Why I love film cameras, part three
I do love film cameras and—because this is a blog, after all—SO SHOULD YOU.
I will be generalizing a bit in what follows. I prefer to think of my generalizations as Weberian ideal types, but you may have a different opinion.
Technical advantages of using film and film cameras
- Maybe the biggest benefit of using film is the "image sensor." The photographer can choose among numerous types of film, and numerous different distinctive looks are available within the broad categories of color print, color slide and black-and-white film. Each film has its own characteristics of latitude, contrast, color saturation, grain, etc. A digitally-captured image can be manipulated to approximate most of the different looks film provides, but there is a uniformity about most digital shots because they all originate from a digital sensor and each camera will only ever have one sensor.
- Print film typically has greater exposure latitide than a digital sensor. It is better able to capture the full range of contrast in a scene.
- Properly exposed and printed, traditional black-and-white photography can display a greater range of tones (light to dark) than digital is capable of.
- Current digital technology is not well suited for the use of wide-angle lenses. Digital sensors are at their best when light hits them at a 90-degree angle, and they don't deal well with the relatively more acute angles produced by wide-angle lenses at the edge of the frame.
- Many consumer digital cameras have significant "shutter lag." When you press the shutter, they don't immediately take the picture. Sometimes there is also a lag while the camera writes information to the memory card.
- Most film cameras don't need to be charged frequently, and many of them can operate for a long time on a small battery and will let you take pictures even if the battery goes dead. You will have to use the "sunny 16 rule", but it actually works quite well with print film.
- Current digital technology is not well suited for long exposures because sensor "noise" in the image builds at a steady rate throughout the exposure. Digital cameras for astrophotography are cooled with liquid nitrogen to minimize this effect, but I'm not allowed to buy liquid nitrogen anymore since "the Incident." Film exhibits non-linear diminishing response to light over long exposures (so-called reciprocity failure, a breakdown in the linear "reciprocity law" that holds at normal shutter speeds and says your film will record twice as much light if you expose it to light for twice as long—depending on your film, this relationhsip stops applying after maybe 8 to 120 seconds, after which the film behaves with less sensitivity and you need to extend your exposure time). But I digress.
- Almost all digital cameras, including all consumer models, have sensors that are smaller than the 35mm frame. Compared to film cameras, these digicams use lenses of shorter focal length to achieve the same angle of view. Since depth of field is greater the shorter the focal length (regardless of the angle of view), digicams tend to produce an "everything in focus" look. Sometimes that's what you want, but with my film cameras I have much more control over depth of field. I can take a headshot where the subject's eyes are in sharp focus and his ears are not, and I can "blow out" extraneous background details. Try doing that with your typical digicam.
- Film has, in my opinion, better archival properties than digital as far as the average user is concerned. While the stable life of negatives and slides varies, the rule for practical purposes is that what goes in the shoe box stays in the shoe box. It's tricky to be confident about what will happen to your digital photos. Consumer-burnable CD-ROMs are nowhere near as robust as commercial CDs because the plastic coating on the recordable side is extremely thin; any breach in the coating and the recording medium will begin to oxidize. I have had several CD-ROMs fail unpredictably. Hard drives are a better option, but they do eventually crash so you need to have a backup procedure involving more than one. Picking good storage media is one thing, but keeping up with changes in formats is quite another. Twenty years ago I had this great Leading Edge Model "D" PC. It had dual 5-1/4 floppy drives, no mouse, ran MS-DOS, etc. I sometimes wish I could read through all the brilliant college papers I have stored away on floppy disks somewhere, but as a practical matter, I can't. I could have methodically converted those papers from WordPerfect to Word, ported them from machine to machine and storage format to storage format, but I didn't. Realistically, neither will you when it comes to your digital photos. Or maybe you will. But I'm thinking you won't.
- At least until you get down to a film-grain level, film is an analog medium. Moreover, film captures more information than digital (generalization alert). If you take a photo from my 5 megapixel digicam and blow it up to 16x20", the image will start to look like it's made out of LEGO. Two of my favorite photos were taken on 400-speed b/w film with a pocketable film camera. They look sensational as 16x20" fiber prints, and I'm convinced that this particular camera (now discontinued) offers about the best ratio of image quality to camera size that exists. If I had taken them with my digital I think I would cry.
- A related point is that digital printing technologies now make it possible to exploit the information captured on a piece of film to an unprecedented extent. I have a 30x40" digital print (Chromira) that I had made from a drum scan of a little 35mm slide. It looks great. I am making a 16x50" digital b/w print (ink jet) from a crop of a 6x9cm negative. It will also look great. Had either one of the original images been captured with digital . . . no way.
A mature technology
- Digital potentially gives you great control over the look of your final images. However, digital can become a serious time-sink. The digital photographer takes over many of the functions formerly assumed by the photo lab. If you don't place much value on your own time, this is not a big deal. It might be if you would rather be out taking photographs instead of staring at a computer screen for hours.
- A related point is that you really need a lot of stuff besides the camera and lenses if you are serious about digital. You need a pretty powerful computer, PhotoShop, a proper monitor, a device to color-calibrate the monitor, etc. All of this costs a lot of money, and needs to be upgraded every few years (again, if you are serious).
- Of course I neglected to mention that you probably have to upgrade your digital camera on a regular basis. Those Sony Mavica models that took diskettes were still being sold, like, five years ago. Digital is not yet a mature technology, and as it continues to improve and change, you will feel the need to upgrade.
- Film is a mature technology with no actual or planned obsolescence. The aggregate age of my three most-used cameras is roughly 94 years and all of them could easily outlast me. Some would argue that for what they do, these three cameras have never been surpassed. The lenses I use are considerably newer, but almost all of them are of such high quality that I could never justify upgrading them (in all modesty, a few of them actually can't be upgraded). My core camera gear never needs to be upgraded as long as film remains available (which, by the way, will be a very long time).
Intangibles and psychological advantages
- Robb Kendrick of National Geographic commented that film forces you to keep shooting to be sure you have a usable shot. He observed that digital can make it too easy to see that you have captured a shot that will work. Knowing you have that shot, you are less likely to keep photographing, stay in the field, go the extra mile, etc. and might therefore miss getting a much better shot than the one you decided was acceptable.
- Sam Abell of National Geographic has spoken about how digital changes the balance between photographers and editors. Digital photographers who right away delete the shots that "didn't work" are destroying images that an editor might find valuable, or even the best. For those of us without real editors, or even with them, the "editor" here can just mean ourselves looking through our photos with the critical distance time provides. Abell said that he took his career in an entirely unexpected direction because of one random snap of his, a single-frame afterthought while covering something else, which he surely would have deleted if he had been using digital. Weeks or months later, either he or his editor saw something in that one photo that hadn't been evident to him when he took it.
- Much is said about how great digital is for learning because you don't pay for your mistakes. This is the logic of Lt. Gorman from "Aliens," with his thirty-eight drops—simulated. It's good to have to pay something for your mistakes or you won't take the process seriously. You can tell yourself you are taking it just as seriously, of course, but I doubt you really will be. And with film, you have to confront your mistakes and can think about what you maybe did wrong. With digital, you are apt to delete "mistakes" before even seeing them on a screen larger than the camera's. By the way, how impressed are you that I was able to pull up the name "Gorman"? Not Ripley or Newt . . . Gorman. Yes, I had to look up the number of drops, because I am not some kind of sci-fi nerd.
- Manual film cameras have simple interfaces. You can adjust the two important variables, aperture and shutter speed, quickly and on the fly. You can set a manual film camera down for a year, pick it up and away you go. A month away from most digicams and it's back to the manual.
- Manual film cameras give you total control. Like to drive a stick? Same idea. Think about all the fancy metering modes, scene modes, etc. on an automated camera (digital or film). All they are are algorithms for choosing an aperture and a shutter speed. Two variables. All those modes and menu settings: to set two variables. Yes I am ignoring flash. I said there would be generalizations. But you take the point.
The gear itself
- For some film cameras, notably Leicas, there are literally hundreds of interesting lenses to choose from, from various manufacturers, of many vintages and offering many different distinctive "looks."
- Great used film gear can be had these days for not so much money. A lot of the older gear has better engineering and build quality than anything now being made. A while ago I saw a Rollei price list from the 1960s and called up one of the online inflation calculators. In today's dollars, my Rolleiflex retailed new for something over $5,000. Let's just say I paid a lot less.
- You can do many neat things with a large format camera (an "old fashioned" camera with bellows, ground glass, etc.). You know how when you focus your camera, there is one area of the subject matter that's in sharpest focus? And how this area is always a plane parallel to the back of the camera? Well, if you could tilt the lens of your camera, you could move that plane fo sharp focus so it is at an angle to the back of the camera. But while this is an incredibly cool concept, and lets you get, say, both the nearby wildflowers and the distant mountain in sharp focus, it is probably too much for this already absurdly long posting.
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 12:58 AM
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