The Future of Film Photography

[Marko]

A question for those of you who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s and are fighting digital. When you were in your late teens or early 20s and putting together your obligatory killer audio system, did you buy a tube amp or a solid state amp to go with the Tannoy or B&W or Acoustic Research (or if you were really hip with dollars to spare, Quad) speakers?

Mine was Thorens TD 160 through Acoustic Research 94 on a Marantz at home, OM-1 and Rolleiflex 3.5 outside.

Good old times.

Middle of the road Pioneer home theater system with Polk speakers today. Totally unremarkable, does a decent job of reproducing noise that passes for entertainment today. Works well with my Mac over Wi-Fi.

Digital Rebel, a G10 and a handful of 4x5's (which I'm currently trying to consolidate into one).

All put together, I'm not sure if I had better time then or now. I was younger then, I have more resources now. It balances out, I guess. At any rate, I enjoy doing things now I couldn't do then much more than I enjoy remembering things I did then and couldn't/wouldn't now.

After all, these are going to be someone's good old times too twenty or thirty years from now. Why spoil them with pointless whining and grumbling?

[Rodney Polden]

.........lets compare apples and apples. You would still have to scan the film with a first rate drum scanner to get the best out of the film....

So does this mean that Ansel, Edward and everybody else were never able to "get the best out of the film" because the scanner didn't exist? How can that equate to comparing apples to apples?

In general, it takes a generation for a new technology to completely replace the old one. Not because technology is slow, it isn't as we all can see, but because it takes a generation for all the dinosaurs to go away and stop resisting. We are now in the latter half of this change.

And that comment with a few words changed, could have come out of the mouth of any 1950's era fast-food industry proponent, because after all, why on earth would anyone bother with something as obsolete and inconvenient as actually COOKING FOOD for themselves, when there's a whole new technology that can do it so much better and so much quicker? Have you noticed yet which direction the world has actually moved in the past 10 years though?

As someone famous said "The recently published news of my death is much premature", or words to that effect.

Most of what exists now in the field of digital photography is going to look as irrelevant and obsolete as Beta, videodiscs and electric carving knives in a short while.
Try even _giving_ away a Mac "Classic" nowadays.

Deardorffs and Dagors may by then look much like, well, Deardorffs and Dagors.

[Robert Hughes]

Most of what exists now in the field of digital photography is going to look as irrelevant and obsolete as Beta, videodiscs and electric carving knives in a short while.

"Irrelevant and obsolete" to the people that grew up with them - "cool and retro" to the next generation. Young moviemakers nowadays scour the Dreaded auction sites for old video cameras and recorders for their weird look.

[BetterSense]

In both cases, the other participants, with one or two exceptions, had never used a film camera, and in both cases I was the only person shooting film.

The analog and digital media are more different than popularly understood--they are superficially similar but fundamentally different. Their practices are also largely alien to each other. A practitioner of strictly one or the other will realize this more often than those indifferent or those that do both. Strictly digital practitioners are common and everywhere. Hybrid workers are somewhat less common, but make up the bulk of film users probably--most of the hipsters that shoot holgas and put their images on flickr, for example. Strictly analog workers are rarer, and are often old people. A strictly digital photographer is likely to be utterly helpless at achieving analog photography, and vice versa.

There is an informal group of (digital) photographers at our church. The things they talk about--software, software editing, software tools, file sizes, raw converters, noise, full-frame, stitching, color spaces, printing profiles--are completely lost on me, sound horribly complicated, and most importantly, I don't care to learn them, because I don't need to know them...they are not relevant to me and my work at all. I stopped hanging out with them when I realized just how little we actually had in common. They know as little about (film) photography as I do about digital photography, so my own concerns were unmet.

I personally know professional (and profiting!) digital photographers that have never loaded film into a medium-format camera, much less loaded it on a developing reel. That don't know what "pushing" is, or what "bracketing" is and asked me what the heck I used a thermometer for. That have never used a dedicated exposure meter and don't actually know what a contact sheet is, having never seen one, and having no real understanding of what a contact print is. A girl at work literally did not know how (analog) photographs are made, at all. To them, these things they call photos come out of computer printers.

And it's not just those that make the art. It's those that consume it as well. They expect that a professional photographer will give them hundreds of images--soon, or instantly--and they expect them in digital form so they can put them on Facebook. They expect that Uncle Bob can be erased from their wedding photos. Anyone working strictly analog, has no choice but to literally try to convince clients that they should go elsewhere, considering their expectations. Doing nothing else but what for decades was called simply "photography" is now considered "Special/weird/niche/expensive/inflexible photography".

The divergence of (analog) photography and digital imaging will become even more apparent as time goes on and fewer and fewer adult-age people grew up in a world that was transitioning between film and digital, much less one where film was the only thing available.

[Marko]

This and a few other recent threads really got me scared that APUG suddenly went away.

I checked and it is up and running, thank God.

So what's up with all this ludditte whining and squealing lately? Why not take it to the warm and cozy place where it belongs?

[Marko]

As someone famous said "The recently published news of my death is much premature", or words to that effect.

If I remember correctly he still died in the end.

[Greg Gibbons]

Most of what exists now in the field of digital photography is going to look as irrelevant and obsolete as Beta, videodiscs and electric carving knives in a short while.
Try even _giving_ away a Mac "Classic" nowadays.

Hahaha. I actually have (not had, still have) a Beta, videodiscs, electric knife and a "Fat Mac".
And I have a 4x5 camera. Uh oh....

[dwross]

Marko,

It's hard to avoid thinking the phrase, "I think he doth protest too loudly." Why are you so determined that all traces of film disappear? It and its vocabulary have been Photography for a long time. What all would be lost if you got your wish?

I look forward to all the new technological additions. Most of us do. I work all the way from ULF film cameras to the cutest little Nikon Coolpix p&s. Photography is more alive and creative than ever in its history precisely because we have managed to preserve and to keep up-to-date all the historical processes while pulling new technology into our workflow.

Here's a bull-baiting question: Can it be that you really do know that a handcrafted print will almost always command a higher prestige and often a higher price than a one-of-a-million identical inkjet knockoffs? If all those annoying one-of-a-kind prints went away, you'd face a lot less competition.

And a bull-baiting observation: I suspect many of the most vocal 'film is a Luddite sin' folk will scream bloody murder when the next technological breakthrough puts their 2-d, static cameras and inkjet prints out of business, especially if the new tools cost 10x what the current digital tools cost.

Photography is a marvelously big tent with room for us all. Can't we please celebrate it as such?

Proud Hybrid,
d

[Ben Syverson]

I can resist one misquote in a thread, but not two on the same page! Blame my mother the ex-copy-editor.

"The recently published news of my death is much premature"

The popular quote is "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," but the actual Mark Twain quote is "The report of my death is an exaggeration."

"I think he doth protest too loudly."

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." - The Queen, Hamlet

[dwross]

I can resist one misquote in a thread, but not two on the same page! Blame my mother the ex-copy-editor.


The popular quote is "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," but the actual Mark Twain quote is "The report of my death is an exaggeration."


"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." - The Queen, Hamlet

Curses on those folks who take and adapt lessons for the present from the classics of history. Take a stand, people! Discard history altogether or talk like a pirate every day.