Film vs Digital

[freethefly 6]

I, myself, am a traditionalist and prefer film although I am looking at getting a Pentax ist. I am really impressed with this camera. It is extremly fast so there is no lapse time for the camera to reload. Interchangeable lens, I can use all of my lenes on it.
I have never been impressed with digital with the exception the Nikon D1. The $4000.00 price tag is a bit high compared to the Pentax ist for $1200.00. Mind you this is body only. The camera seems to do all that the Nikon does except clean out your bank account.

"...And once you're gone, you can't come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black."
Neil Young

[quade 3]

At this point, digital isn't the wave of the future; it's now. For 99% of everything, film is simply obsolete.

Further, when you take costs into consideration, please include all of your variable costs as well, such as film and processing. Over a -very- short period of time, digital can be much more cost effective.

Also, take into consideration the value of time. With digital, you can take your photo and deliver product to your client much, much faster than you could ever hope to with any film, let alone medium format film such as a Pentax 645.

EVERY pro photographer I know (and these are guys doing magazine ads for huge companies) still keeps their film cameras around, but they almost exclusively shoot digital.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[freethefly 6]

My specialty has been in the area of portrait photography and darkroom manipulation. I am afraid, sadly, that the art form of traditional photography and darkroom photography is all but gone as digital is what gets an image on the market in nano seconds. When I admire a portrait produced from light and silver I feel a true convayence of what the photographer was viewing. I shoot almost exclusively B/W and do all of my own darkroom work. I guess I am just a relic and cannot release the romantics of traditional B/W portrait photography.
I should start stockpiling roll film before it is washed away on a tide to the past.

"...And once you're gone, you can't come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black."
Neil Young

[murrays 0]

I bought my first slr in 1975. I have boxes of negatives and slides I can basically do nothing with unless I spend weeks scanning. And, after I scan I spend hours in Photoshop getting rid of dust, scratches, etc.

One of our local jumpers just bought himself a Digital Rebel. He hasn't done much photography before. He's been blasting off tons of shots learning the camera functions...but also learning composition and creativity and this isn't costing him a ton of money in processing fees.

His images will never collect dust or get scratched. I wish I was starting photography with a digital camera.

Digital is the only way to go. Just back everything up regularly.

--
Murray

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

[quade 3]

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When I admire a portrait produced from light and silver I feel a true convayence of what the photographer was viewing.

You're an artist and a romantic.

While that's fine, there's something to be said for practicality as well.

I don't think film, high-quality, professional film, is going to die soon, but neither would I be surprised if it did. The consumer market for film is pretty bleak. I wouldn't give that another five years.

The interesting side of this is that while there may be more images shot, it's entirely possible that long term records of events will simply vanish. Ok, maybe that's a bit overly dramatic, but consider this. We can pick up a physical photo today taken a hundred years ago and it's possible to view the image without any sort of device or software. No real "backup" is required since it's a nonvolatile medium and unless a disaster strikes; fire, flood, what have you, the image is probably going to be around for another hundred years.

The same can not be said of digital images because we will have to continue to re-archive the images in new formats; CDs to DVDs to ??? as time goes on in order to continue to have viable and viewable images.

So . . . for purely historical reasons, there is a case to be made for film.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[freethefly 6]

I attended a siminar put on by Nikon some years back when they introduced the D1 and its related equipment such as software and printer. The siminar was to show the advantage of digital portraits over film. The only advantage that I could see was time. Your customer would have to wait but minutes for a print. The quality was superb up to a certian point. Yet the concern of most was archiving. Digital archived images do in fact degrade over time whether they are kept on a hard drive or a disk, just as you mentioned.
My film is kept in acid free film files. Never touched by bare fingers. They will last till the end of time with virtually no degradation. Film is only as good as you handle it.
I wonder if an Ansel Adams photo of El Capitian or Edward S. Curtis's portrait of Geronimo would convey the emotion of the moment had they used digital?
Yet I can most clearly see where using the digital format in skydiving does have the upperhand to using film. You can hand a tandem customer a CD/DVD within 30 minutes after landing. The disadvantage to handing out, (what are basically your negatives), a CD of still images is that you lose your reprint sales. This is mostly a concern of portrait and wedding photographer as it is the bread and butter and does not seem to be of any concern to freefall still photographers that I have observed.
I am very interested in hearing any input on 35mm digital photography relating to skydiving. Any pro's or con's will be appreciated.

"...And once you're gone, you can't come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black."
Neil Young

[quade 3]

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The disadvantage to handing out, (what are basically your negatives), a CD of still images is that you lose your reprint sales. This is mostly a concern of portrait and wedding photographer as it is the bread and butter and does not seem to be of any concern to freefall still photographers that I have observed.

But so can anyone with a scanner. It's not that hard. The image won't be "perfect" but remember that for years we used to send 8x10 glossies into magazines for publication purposes. Today, the same (and also higher) quality can be obtained by a desktop scanner.

Our property rights are in danger no matter what type of original image you use.

As for freefall photographers and their tendancy to give it away . . . well, yeah, supply and demand kinda working against us there.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[JayhawkJumper 0]

I always thought I would prefer film, until the 10D came out. After that, I will never go back. I have taken some beautiful pictures in the highlands of Scotland which definately convey the same beauty that film would have. They aren't as high quality as ansel adams photos, but they were shot on a 35 sized digital camera, if they would have been captured using an 8x10 view camera with a digital back, they would be. The only current drawback to digital vs. film is that digital doesn't have the same exposure latitude that digital does. This is why cinematographers are resisting 24p and digital capture. Whites blow out much more easily, and the shadow detail isn't quite what film is, but its really close.

[skydance1954 0]

I am currently using film, and due to many financial constraints (mortgage, cars, kids in school, etc.) I find it very hard to keep the still camera on my helmet unless there's a paying customer willing to take the shots. The predictable result of this is that I see lots of really neat things that, if I had the camera on board, I might be able to capture.

Of course, as every film photographer knows, you'll shoot 1,000 pictures before you get that one gem.

So, instead of spending the money on extra rolls of film, I'm saving it for the digital. I agree that you can't get the warmth of film that the really dedicated pro's use. But hey, NONE of us are Ansel Adams when we are in the sky. We take a different kind of picture.

I think that I could significantly increase my potential market with a digital, but by doing it, hopefully smarter, by only releasing the gems without having the expense of printing all those rejects.

Mike Ashley
D-18460
Canadian A-666

[quade 3]

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The only current drawback to digital vs. film is that digital doesn't have the same exposure latitude that digital does. This is why cinematographers are resisting 24p and digital capture. Whites blow out much more easily, and the shadow detail isn't quite what film is, but its really close.

This simply isn't the case. Used to be, but certainly not now.

There -are- some things that motion picture film can do that currently HD can not, most notably slo-mo with a wide variation of frame rates, but even that's being worked on. We had a demo about a year ago of a HDTV camera that could shoot at 300 fps. Really incredible slo-mo capabilities, but the thing simply wasn't interchangable with the regular Sony HDTV 24p cameras, so . . . there ya go.

-Personally- I think the picture quality of the Sony HD 24p production cameras are -better- in -every way- compared to 35mm motion picture film. But you might not wanna take my word for it, what you might wanna do is take a gander at Star Wars Episode 1 and see if you can spot which scenes were film with 35mm motion picture film and which were shot with HD 24p. Then take another gander at Episode 2. The entire thing was shot in HD 24p. I defy you to find -anything- wrong with the "look" of it.

What was truly breath taking was seeing these films in a DLP theater. OMG!

Anyway, we digress . . .

Even the imagers on my good old D60 have an exposure latitude in excess of most consumer film. Even with a fairly high-quality film scanner, the D60 images are better in every way than conventional 35mm print -or- slide film. You really would have to go up to medium format before there is an advantage in image quality, but even at that, it's pretty much only going to be in resolution and not in exposure latitude.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[CaTo 0]

I am still using film. Well, actually slides (dia). Not only because the camera itself is lighter, but also because of scanned slides still give me a much higher resolution then any (affordable) digital camera can give me: over 24 Mpixels.
And yes, I know people have to wait for a couple of day's to see the result, but I do not get complaints.... :-)

Caren

[kelpdiver 2]

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-Personally- I think the picture quality of the Sony HD 24p production cameras are -better- in -every way- compared to 35mm motion picture film. But you might not wanna take my word for it, what you might wanna do is take a gander at Star Wars Episode 1 and see if you can spot which scenes were film with 35mm motion picture film and which were shot with HD 24p. Then take another gander at Episode 2. The entire thing was shot in HD 24p. I defy you to find -anything- wrong with the "look" of it.

I thought many scenes (in particular the night car chase sequence) reminded me of playing a computer game, not watching a real image.

That could be Lucas's obsession with making the backgrounds louder than a Vegas skyline, but it was definitely disappointing to me. Is HD resolution really enough for a big movie theater? It's appealing for home use, but 720p (what is 24p?) doesn't seem like it should do better than movie film.

[quade 3]

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It's appealing for home use, but 720p (what is 24p?) doesn't seem like it should do better than movie film.

The 24p denotes 24 frames per second progressive scan. 1920 pixels wide x 1080 pixels high.

Yeah, that's plenty good enough for a movie theater.

Also see; http://millimeter.com/mag/video_exclusive_lucas_pov/

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[SabreDave 0]

The whole Mega-pixel thing just doesn't really matter anymore, seriously. I have owned a D1H for over 2 years now and I love it. It is only 2.74 MP yet I can get 100MB images out of it! How? Well let me explain. INTERPOLATION!! Lossless interpolation to be exact. This can be achieved through software including Photoshop 6.0 and higher.
Programs like S-Spline work magic. My files come out of the D1H as 4x6 at 300 dpi, say 7 or 8 Megs. I can take my image drop it in the program at 4x6-300dpi and type in 20x30 at 400 dpi and chug chug chug it goes until it brings up the resolution to the desired level It can take 10-15 minutes to make very large changes and there are things you need to know such as turning off the sharpening in the camera which should never under any circumstances be set to anything but NONE.blah, blah..... anyway, I make a living at photography and have sold images to magazines that wouldn't believe me when I said they were digi files but they bought them anyway.
www.interpolatethis.com has all the info and explains this stuff quite well. They also have a downloadable action for Photoshop to interpolate. And when using Photoshop to interpolate never go more than 10% at a time.
One more thing, the D1H although an amazing camera is just way too heavy to mount unless you are a freak;)

SabreDave

[kelpdiver 2]

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It's appealing for home use, but 720p (what is 24p?) doesn't seem like it should do better than movie film.

The 24p denotes 24 frames per second progressive scan. 1920 pixels wide x 1080 pixels high.

Yeah, that's plenty good enough for a movie theater.

So we're still only talking 1080P. My 4 year old negative scanner can get 4300x2800 off 35mm, and a good slide is capable of much more than that.

I don't doubt that staying all digital makes the digital effects editing immensely better and cheaper, but I'm not convinced the resolution is good enough for the big screen. I recall watching Disney's Mulan as the horde of invaders came charging down the glacier and the amount of sharp detail was rather spectacular.

Hopefully progress will lead on to bigger and better in the next generation since removing film cannisters from the equation will pay off big for movie theaters.

[AndyMan 7]

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I don't doubt that staying all digital makes the digital effects editing immensely better and cheaper, but I'm not convinced the resolution is good enough for the big screen. I recall watching Disney's Mulan as the horde of invaders came charging down the glacier and the amount of sharp detail was rather spectacular.

By the same token, Gandolph storming into Helms Deep in Return of the King is equally impressive, if not more. Of course, it was digital.

My wife (dz.com username craichead) runs the rights/repro division of the Chicago Historical Society, and is a film photographer and silver purist. I'm a geek who went digital for both stills and video.[1] If the two of us manage to get along and admire each others work, surely the rest of the you can, too.


[1] I'm still threatening to jump our Graflex Speed Graphics. Craichead won't let me, so I'll have to do it when she's away. She'll never suspect a thing...

-Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[quade 3]

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So we're still only talking 1080P. My 4 year old negative scanner can get 4300x2800 off 35mm, and a good slide is capable of much more than that.

At 4300x2800 from a 35mm neg, you're running over the limits of actual resolution of the film (which, as it turns out, is a good thing). It's kinda technical, but the actual resolution you're getting out of the film is a little less than half of that. You might want to Google "Nyquist's Sampling Theorem".

Beyond that, you half to remember that motion picutre resolution can be somewhat lower that you'd need for a still image because of persistance of vision. That's why you can get away with such crappy resolution on a regular TV; it fools the eye.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[Zee 0]

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[[1] I'm still threatening to jump our Graflex Speed Graphics. Craichead won't let me, so I'll have to do it when she's away. She'll never suspect a thing...

-Am

That would be pretty cool to watch - It would be a bitch to replace the flash bulbs in freefall though
Peace,
Z

Action©Sports

[murrays 0]

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[1] I'm still threatening to jump our Graflex Speed Graphics. Craichead won't let me, so I'll have to do it when she's away. She'll never suspect a thing...

-Am

Andyman, you'll have to change your name to Weegee if you do that.

--
Murray

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

[kelpdiver 2]

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By the same token, Gandolph storming into Helms Deep in Return of the King is equally impressive, if not more. Of course, it was digital.

I only saw it on DVD, so down to 480P. I am a much bigger fan of what Jackson has been doing than Lucas.

I just can't stomach 3+ hours in a movie theater without an intermission, so I pretty much write off some of the epics that have been coming out lately. I can accept 3hours for a LOTR movie, but it's hard to understand why Harry Potter movies/books need to be.

[kelpdiver 2]

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So we're still only talking 1080P. My 4 year old negative scanner can get 4300x2800 off 35mm, and a good slide is capable of much more than that.

At 4300x2800 from a 35mm neg, you're running over the limits of actual resolution of the film (which, as it turns out, is a good thing). It's kinda technical, but the actual resolution you're getting out of the film is a little less than half of that. You might want to Google "Nyquist's Sampling Theorem".

I'm quite familiar, and also that my 2900dpi scanner is at the lower end in current tech. Certainly I've seen no one suggest that a slide is only capable of 2mp of data, or remotely close.

In review though, I can't say that my objection to Clones is the digital tech so much as the use of it. AndyMan pointing towards LOTR is a good counterexample. But you defied anyone to object to how Clones looked.

[quade 3]

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But you defied anyone to object to how Clones looked.

Have you ever heard of a rhetorical question?

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I'm quite familiar, and also that my 2900dpi scanner is at the lower end in current tech. Certainly I've seen no one suggest that a slide is only capable of 2mp of data, or remotely close.

Typical 35mm film resolution is about 50 to 60 lines per mm.
Velvia is about 100 lpmm.
B&W tech pan type films are maybe 125 lpmm which is bumping up against the limits of most lenses designed for 35mm film.

http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/lenslpm.html

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[psw097 0]

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Even the imagers on my good old D60 have an exposure latitude in excess of most consumer film. Even with a fairly high-quality film scanner, the D60 images are better in every way than conventional 35mm print -or- slide film. You really would have to go up to medium format before there is an advantage in image quality, but even at that, it's pretty much only going to be in resolution and not in exposure latitude.

I shoot both digital and film and I don't see this when comparing my 300D shots to good print film. The digital is much more likely to blow out the highlights or loose the shadow detail. My dedicated film scanner is 3200x3200, around 13 MP. The 6.3 MP sensor in the 300D is close depending on what film I use but still doesn't have the detail or the latitude. It also doesn't shoot as fast and cannot do B&W or change between the several hundred specialized films out there. The convenience of the digital camera rocks and I really miss it (its getting repaired) for skydiving where I want instant gratification but the quality is still not as good as film.

I like this comparison between slide, print and the 10D:

http://194.100.88.243/petteri/pont/Pontification/m_Aesthetics_Shootout/_Is_slide_better.html

[rhys 0]

at my dz we still use film but offer the photos on c.d. for an extra charge, although i know bugger all about digital cameras i still think slide film will never be obsolete for portrait professionals. just like the best d.j.'s are still using vinyl rather than digital.
digital has to be the easiest and the average punter knows nothing about picture quality and just wants some pics to remember the jump! i'm confused! we have to buy digital cameras this summer!

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then the world will see peace." - 'Jimi' Hendrix