more informative?
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Fv3cGSw.png
It's still less informative.