Film

Lots of surprise by the switch to film: e-mails, as well as shocked friends just returned from vacation who voiced some worry about my mental state. (Man - are you nuts?)

Let me try and offer a summary:

Dear Reader (to take the Victorian voice),

I was just talking with someone about this yesterday, and the more I talked, the more items I listed in the move back to film. Here are the points I remember.

One day, I had a large batch of prints to do on the 4800. Both digital captures and prints from film. I was getting to see a lot of my own work side by side. Now the first factor - was the new printer. It was fast enough so that I was holding and looking at several prints at the same time. Not to mention that the prints from the 4800 were better able to hold the blacks better - in fact able to reproduce the negative / digital capture better.

Something was rotten in the state of digital. Or was it something that was present: a sort of smoothness that I should have liked, but didn't. After all, didn't we all go up to medium and large format for smoothness? But there was something too smooth in the prints from digital. What exactly it was I still can't say, but the prints via film felt like they had character (for want of a better word).

That character (which I can't describe) but which probably comes from the b&w era that I grew up in - is actually important. Oh I know. You grew up around the same time and you love digital prints. So it can't be that alone. So I can't explain it very well. But the practical considerations are easier:

The digitals had been seriously worked over in Photoshop. In some cases, you might have four or five or more layers; masks; various plug-ins used; all to try and recreate a feeling I got from film.

I had to make a print of Night Bus (an old 35mm film shot). The gray streaks as the bus pulled out were still magical to me. The blackness of the night - it looked like it should. And the print was made without any work in Photoshop. Straight out of the negative scanner.

Sort of scary. I had invested a lot of time, money and effort moving through the digital cycle.

Obviously I was happy with it - at first - or I wouldn't have moved on to the 20D. The whole digital adventure took me almost exactly one year. I picked up the Canon A75 one day after the July 4th fireworks.

I began wondering about all this - this July.

And I still like the 20D. I would wish it a brighter and bigger viewfinder, but it was the best viewfinder of any of the low- to middle Canon autofocus SLRs. I guess with the advent of autofocus it wasn't that important to see what you were shooting anymore. Or maybe there's a technical reason for the dimmer viewfinders - though I doubt it since you can get a very good one if you go to the top of the Canon film line.

But there were other factors sneaking in as well:

- It's nice to have a negative as your "archival" backup. Disk after disk was filling with images. Then offloaded to DVDs. Sometimes to dupe DVDs just to be extra careful. Yes, I could buy more hard drives. Maybe invest in RAID. It was getting more and more expensive - especially since the next digital camera in my sights would produce even larger files.

- With digital, at some point you are going to dump every file - good and bad - to media of some kind. Film: you contact sheet or look on a lightbox - if you're lucky you may have one or two on a roll worth scanning.

- In short the storage / archival issues with digital are much more demanding than with film.

- The film shots have a greater dynamic range (once you get your exposure and processing down).

- I like my lenses - uncropped by the medium. With the current crop of Canon lenses, you are simply cropping off a big part of the "image circle." You can compensate by using shorter lenses, but then you are also changing the character again - more depth of field in a narrower field.

I had the whole Canon rig: from flash to a multitude of prime lenses. If I was going to jump to film - first choice would have Canon. I bought their Canon 7. Quiet. Dim viewfinder. Felt like plastic. Returned it.

The top-of-the-line Canons (as mentioned): noisy and imposing.

So if Canon was out. Might as go from scratch. Best viewfinders in current production cameras: rangefinders. They had to be since they were manual focus. Quiet, at least compared to the big motor-driven behemoths. Which eventually led to the Voigtlanders...

More factors that came up in our conversation:

If you are shooting b&w, you're still originally doing the capture in color when you use digital - so you are dealing with an additional factor: white balance which effects the b&w conversion.

Digital for commercial work or reportage - you need the speed of transmission. You don't need it for my usual strolling around waiting and hoping strategy.

Some points can be argued but I'm just writing how the decision was made - and that it is ultimately based on something akin to - dare I say it - an emotional feeling towards the look of film - and the fact that film is something you can touch, and hold up to the light and take a gander at.

Best --

Dave