Film cameras: They will protect you from death
Well, perhaps not. But I did manage to draw you in to this diffuse collection of further photography musings, to wit . . . . White balance is one area where color digital has a clear advantage over color film, especially with the proliferation of different types of non-tungsten artificial lighting. With color film, you always need to be aware of the differences in color temperature of outdoor vs. indoor light. For this reason, I almost always use black and white film if I know I'll be shooting indoors. I could get a color film balanced for tungsten light or--these days--scan the film and correct the color after the fact using Photoshop, but it's easier just to use black and white. As sensors get better at high-ISO performance, digital should be great for low-light photography. I'm partial to a full-size sensor so lenses will behave as they do in 35mm film photography--notably, so not everything is in focus.
I've seen some amazing examples shot with a Canon 5D - 85mm f/1.2 combo, but that's $2K for the lens and $3K for a the body that, unlike certain film cameras, won't be state-of-the-art in its class indefinitely. The 5D is a real SLR with a real optical finder, but it's not a finder that's designed for manual focusing. So I'm not sure how useful it would be focusing an 85/1.2 critically, since that lens has razor-thin depth of field close up at full aperture. But if you could crank the ISO high enough without excessive "noise", you wouldn't need a fast prime lens at all. Fuji just released a digicam, the F30, I think, that supposedly has amazing performance even at ISO 3200 (but no optical viewfinder at all). It also has a mode where it will take a flashless photos and a flash photo within milliseconds of each other on the same press of the shutter. That's a clever way to show people that they don't need the flash for every shot. 
In the last post I mused about how digital promotes a type of visual illiteracy. The other kind of visual illiteracy I'm sure automatic digital zoom cameras have encouraged is the tendency of people to stand wherever they find themselves and zoom to fill the frame with the subject. People who started out with zooms and follow the inclination to shoot this way are never going to learn composition. Not only do they likely fail to consider secondary details that could be in the frame if they didn't zoom so far--and which might make for a more interesting or balanced composition--they also have no concept about perspective. I've seen people on Internet forums trying to explain that perspective is determined by the position of the camera relative to the subject, and those reared on zooms often just don't get the difference between moving your body and zooming. When zooms were first introduced, of course, manufacturers imagined them within the paradigm of the fixed-focus world they came into. The idea was that every competent photographer would size up the scene, decide what focal length it called for, set the zoom for that focal length and only then put camera to eye and maybe do minor framing adjustments. I suspect some pros still use that kind of discipline. The average person today doesn't even think in terms like "I need a [35/50/85]mm lens here" etc. 
I figure zooms also delivered the final blow to the head of once fairly popular 135mm short telephoto lens, which already seemed like a "tweener" focal length on an SLR—too long use indoors, too short for a lot of "real" telephoto chores. And it fell right in the middle of a range (70-200mm) that would be covered by your "long" zoom. So R.I.P. They still make them, of course, but I can't imagine many people buy them. A little-known fact is that 135mm became a standard focal length because it is the longest lens that can be reliably focused with a Leica or other 35mm rangefinder with similar "rangefinder baselength." The Nikkor 135mm f/3.5 was one of the three original Nikkor lenses that David Douglas Duncan famously chose over Leica and Zeiss to cover the Korean War in 1950. The others were a 50mm f/1.5 and an 85mm f/2. He and some colleagues tested them and found them better by whatever standards they were applying than the comparable German glass. This choice was well publicized and helped secure Nikon's reputation (one account has Nippon Kogaku being run out of a garage when Duncan found them, but I don't know if that's true). German purists insist that the Nikon lenses were probably only better in the contrast qualities desired for magazine work, not in resolution overall. And they were all Zeiss designs the U.S. got as part of its reparations (Wikipedia: "Germany paid reparations to France, Britain and Russia, in the form of dismantled factories, forced labour, and shipments of coal. The U.S. settled for confiscating German patents and German owned property in the U.S., mainly subsidiaries of German companies." That's our U.S., ever the good sport.) I'm not fully clear on how a Japanese company wound up with them.Labels: film cameras, photography, photos
posted at 12:10 AM
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