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Going back to film...



 
 
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  #1  
Old February 27th 10, 04:15 AM posted to rec.photo.equipment.medium-format
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Posts: 428
Default Going back to film...

After shooting mostly digital for years (and getting burnt out on my
photography) I am shifting gears and going back to shooting 120 film.
While obviously shooting digital is easier and cheaper, I'm just not
getting the results from my landscape photography like I used to. What
made me realize I want to start shooting film again was when I got some
proofs back from an old Ikoflex TLR I was given and had repaired. They
had a smooth tonal, 3D look I haven't seen in years!

It wasn't even a top shelf model (had the 3 element novar lens) but
when I saw the 5X5 proofs, I remember why I loved shooting medium format
film. I'm sure not gonna argue about why these images convinced me to
clean up my darkroom and go back to analog photography (including not
scan and print but optically printing again too) but there is something
magical about the look of an image from this medium to me. To be fair, I
was never happy with the results from 35mm film either..

I also found it interesting the local camera store told me film sales
has picked up and some of the working pro's have gone back to film for
some of their projects. I'm sure this is the point where some of the die
hard digital guys will explain that "You just don't what your doing as
digital is far superiour".. To those people, I could care less if you or
some web site has all sorts of data to "prove it".. I know what I see
and am going back to shooting 120 film :-)

Stephanie
  #2  
Old February 27th 10, 07:43 AM posted to rec.photo.equipment.medium-format
Richard Knoppow
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Posts: 751
Default Going back to film...


wrote in message
...
After shooting mostly digital for years (and getting burnt
out on my photography) I am shifting gears and going back
to shooting 120 film. While obviously shooting digital is
easier and cheaper, I'm just not getting the results from
my landscape photography like I used to. What made me
realize I want to start shooting film again was when I got
some proofs back from an old Ikoflex TLR I was given and
had repaired. They had a smooth tonal, 3D look I haven't
seen in years!

It wasn't even a top shelf model (had the 3 element novar
lens) but when I saw the 5X5 proofs, I remember why I
loved shooting medium format film. I'm sure not gonna
argue about why these images convinced me to clean up my
darkroom and go back to analog photography (including not
scan and print but optically printing again too) but there
is something magical about the look of an image from this
medium to me. To be fair, I was never happy with the
results from 35mm film either..

I also found it interesting the local camera store told
me film sales has picked up and some of the working pro's
have gone back to film for some of their projects. I'm
sure this is the point where some of the die hard digital
guys will explain that "You just don't what your doing as
digital is far superiour".. To those people, I could care
less if you or some web site has all sorts of data to
"prove it".. I know what I see and am going back to
shooting 120 film :-)

Stephanie


Welcome to the club Stephanie. While I certainly
recognize that digital, or perhaps electronic is a better
name, photography has a number of advantages, especially for
commercial photographers, I still like working with film and
printing on paper. There is still a fair variety of
materials available. Ilford, in particular, seems to have
undertaken to make sure there is an adequate supply of
traditional photographic materials and chemistry of good
quality. I still like Kodak products a lot but they seem
bound and determined to destroy what little market they have
left.
This group, the medium format group, and the darkroom
group seem to still have a bit of life in them.
The Ikoflex was a very respectible camera, well made and
with good lenses. I shoot mostly Rolleiflex's in this format
but my favorite is a Rollicord IV.


--
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA



  #6  
Old February 27th 10, 03:05 PM posted to rec.photo.equipment.medium-format
Alan Browne
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Posts: 12,640
Default Going back to film...

On 10-02-26 23:15 , wrote:
After shooting mostly digital for years (and getting burnt out on my
photography) I am shifting gears and going back to shooting 120 film.
While obviously shooting digital is easier and cheaper, I'm just not
getting the results from my landscape photography like I used to. What
made me realize I want to start shooting film again was when I got some
proofs back from an old Ikoflex TLR I was given and had repaired. They
had a smooth tonal, 3D look I haven't seen in years!

It wasn't even a top shelf model (had the 3 element novar lens) but when
I saw the 5X5 proofs, I remember why I loved shooting medium format
film. I'm sure not gonna argue about why these images convinced me to
clean up my darkroom and go back to analog photography (including not
scan and print but optically printing again too) but there is something
magical about the look of an image from this medium to me. To be fair, I
was never happy with the results from 35mm film either..

I also found it interesting the local camera store told me film sales
has picked up and some of the working pro's have gone back to film for
some of their projects. I'm sure this is the point where some of the die
hard digital guys will explain that "You just don't what your doing as
digital is far superiour".. To those people, I could care less if you or
some web site has all sorts of data to "prove it".. I know what I see
and am going back to shooting 120 film :-)


Good for you. My 'blad does not get the use it deserves and a lot of
film is sleeping in the freezer.

By the way, the term "analog" isn't very good. Just say film. It's not
an analog, it's an image.

(For that matter what makes a digital camera work is the very analog
sensor and bucket brigade emptying of same).

You can also use a digital camera to preview a scene before committing
it to film. On my digital I can even preview in B&W...

A major attraction of digital is that you can shoot a lot more, with no
cost, loss or penalty and of course convenience. I have a 45 minute
round trip to drop off E-6 and again to pick it up.

--
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  #7  
Old February 27th 10, 06:27 PM posted to rec.photo.equipment.medium-format
[email protected]
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Posts: 428
Default Going back to film...

Alan Browne wrote:

A major attraction of digital is that you can shoot a lot more, with no
cost, loss or penalty and of course convenience.


This is one of the reasons for me to stop shooting digital.

On the analog issue, when you shoot film and optically print it in the
darkroom, that's pretty much an analog process don't ya think? There
isn't much analog about a digital camera other than the light hitting
the sensor. After that point, it's all digital. The image is converted
to digital data before it ever leaves the sensor.

Stephanie
  #9  
Old March 9th 10, 08:56 PM posted to rec.photo.equipment.medium-format
Richard Knoppow
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Posts: 751
Default Going back to film...


wrote in message
...
Alan Browne wrote:

A major attraction of digital is that you can shoot a lot
more, with no cost, loss or penalty and of course
convenience.


This is one of the reasons for me to stop shooting
digital.

On the analog issue, when you shoot film and optically
print it in the darkroom, that's pretty much an analog
process don't ya think? There isn't much analog about a
digital camera other than the light hitting the sensor.
After that point, it's all digital. The image is converted
to digital data before it ever leaves the sensor.

Stephanie


Digital properly refers to a method of storage and
transmission that samples the original continuous data in a
discontinuous way and further codes it into numbers. There
are discontinuous methods that are not digital such as pulse
coding. These can have some of the advantages of digital in
that they are immune from non-linearities in the storage and
transmission system. For instance, pulse coding can be
adapted to magnetic recording. Digital goes another step
from simply sampling the data, it codes it into numbers
following some set plan so that the original data can be
exactly reconstructed. In practice, because of limitations
of bandwidth in both transmission and storage media digital
data is often compressed. Some compression methods loose
some of the original information and some don't. The common
JPEG compression scheme used for digital images on the
internet is a "lossy" compression method. It assumes certain
statistical characteristics of the original in order to
reconstruct an approximation of it. A low compression JPEG
can be nearly as good as the original but, if its decoded
and recoded some additional information is lost so it can go
only a limited number of generations. By this I mean
generations where decoding and recoding are required such as
editing. Other compression schemes are do not have data loss
and can be reapplied essentially without limit.
The main advantages of "digital" photography is that it
is electronic and would have many of the same advantages
even if digital encoding were not used. However, properly
applied, digital encoding and decoding can eliminate many
problems with imperfect transmission and storage methods.



--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA



  #10  
Old March 9th 10, 10:52 PM posted to rec.photo.equipment.medium-format
Alan Browne
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Posts: 12,640
Default Going back to film...

On 10-03-09 15:56 , Richard Knoppow wrote:

Digital properly refers to a method of storage and
transmission that samples the original continuous data in a
discontinuous way and further codes it into numbers. There


snipped

The main advantages of "digital" photography is that it
is electronic and would have many of the same advantages
even if digital encoding were not used. However, properly
applied, digital encoding and decoding can eliminate many
problems with imperfect transmission and storage methods.


The main reasons for digital photo popularity remain its _convenience_
and low recurring cost, low cost of experimentation, high image quality,
immediate feedback (try again if you screwed up), post processing
convenience and cost, ease of storage and storage maintenance - not that
everyone practices good storage habits.

That the data is loss-lessly manageable after the fact is a huge
benefit. Digital photography also lends itself to the information
exchange age so well. Snapshooters and journalists share the trait of
shooting and transmitting images in short periods of time.

In 500 years, a lot ( say 0.0001% ) of the digital photography of today
will be available to future historians. It will be very well documented
in many cases. Those who preserve the data well will be more likely to
document it well.

And yes, I know common CD/DVD ROMs don't last more that 5 - 10 years,
but there are other archival media that will easily do 200 years. Some
of that will survive much longer.

A lot of key data will be attached to these images in tag/exif form, and
I wouldn't doubt that they will be linked to very descriptive documents
(or be in the documents).

For those with other photographic pursuits, where film has its
advantages or character, film will continue for a very long time. (All
predictions of film's demise having so far been way off the mark).

Most movies (and many television shows) are still shot on film, often
because the cinematographer, producer and director have agreed on a
certain look that digital fails to capture. But I bet that digital
cinematography will improve (mainly in highlight capture) that film
cinematography will become quite rare. (Some cinematographers are
shooting mixed film and digital now...).

--
gmail originated posts are filtered due to spam.
 




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