30 May
2014
30 May
'14
8:58 p.m.
On 14-05-30 09:25 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
use it exclusively and they are semi-/professionals
and do good work. It
can be fun working with film but to get excellent results takes a lot of
care and work. I have also read that 35mm is around ~10MP if tripod
mounted and sufficiently fine grained, and that hand holding it drops to
around 6ish. This seems to echo my own experience with film vs digital.
I think it depends on how you use it. If you're scanning film and
manipulating it digitally, digital capture is at a relative advantage.
However, if you're projecting, film wins handily (projection isn't up to
the resolution of slide film yet, and certainly not up to the contrast
range). If you're printing, traditional silver-based prints fare quite
well against digital.
I still do all of my black-and-white work on film - mostly because I
find the workflow to be more fun and I trust film to be more archival
(less intervention is needed; see the recent article about century-old
negatives found in Antarctica that are still printable), but also
because black-and-white film seems to really suffer from scanning. The
sharp edges of black-and-white film grain really seem to have aliasing
issues when scanned digitally.
I can get really good 11x14" prints out of 35mm black-and-white films of
ISO 125 and less... faster films get grainy but it's not necessarily
objectionable. If I need higher quality I move to medium or large format.
As for digital? It's awfully nice not to have to schlep film with me on
trips; it's nice to see the results of my shoot the same day (I rarely
chimp as I shoot, but I usually have a quick look on a laptop or netbook
to see what I got when I get the time to look). The archiving is more
work, but of course I can have perfect duplicates which is a plus. It
just takes more work to not need the advantages of passive archiving
that I get with film. And my camera captures over 36 megapixels of
resolution, so the quality is pretty incredible, even handheld (I have
pretty good handheld technique and I have good glass). My DSLR
certainly outresolves 35mm film, but I doubt a 14 or 16 MP camera would
give me better results than I get on 35mm film right now, and larger
formats of film still win.
Still, it's not all about quality; it's about fun. I like computers a
lot - but I don't always want my other hobbies to involve computers. A
night in the darkroom is a great escape from a day at a desktop.
Jim