Is Digital REALLY Better than Film Part 2

Last time I discussed some reasons why shooting and printing with film can offer tangible advantages. Sometimes digital ISN'T as good as film.

Now it's time to get real. I contend that for almost ALL of us, almost all of the time, digital really is the way to go.

We all like to talk about "the old days". I, myself, am one of the worst offenders. I miss my Kodachrome slides and the excitement of receiving the "little yellow boxes". I miss the wonderful old cameras, the wonderful old darkrooms. I miss the mystique, the ceremony and the ALCHEMY of it all. Damn it. I miss the MAGIC. But perhaps what I really miss are the times that went with it. Maybe I just miss my youth or the traditional skill set.

"Here am I. I spend a lifetime learning the craft of traditional film photography. Along comes digital and any idiot with a computer, after five minutes on "Photoshop Elements", is better at image making than I am. My life has no MEANING anymore. It is just not fair."

Ring a bell? Be honest. Yes I thought so.

There are people that will tell you that film derived prints just plain LOOK better. They'll tell you that the COLOUR is better - or more natural or more vivid or more romantic or somehow less clinical. The fact is that many old diehards don't WANT digital images to be better, just like they didn't want flat screen TVs to be better than CRT screens or CDs to be better than vinyl records or jet planes to be better than propeller ones or "talkies" to be better than silent movies.

Someday we'll be hearing how petrol engined cars were better than these new fangled hydrogen fuel cell ones. 2D television sets were better than 3D ones or 3D with the old glasses was actually better than these "new" spectacle free 3D ones. etcetera, etcetera, etcetera yawn.

Lets pollute this discussion with some hard facts.

Colour fim emulsions were fixed to a particular colour temperature totally ignoring the fact that effective white balance changes with the seasons, the time of day, the atmospheric conditions and whether I had porridge or corn flakes for my breakfast. When we wax lyrical about the glory days of Fujichrome Velvia or Ansco or Kodachrome II, we ignore the fact that these films could only ever give an approximately accurate colour balance for any given circumstance. In reality, what we REALLY miss is one particular flavour of visual DISTORTION that one brand of film might once have offered compared with another.

The fact is that with digital imaging we can ultimately have any colour we want. It can be accurate or saturated or warm or cold or rosy or tinted or none of the above ... or any combination of the above or any graduated VARIATION of the above.

Furthermore the effective ASA rating of film would vary as rolls of film got older. We could "nail" the exposure settings for a particular shot only to EVENTUALLY find that dated emulsions would underexpose the picture. If a particular roll of film was loaded into our camera, we were stuck with the characteristics of that emulsion until the roll was used up - fast or slow, fine or grainy, warm or cold, daylight or tungsten light balanced, colour or black & white. People would wander around with multipe cameras in great discomfort just in case one needed to shoot with a film having different features.

Using digital, accurate sensitivity settings and any OTHER image characteristics can be varied between individual shots and the eventual result previewed on the spot. Shot one can be a superfast grainy black and white documentary style image. Shot two might be an exquisitely fine grained still life image. Shot three can be a fast moving glimpse of a championship volleyball match etc etc.

How can the results from film POSSIBLY be better - when with digital imaging, the results can be anything we WANT or NEED them to be?

In the end, the proof of a pudding is in the eating. Every kind of photographer has better RESULTS under digital. Anyone can see it. What can possibly be better about a former system under which the final results WEREN'T as good.

Back when I was young I remember that every time I pressed the shutter release it represented 20 cents which was effectively the per unit cost of colour transparencies (film plus processing). I rationed my shooting by what I could afford. How can this situation POSSIBLY have produced a better result than one in which I can go on shooting from any angle, at any exposure etc without restriction?

At the end of the day, under digital, we KNOW we have the shot we want, or at least a shot close ENOUGH to what we want, prior to finishing the job back at the computer.

Digital imaging has given us so many advantages, it sometimes makes we wonder how we managed without it. Spoiled aren't we?

Is Digital REALLY better than Film? Part 1

There was a time - quite a long time actually - during which traditional photographers refused to give up a life time of acquired skill and shift to digital capture. For some years it was possible to argue that the ultimate quality of film was superior to digital. There are STILL many who argue that way.

To be sure, at a purely technical level, it cannot be denied that (all other things being equal) the ultimate resolution of film for large prints is better than digital. Given the inherent resolution prowess of medium to large format film as compared to (say) APS-C or even "full frame" 35mm sensors, the advantage is even greater. Even when the limits of resolution are reached, analogue prints with blurry edges and details still look FAR better than pixelated digital versions of the same image. Wouldn't you agree?

Likewise under low light, film grain always looks better than digital noise. This may only be due to the fact that 180 years of tradition makes it easier for us to ACCEPT the look of film grain but it still looks better to me. I don't care what anyone says. We are so accepting of film grain that there are even filters in image processing software which SIMULATE film grain with which we can add "character" and apparent "authenticity" to documentary style monochrome digital images.

It ALSO cannot be denied that in the case of slow to medium sensitivity, film offers better inherent dynamic range. The scourge of digital capture must surely be the ease with which highlights and shadows are reduced to featureless white or total black with all detail lost forever. Admittedly, there are strategies for remediating this problem, RAW capture included, but given that most people shoot jpeg images and utilise NO dynamic range enhancement strategies, film was and remains a better choice in this regard.

It certainly seems clear that the marketplace attributes a higher intrinsic value to film and its analogue prints. Even superb digital prints pale in significance compared to less technically perfect ones produced by traditional means.

In some cases the higher prices are for rational reasons. Traditional prints are inherently rarer than digital ones because (generally) one has to have the original negative before a print can be produced. Consequently a traditional print has more the feel of an "original" than a digital version which (it seems) is so much more readily copied. For a long while the longevity of prints produced by digital means was questionable. Not so long ago digital prints could be expected to start fading within weeks of their having been created. Even NOW it has to be conceded that digital prints have not been around long enough to have TRULY stood the test of time. On the other hand we have analogue prints which are almost as old as photography itself - still on display, still looking good.

Some of the reasons are perhaps less strictly rational but are just as valid. If I buy a new analogue print (perhaps one of a limited release) produced from film by entirely traditional means, I seem to have something special - something which connects me to the great photographic artists of the past whose skilled hands produced similar items using almost identical materials, chemicals and techniques. Indeed when one purchases a print of an image shot last week on a "famous name" German camera made in 1964, with a film emulsion first produced in 1930 using a chemical first employed in 1905 with an actual enlarger manufactured in 1941, my purchase offers me an antiquity and provenance which cannot be compared with the same picture shot on the latest digital camera and run off on a brand new digital printer tethered to my computer.

Conclusions that "film is dead" may be very much premature. For serious professional and enthusiast fine arts photography, film is NOW very much the medium of choice. Traditional film producers who contemplated the total abandonment of that technology have begun life anew. Film will never be produced in the stupendous quantities that it once was but companies like Agfa, Ilford and even Kodak have found a worthwhile niche market producing a select range of emulsions in a number of sizes along with a comprehensive range of chemicals, papers and darkroom kit.

Careless assertions that digital is inherently better than film need further consideration ... next time.

The Entry Level Shooter Part 3

Two articles ago I described how I grew up with 35mm film SLRs. They were relatively unsophisticated devices back then but curiously, many great, legendary photographers produced many memorable images with nothing more. How many great National Geographic articles did we read, festooned with pictures of exotic people and places shot by mostly manual Nikon Fs and the like?

These cameras couldn't shoot at 7 frames per second, they didn't have face recognition. They didn't boast ultra high definition LCD screens, live view, auto focus, stabilisation, automatic ISO, movie files, wifi connection, auto-bracketing, noise reduction circuitry, red-eye correction, D-lighting blah blah blah ... and yet great pictures were made, week in and week out, by working photographers across the world.

What is more, the lenses that such photographers worked with were relatively primitive. Computer aided design technology and white hot manufacturer competition have brought us lenses, in recent years, which are far and away superior to anything which camera jockeys of the 60s and 70s ever had access to. Even today's so called "kit" lenses, (while admittedly suffering from light construction) are astonishingly good. When a token amount of skill is employed in their ACTUAL USE, it is discovered that they are often the optical equal of advanced pro models dating from, say, fifteen years ago.

How on EARTH can one explain the generations of great pictures which have adorned the pages of National Geographic, Life Magazine, Cosmopolitan, the New York Times or the Saturday Evening Post when such pictures were shot by the simple featureless cameras of bygone days. How did serious photographers ever function without the legion of features and gimmicks which modern marketing departments INSIST that we have to have? Bit of a mystery isn't it?

One can buy an "entry level" Nikon D3100 or a Canon EOS 1100D SLR for maybe $600 or so which is a quarter of the price of a D700 or an EIGHTH the price of a D3s and yet it can be argued that these humble, much despised "entry level" devices are far and away superior image capturing instruments than anything possessed by the great photographers of past eras. Somehow, however, modern entry level SLRs are not good enough for the likes of you and me. We must spend more ... presumably for the continued survival of Nikon and Canon marketing team executives! Let's be kind. After all these people have swank suburban residences and BMW dealerships to support.

Such bottom of the line SLRs offer clean resolving power which would have been envied by the owners of top pro cameras only five years ago. They offer rapid speed of operation, nice bright viewfinders, big clear viewing screens and a broad selection of the essential digital features and facilities. They are light, convenient to carry, fun and simple to use and offer total, accurate manual control. Under all but truly exceptional conditions, the ultimate image quality from such cameras is effectively equal to anything available.

"Whoa! Hold on there! Just a minute. Now you've overstepped the mark, Hobbs. Everybody knows that the pictures from a D3100 can't possibly compete with those from say a nice expensive D300s for example. After all I just shelled out for a D300s and I sure as hell don't want to have to swallow the idea that some jerk with a D3100 can get pictures just as good as mine!!"

Now this is where I have to disappoint a whole lot of people. Recently as part of their comprehenive camera review articles, DPreview.com started including a page which enabled the picture quality from ANY of the cameras which they had formerly reviewed, to be compared with the results from the model currently under examination. You can move the cursor around the display screen to make 100% enlarged comparisons using any part of a comprehensively arranged sample scene. You can vary the ISO settings. You can look at RAW results AND jpeg. Not much goes unrevealed - let me assure you. It enables me to make an outrageous statement here.

Given that 90% or more of photography is generally done using ISO settings 100 to 1600 I think it is legitimate to concentrate on comparisons made under those conditions. Accordingly, anybody who goes to the DPreview site and does the exercise can quickly see for themselves that the quality of the pictures produced by our entry-level brigade compares well with almost ANYTHING regardless of price. Most people just don't seem to understand that simple fact.

Consider the following:

Most great pictures are shot by people who use cameras. I don't care HOW good a camera you own at home in the cupboard. If you don't have it with you when the picture presents itself it might as well be a box brownie that you couldn't find film for. My Nikon D40 is light enough for me to carry almost anywhere I go - just in case. Try carrying a HEAVY camera on spec. You don't do it do you? I didn't think so

A lot of the best pictures are to be found in out-of-the-way, hard-to-get-to places. Sometimes the conditions are difficult and we are worried about damaging our expensive cameras. My entry level camera didn't cost very much. If I drop a D700 off a cliff, its gone and I shall probably have to buy another at great relative expense. I can drop FOUR entry level SLRs off FOUR cliffs before I am up for the same cost. Accordingly I can afford to take a few more risks, go to a few more dicey places and get a whole lot of great pictures I probably would NOT have got if I'd been too worried about my camera.

Expensive cameras ARE expensive, very often because they bristle with features which marketing departments tell us we MUST have. I don't know about you but 99% of the time the only features I need to know about are the auto-focus, the shutter speed and aperture controls, the exposure compensation, the ISO adjustments and the shutter release button ..... pretty much like the old film SLRs I was brought up with. Sometimes I go to try out some totally superfluous new fangled gim .. er .. feature. I learn to use it but might not have need of it for another 12 months. I have to get out the manual because I've forgotten how the feature works. Meanwhile the picture I was after goes away. What - I ask you - was the point of having the feature in the first place?

Expensive cameras are designed to take more punishment and last a lot longer than entry level cameras. Again I am led to ask what the point of that is. If you are a working professional you need for the camera not to let you down at critcal moments. That is fair enough, but as I said last time, I am addressing myself to enthusiasts who are usually able to work without abusing their equipment. My entry level camera has never let me down and I have been using it heavily for four years or more now.

I might also suggest that having an expensive camera designed to last a moderate enthusiast user for some seven years or more has little point in an environment in which technical advances make it desirable to update equipment much more frequently. Of course, if you didn't spend so much on the camera in the first place, it is much less wasteful to update more frequently. Wouldn't it be nice to always have the leatest gear without alarming the bank manager?

Wouldn't it be nice to have the right lens for every purpose? If you didn't spend too much on a needlessly expensive body, you can probably afford to do just that ... and having the right lens for the shot WILL MOST ASSUREDLY make a noticeable difference to the quality of your pictures. Once you have got the glass, you will probably never need to buy it again. Am I missing something vital in this discussion?

Look. If you are an enthusiast photographer (rather than a workaday pro) there are many many reasons why you MAY be better off using "entry level" SLRs in preference to overly expensive models. I have only mentioned a few.

Before closing this article I'd just like to address ONE last point. There is a suggestion from some quarters that the less skill and experience a photographer has, the more he/she needs an expensive camera to somehow compensate. This makes no sense to me at all. If I have learned one thing over the last forty odd years it is this. NOTHING makes a bigger difference to picture quality than one's ability to do the basic things well. Anything which makes the basic things harder will tend to HARM the quality of one's pictures - not the other way around. One reason why I DON'T use expensive, complicated cameras is that they are generally too big, too heavy and too fiddly for me to use as quickly or as well as a smaller, simpler, less demanding camera. It is as simple as that ... but it's entirely possible that all of that is a problem peculiar to me.

Anyway for right or for wrong the foregoing are the reasons why I believe that most mere enthusiast photographers, like me (and possibly you), might easily be better off using nominally "entry level" equipment in preference to so-called professional kit. Before you shoot me, it is just my personal opinion. If you have a different view, feel free to express it.