Film, is the sun setting...

[framer]

Anyone still using a film camera. This last cruise I had a problem with the focus on my Nikon F4 and left it home and just took the digital. I did get great photos but I missed having the film camera with me. I'm debating getting another good film camera or just leave the current one on the shelve. When I look around my house 90% of what's displayed or put in an album is from my film camera. 80% of the photos taken in the last 10 years are digital and live in a computer. There is something about spending money to click the shutter that make me take better photos. Maybe it's the mindset difference between a snapshot and a photograph.

 

framer

[pierces]

I miss film as well. Not as much as I thought I would, but I still miss it. I had a film-related travel tragedy back in 2000 (chronicled here) and have been 100% digital ever since.

 

Oddly enough, I still seem to think before releasing the shutter and take far fewer than the average shooter that gained most of their experience in the digital era. "Shoot a bunch and fix it in Photoshop" has never appealed to me. The result is that while I have thousands of family "snapshots", I also have thousands of digital "photographs" as well. 95% of what I have printed is from digital sources, including some truly large prints that I would never have tried printing from a 35mm negative.

 

It's true that more people are taking more photos now due to the availability of good, easy to use and affordable equipment but I don't think it has diminished the art. Snapshooters will still blast off tons of crap snaps and serious shooters will still produce captivating images. The only difference is that it is easier for said snapshooter to become a serious shooter through practice and the miracle of instantaneous feedback.

 

I shot film for 30+ years and have never been as avid a photographer as I am now. I miss film but embrace digital as a positive evolution in the tools available to photographers. A very positive evolution.

 

From a plastic film Holga all the way up to a 65MP medium-format digital...they are just tools. The inspiration that creates a great image still resides in that lump of grey mush balanced atop out necks.

 

Just my opinion...I could be wrong.

 

Dave

[chipmaster]

A few years ago one could still debate the romance and IQ of flim versus digital but that debate is pretty much over. Pitty the film shooter at the great wall or in some remote port who runs out of film. Just about everywhere you go now you can find overpriced flash cards and battery but non-expired film ( kodak, fuji, or other ) forget it. In high school I started shooting a flim SLR, couldn't afford the darkroom or developing. I love digital and I am one to only shoot in rapid mode for sports but it really has changed it. I do find it funny when I view some peoples vacation webshots and see so many random pictures and agree the thinking is now often cast out in the digital world. But I also know I catch many more a kodak moments because they are free. So nothing is totally free but the gigabytes of images are pretty close and the memories from some of them truely are priceless so in the end digital rocks!

 

It now takes ever more discipline to produce a beautiful picture because like all things digital there is overwheliming noise for that to get above :D

 

Things will really go another level when everyone has a smartphone with HD vidoe and 10M camera and a few upload to sharing sites :eek:

Anyone still using a film camera. This last cruise I had a problem with the focus on my Nikon F4 and left it home and just took the digital. I did get great photos but I missed having the film camera with me. I'm debating getting another good film camera or just leave the current one on the shelve. When I look around my house 90% of what's displayed or put in an album is from my film camera. 80% of the photos taken in the last 10 years are digital and live in a computer. There is something about spending money to click the shutter that make me take better photos. Maybe it's the mindset difference between a snapshot and a photograph.

 

framer

[pilotdane]

I don't miss film but I do miss the darkroom. I started doing my own processing and darkroom work when I was 13 or 14 years old. The smell of the chemicals will always be fresh in my mind. Dodging and burning required extra talent (past tense) and patience above that required by Photoshop and at the time the concept of an "undo" command was only a dream.

[pierces]

I don't miss film but I do miss the darkroom. I started doing my own processing and darkroom work when I was 13 or 14 years old. The smell of the chemicals will always be fresh in my mind. Dodging and burning required extra talent (past tense) and patience above that required by Photoshop and at the time the concept of an "undo" command was only a dream.

 

That sparked memories! The darkroom at high school...sitting on a folding chair in my closet loading film cartridges from a spool of bulk Tri-X! :)

 

I don't miss the chemical smell (ok, the tangy odor of acetic acid still makes me smile), but I do miss the thrill of making a print with the challenge of no "undo" (other than chuck it and pull out another piece of paper).

 

Still, there is a bit of skill and more than a bit of art required to get a digital print to come out exactly how you want it. The tools have gotten better to the point where making an ok image is easier than ever but there's still a big difference between "ok" and "WOW"!

 

The people posting here on the CC photo board reassure me that there are many left who think working towards a "WOW" is still worth the extra effort.

 

Happy shooting!

 

Dave

 

P.S. While I miss the challenge of no undo, I'm not a fool and "Ctrl+Z" and I have become very good friends. ;)

[pierces]

I may have understated the user-friendliness of modern cameras...

 

 

Gizmodo posted this to remind us of our replaceablity.

 

Dave

[TheRoff]

Ah, nice subject. I too shot film for many years from a lovingly amassed Canon F-1 system. A good friend had a wonderful darkroom also where we spent many enjoyable hours. I bought a roll of Etkar 100 a couple of months ago and hauled out the old F-1 and a lens or two. That may just motivate me to do more. I do think film and digital are almost different art forms. There are a few artisan film shooters and fantastic print makers around. I wish I had their ability and creativeness. My current favorite – http://ctein.com/

 

One of the main advantages of digital as far as I am concerned is the short time from image to result and of course the Adobe “darkroom” magic. Nicely enough I just got my first paying photography job. It is fantastic to shoot something with the camera tethered to a computer for instant feedback, particularly when one is such a novice, like me.

 

Larry

[zackiedawg]

I'd say the sun dun set already! It is a bit sad, like any other thing we were accustomed to, seeing it fade away and die - LPs, calculators, cellphones that only functioned as a phone...and film.

 

I got my first film camera in 1974 at age 6...Kodak Instamatic, B&W film, NY city. Lots of fun, being just a kid, it addicted me to the idea of photography. On my 9th birthday, my father decided to splurge for an SLR for me - a Pentax ME Super with the kit 50mm F1.7 lens, and an additional Osawa 35mm F2 and a basic zoom (something like 70-210). Not too many kids had something like that...but I loved it, and had much fun. I was never very good - didn't know too much beyond trying to get the shutter to 1/125 and watching the little light meter to try to keep it in the green zone...but it was all manual, so it was a great basic learning tool. That stayed my primary camera until 1996, when I picked up a Canon EOS-IX for a convenient travel cam - more automatic. I kept the Pentax as my play camera though.

 

In 1997, I ended up picking up this marvelous new technology - a digital camera! It was $1,000 - 1MP, fixed lens ultrazoom Sony Mavica FD91 with stabilization...held pics on floppy disks. I barely knew anything about a computer, or digital cameras, and certainly nothing about processing. The digital was a revelation - instant shots, ready to view...and moreover, I suddenly had a visual representation right on screen on how metering changed the exposure when I pointed at light and dark areas and watched the aperture and shutter speed change and the screen lighten and darken...I could see white balance change right on the screen. Wow! After my first few photos viewing on my marvelous 640x480 CRT screen resolution, I found the photos were bigger than the screen was, which seemed a waste and rather annoying. Fortunately, I found I could set the camera to 640x480 too, and fit a bunch more photos on a disk! Cool! And they are just as big as my screen! No more film cameras...they sat gathering dust while I traveled around with the digital only, snapping glorious 640x480 shots! (yes...this eventually dawned on me years later as I began to understand computers, that I essentially wasted 4 years of travel shots). I finally set the camera back to the full power of 1MP after about 4 years...and shortly after began to realize how little this was. In 2003 I picked up a 5MP digital...this one with manual controls too - the F717. This is really when I first learned about photography - in earnest. Despite decades with SLRs, I still just used what i knew, but hadn't really learned about photography. With the 717, I finally really delved into learning and understanding all of the camera controls. Ironically, this actually breathed new life into my film SLRs again, as I broke those out and spent a few years shooting alternately between the old Pentax, the Canon, and the digital. I even did my first model shoots with the film cameras, thanks to the digital as a learning tool.

 

Now, of course, I'm fully immersed in digital - yet the Canon and Pentax still live in my closet - rather unused lately. But one thing I never really did was process my own film - never learned the darkroom process or developing. So that part of the process has never been something i cared too much about. Which has transferred to digital as well. For me, my big love, interest, and ambition is photography - the act of TAKING the photo, but not necessarily of processing it. I have infinitely more interest in the photo taking process, in manipulating camera controls, adjusting composition, playing with lighting, forcing the color, the depth of field, the focus, and the composition to take on the atmosphere I want to capture...not in post processing, but right there on scene. I know how amazing some people are with their post-processing, and I give them credit for that...it just isn't my cup of tea. I'd much rather try to get what I can in the camera in the field, and not do any processing on the computer. I hear the arguments from those who think I'm looney tunes - shoot RAW because there is so much more you can tweak and correct...process your photos because the computer processes better than the camera can...why let some programmer who designed the camera dictate how the jpeg should look...post-processing is as much a part of the photographic process as taking the photo...etc etc etc. But it just isn't me - I'm the guy happy in the field with a camera in his hand, and bored & miserable plopped in front of a computer manipulating sliders. If I don't get it right in camera, I would rather go try again than to tweak the shot to correct it. So my niche, however wrong it may seem to some, is to shoot digital as I would shoot film - working as much as possible to get the shot to look the way I want it using the camera as the tool, and letting the computer be the way I view the photos or resize them to share them with others. I do process a bit - I try to get 'into' it - I have a decent processing software, I know how to use it at an advanced level, and I can tweak a worthless shot into something wild and awesome...but I don't prefer to do it, and I don't really enjoy it much. Even in film days, I didn't do my own developing, leaving that to whoever I dropped my film off to. So I guess in digital days, I'm content to leave the software choices to the guy who programmed the camera's jpeg processing, and to do my share using the buttons, controls, settings, and lenses of my camera!

[Zack Adams]

I remember those Mavica's zd, they impressed me as well. My first camera was a Kodak 110, but in the 70's money was hard to come by for developing film. My next camera was a Minolta 370N... should have never sold that camera... nothing else took pictures as quick as that 35mm until I got a DSLR.

 

Film is dead in most instances, but I still enjoyed sending off my rolls and waiting for them to come back. That was a way to experience your trip all over again when you got them back in the mail:)

 

Of course with todays instant feedback, digital photography is a lot cheaper and provides instant satisfaction which is probably why film is going away...

[framer]

The big cost in the early 60's was flash bulbs. Ouch! Most of the paper, film, and chems were free from schools & studios I worked for.

[zackiedawg]

Wow...there's a 'flash'back - I still can remember the little 4-way cube flashes I had to put on my Instamatic...one shot for each side, lift and turn, then dispose of. I can also still distinctly remember LOTS of disposed of flash cubes and flash bars lying around in the gutters in NYC (back in NYC's seedier unclean days)

[sparky-elpaso]

I got my first b/w Kodak Brownie (I think) when I was 7 (I'm 63 now). Of course I had to make every picture count. My Dad had a dark room in our basement so I've helped process, enlarge, etc.

 

But I really love the digital age - there's no way I could afford the comparable quality if I had to have a film camera now. And I can take a dozen or more shots trying for the best angle, etc. which I could never have done with film.

[framer]

OK I just bought a used F6. I guess I'll be using film for another 20 years.

 

framer