To each his own, as they say. ;-)Originally Posted by Doug Dolde
And I have yet to find a line of work for which there are no snide snipes out there... Just imagine what kind of field day the computer geeks must be having with all those photographers being dragged into using computers these days!
He's still my friend, he still earns a decent and honest living and I still stand by my math, though.
Actually, many "high-end" or at least good to formerly successful advertising and corporate photographers have taken to doing high quality wedding photography. While rates for commercial work have been stagnant, many upper middle class American weddings are spending $5000 on photography alone. I have several friends who have shot national ads and are now doing weddings as often as possible.
I used to sneer at it too. I tried doing one last year and found out that it is really hard work to do a wedding well, and next time I would want at least $5000 for a long day on my feet plus an extended editing and digital process, all bound into a nice book and CD.
When I was a young tog I was flying to NYC for Xerox, getting like $1000 a day. I thought I was hotstuff until the guy sitting next to me told me he was a tog too and pulled out a Halliburton filled with all the best Hasselblad stuff. He would go to Long Island every weekend and make $10K per week shooting two weddings. Then he would return to Rochester and print the weddings. It's taken me years to realize that this guy outearned me and probably made more personally fun and satisfying photos - that made people happy - than I did doing corporate stuff.
Photo below is from a wedding - it's a 45-minute time exposure (4x5) of the ceremony. The white dust is my little flash going off as I shot with my dSLR.
Maybe for some people, but that's not why I use it.
It's a set of tools with strengths and limitations, just like anything else.
All the complaints about crappy work done with digital tools have to do with accessibility, not with the tools' innate abilities. It's a specious argument to suggest otherwise. Remember all the painters who belittled photography in its early days. "All you have to do is push a button. Anyone can do it." And to prove their point, they could show you all the crappy snapshots in the world. Do these arguments really say anything about the worth of photographic tools?
Your comparison to printing is apt, but only if you look deeper at the history of printing and design. There has been great work and terrible work done with every type of printing technology. The nature of the work changes, since the different tools have different strengths and weaknesses. There has been plenty of crap done with the letterpress. For evidence look at most of the nineteenth century. Converely, most modern typographic design and typefaces are not suitable to the three dimensional impressions of letterpress type. Typefaces like futura or frutiger would look preposterous set in lead. As would most typographic design from the modernist period onward.
It's time to stop looking at one technology as being superior to another, and to save that energy for something that makes sense ... like picking the appropriate technology for the work you want to do.
paulr said "It's time to stop looking at one technology as being superior to another, and to save that energy for something that makes sense ... like picking the appropriate technology for the work you want to do." and that is the most sensible statement ever made on any of the digital v. fil threads in all the photography forums on the net. I firmly believe that any of us that value our art and our craft be it for artistic or commercial purposes or some combination of both should applaud every new tool that becomes available to us, evaluate it, learn enough about it to understand how it fits or could fit into our workflow and vison and finally use it when appropriate.
I have a much wider variety of tools in my toolbox today than I had 50 years ago and an even wider variety to put there shhould I choose to do so. All I can say is I am glad to have the choices.
You may remember that Nikon wasn't making review cameras available when they were producing clearly inferior product.
I wouldn't put much stock in MR's 4x5 comparisons. His transparencies have less detail than just about anyone else who have done this testing.
I can see the thumb, but when I click on it, I get a login dialog again. When I fill it in and submit, it simply pops up again.
Tom?
Marko - might your login have timed out due to inactivity?
however, there's few around who can get as much detail from a sheet of film than charlie cramer... and he wasn't just a bystander in this testing.. he was a very active part in it.
Hi Frank. That 4x5 long exposure is just so coooool!
I wouldn't either. There are just too many variables to do a valid comparison. For example, what developer was used to process the film? Fuji or Kodak. It does make a different. What contrast range was used in the test? Film resolves higher at higher contrasts (ever notice that MR comparisons are fairly flat). What scanner was used and how was it scanned? Single pass or multiple pass scanning, single sample or multiple sampling. Hiow has the generational loss between an already digital file (from the scanning back) and the film scan been taken into account? How about the loss when resizing for the web? Remember, when you resize the image from the film scan, you are essentially throwing away most of the information available in the scan - it isn't as big a problem for digital. MR's comparions are just plain BS.
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