New Tool or New Toy?

[yelvertoft]

Originally Posted by Alex1994

Now that I develop my film it takes me around half an hour from start to finish, and another 20 minutes for scanning. If you want to import some 100 odd photos, sift through, edit the good ones to perfection, it would take me well over an hour.

You're not exactly comparing like with like there though, are you?

Set up darkroom/get out changing bag etc., mix up chemicals, develop 100 photos (at least 3 reels of film), scan 100 negatives, sift through, edit the good scans to perfection, clean up chemicals, wash-up. If that takes you less than 2.5 hours, you're doing well.

[Alex1994]

Aha, in terms of pure volume digital wins. However, digital always brings more volume: for example, over the holidays, I shot 4 rolls of film, or 144 pictures. On the digital camera over the same period of time there are more than 800 photos, and I usually took the OM with me out and about rather than the digi. So it does indeed take me less time to process 4 rolls of film with the following process: prepare darkroom (wait for lights out, shut door), mix chemicals (dilute developer, the rest are ready to use, bring to temperature in the fridge), develop (8 mins for two rolls of film, so 16 for all my holiday pics, add ten minutes for loading). Really the most time consuming part is the scanning, but of course as that happens you can always be doing something else in the background. With the preview scan facility I only do the time-consuming fullres scans on the photos I want.

Now imagine loading 800 piccies off a CF card and running them through a RAW engine, editing, deleting the crappy ones...it is indeed more time consuming. Certainly worth it, but more time consuming.

[Don Hoey]

Alex,
I think you are being a bit sketchy on the total film processing part and the time involved for B&W film.
Developer, Stop and Fixer all require dilution. Temperature stabilisation is not a big issue, but you must be working in a seriously hot environment if you have to put them in the fridge for that , as the normal temperature is 20 deg C.
Development time depending on film and developer choice can be anything between 5 and 20 minutes.
Stop: 30 secs
Fix: around 3 mins
Wash: 10 to 15 mins under a tap, but if you do that by tank refilling and inversions you would probably need 5 mins.
Drying time: Probably a couple of hours in a warm cupboard.
Wash and dry dev tanks and mixing vessels not long but it is something that has to be done.

By contrast digital images are downloaded to a computer in quick order. Anyone with a computer can do it, while not everyone nowadays would be prepared to go though the process to get to a negative.

I do not know how to put quotes in from other posts, but taking this one [ Overall one medium doesn't hinder another, and it is my hope that as digital image capture becomes all the more sophisticated it will help delineate the niche that film has and thus bring more people back to this wonderful alternative way of taking pictures. ]

Now we have a negative we have the choice of home printing for which we need all the kit ( enlarger etc ) or scan it as you do, then process the image on a computer.
At this stage it would be quite reasonable for anyone without darkroom facilities to ask the question " How much better is the scan from negative than a digital camera RAW file ?"

Do not get me wrong here I loved B&W printing, and regarded film development as a necessary chore, similarly all the washing up after a session. Nothing can beat watching an image appear on a sheet of paper in a dev tray. Jim and I had a chat about how cool it would be if there was a program that could simulate that with a digital image on a computer. Maybe there is one.

Once you start down the scanner route then you are digitising the image, and so the scanner as the digitising medium will have a huge impact on your results. Scanners cover a huge price range from simple flat bed type through to really pricey dedicated film scanners. That says that there is a wide range in the quality of the obtainable scan. I did have a play with Dave's Epson V300 and found that a straight photograph of the neg or slide done on a light table with my D2X was far superior to the best that the Epson could achieve. That exercise then begs the question in the 'lets use film context' how much would one have to pay for a scanner that would output say a 35mm frame to at least equal quality obtainable from a 12mp digital slr camera. Link to my thread here http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...ead.php?t=4972

Of course film does have its own look, and in the world of film, that look changes as format changes, so the larger the neg the smoother the tones. Distinctive look can also be applied to lenses which is why I prefer my old fixed focal Ais jobs to the modern zooms that Stevie uses, even though she gains by having autofocus.

If I had the cash to splash, and the inclination, then I might try film again but it would probably be 6x9 or 5x4 as those large negs really are fantastic. Then again I guess the other side of the coin might strike, as the cash involved in setting that lot up would put one in the realms of medium format digital.

Don

[Don Hoey]

Originally Posted by Alex1994

Aha, in terms of pure volume digital wins. However, digital always brings more volume: for example, over the holidays, I shot 4 rolls of film, or 144 pictures. On the digital camera over the same period of time there are more than 800 photos, and I usually took the OM with me out and about rather than the digi.

'Machine gun Kelly' with digital then Alex

Don

[miketoll]

When you have developed the film and finally scanned them into the computer which must take quite some time (let's say the 2.5 hours already suggested as excellent) then you are finally at the same stage as the downloaded RAW files which would take just a few minutes to download, from then on the work flow for the film generated files and the digitally generated ones is essentially the same. Just as you would not manipulate every film image you would not process every digital file either but just select the best ones so again your 'logic' is rather illogical. As for machine gunning with digital it is certainly a temptation but that is, as has been said, down to your self discipline and not down to the medium. By the way film SLR cameras are not necessarily smaller than digital SLR's - my digital Canons are smaller than my EOS 3 and Fd mount cameras. The Olympus OM1 was exceptionally small for it's day compared to any other SLR available at the time, the exception rather than the rule.

[Alex1994]

OK I think I need to explain better what I meant with the phrase 'as digital image capture becomes all the more sophisticated it will help delineate the niche that film has and thus bring more people back to this wonderful alternative way of taking pictures.'

Often when one technology is superseded by another, the 'obsolete' technology still lives on as an alternative, recreational way of doing this. The most well-known example is for personal and small-scale commercial land transportation, where for centuries the norm was horse-drawn transport. Eventually the motor car was invented, and there was a brief period where they were in competition, motor cars being too slow, too expensive, too unreliable. As we know they improved and became the norm - once this happened, horses were used no longer for transport but for recreation. As cars became faster, bigger, more powerful than horses the niche of horse transport was delineated and people used them solely for that reason.

Perhaps a better example is sail vs. steam for shipping - sailboats, despite being inferior to steam and now of course internal combustion is still widely used, but sailing boats and ships remain popular.

With film and digital we're in that transitional stage (as when sail clippers competed with steamships over long-haul trade routes) where the newer medium does not have a decisive advantage over the other (large format film being still almost unbeatable in terms of resolution by digital means) but with time digital will reign supreme. In the meantime as digital gets better people will return to film in order to appreciate the difference.

[Don Hoey]

Well I cannot disagree with what you say there Alex.

Funnily enough I have just been reading an article in last weeks Amateur Photographer on Sally Mann. She is using a wet-plate collodion process. Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collodion_process

So as long as there are films and chemicals around then there will always be those prepared to have a go at something a bit different from the norm.

Reminds me of my entry to 5x4 when I got a De-Vere for nothing. A bit tweeky about lashing out on sheet film and a load of double darkslides at that stage, I set of with some Polariod 54 or 55, an instant negative film, and then contact printed them on paper coated with liquid emulsion so something well different from my norm which was 35mm at the time.

Dave, Jim's dad, still uses film as he does all sorts of different processing effects which he loves, to achieve what would probably be impossible on digital. No real surprise then that Jim is also becoming film mad even though he has a D200.

Writing this also reminds me how I became fascinated with what was becoming achievable with the digital medium in 2002.

Back in the 1990's I was doing publicity photography for the company I worked for, so a secondary activity. Often I was doing a fair bit of of stuff on very tight timelines, and could be in the darkroom until 3 or 4 in the morning doing mailshot 6x4 Cibachrome prints. By 1997 I was looking at photography as just another job, and it lost its appeal as a hobby, and that is when I took up model engineering as a substitute. By 2001 our production engineers were using a digital compact and I was suitably impressed. I then switched from medium format and bought a D100, and at the same time our publicity department got desktop publishing. To all intents and purposes we now had a seriously compressed time line. Not instant, but by comparison with the old days, pretty quick imaging, publishing and distribution. No more burning the midnight oil in the darkroom.

The ability to easily experiment with areas of photography I had not really tried before then took a bit of a hold. So in the end it is digital imaging that brought me back into photography as a hobby. For myself digital has a way to go before it loses any of its shine, but I still appreciate that there are others that enjoy all of the other photographic mediums.

Don

[miketoll]

I too have to agree with what you say in your last post Alex and am glad you enjoy it. If I ever do use film again it will be B&W from start to final print because I like the control that, theoretically at least, allows me to express my 'vision' of the world. I love the freedom of digital and although no doubt it has a long way to go I am happy with what it can achieve now. Oh and I do still very occasionally spin one of my old LP, EP or single records for old times sake (and to enjoy a little old analogue retro) although the 78's have long gone.

[robski]

Where I live there are a few well heeled eccentrics who indulge in the nostalgia of running anything from a simple pony and trap to a 6 horse team and carriage. It is great to see them trotting down the country lanes enjoying themselves. Perfect if we all have all the time in the world to get nowhere slowly. Alex I don’t recall anybody knocking you for enjoying the pleasures of film but as a few have said before you do seem to have to justify this pleasure. Added to this I get the impression rightly or wrongly you like to take a pop at the advances in photographic technology.

I have never quite understood why you scan your negatives given your standpoint on digital. Is this an attempt to have one foot in each camp? I could understand it if you scanned the final non digital print to broadcast your efforts through the digital medium.

Analogue and digital each have a set of problems neither is perfect. Either way it is image processing of one sort or another.

Alas the horse and cart is not the right tool for the job in today’s fast moving environment and the weekend horse and cart enthusiasts jump into their cars during the week. I have to agree that some of the old ways are better and it is very short sighted to rush headlong toward unknown horizons.

You have to remember that many of us older folk cut our teeth on film processing and darkroom technique because there was no alternative. As much as we enjoyed it at the time few of us have a burning desire to return to those days. In my case I feel the advances in photographic technology have taken my photography to a new level compared to my film days. It would also be interesting to find out if the digital version is actually greener than film.

Without doubt development has produced better lens, faster focus systems and improved low light image quality to name a few technology improvements.

Yes use a vintage camera if you want to produce images faithful to that time frame. But why use an inferior optics if you don’t have to?

A good example is to compare wildlife media (film, magazines) from the 60’s & 70’s which was pretty dire to the current outstanding material.

An interesting point about you feeling self conscious when carrying a larger camera. I guess you are used to carrying compact size camera. I had concerns when using long lens and then white long lens. To be honest most folk don’t notice you. From my experience when talking to people in the area it is only the folk with 1D and 500mm F4 that get noticed. Strangely enough for me it is the guys with the old film camera that stand-out as most folk seem to have a dSLR, bridge, digital compact or camera phone.

[miketoll]

Originally Posted by robski

I have never quite understood why you scan your negatives given your standpoint on digital. Is this an attempt to have one foot in each camp? I could understand it if you scanned the final non digital print to broadcast your efforts through the digital medium.

I must say that this has had me wondering too, you are not a true film buff unless you go the whole hog and print in the dark room as well. The film development is largely mechanical, at this point in time the main choice is in the film you used to take the shots and then which developer you choose. The rest is mechanical. The real magic and buzz of film was in the printing where there is enormous skill required to truly master the process and then finally watching the image form before your eyes. Elation or despair! As Rob says you have your feet in both camps at the same time and not truly doing either properly.