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 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.
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...