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Thread: The Future of Film Photography

  1. #81
    Joshua Tree, California
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
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    224

    Re: The Future of Film Photography

    I like the results I get from my 33 megapixel Leaf Aptus. Still a good drum scanned 4x5 transparency has a warmth and romance that the Leaf doesn't have. Of course it is a lot harder to get a good 4x5 exposure than with the Leaf.

  2. #82
    Drew Wiley
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    Sep 2008
    Location
    SF Bay area, CA
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    18,337

    Re: The Future of Film Photography

    Brian - I just have to walk a block from my office to an upscale mall where probably more money is spent every month on large format photography than any "fine art" printer like me will generate in film or paper purchases in a year. Great big advertising
    prints or transparencies, and they get routinely replaced. Probably a fair amount of PS
    post-processing, but I seriously wonder how much of this was shot digital in the first
    place. Film is still a lot more convenient except for tabletop stills and smaller scales of
    reproduction. Yeah, for catalog work, cookbooks, and magazine ads digital is taking over big time, but the extra investment needed for highly detailed large scale work is clear off the charts for a lot of pros. Until some much more affordable system of high detail digital capture comes along, there will be a commercial demand for LF color film. Black and white LF can probably survive just fine with or without the advertising industry.

  3. #83

    Join Date
    Jul 2010
    Location
    Chichester, UK
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    463

    Re: The Future of Film Photography

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    I find it utterly ironic how these discussion all seem to end up at one point or another comparing trends in amateur consumer photography with what we're doing
    in large format. What relation did one-hour drugstore print machines and intersection Photomats have to do with large format in the past? Damn little. And
    what on earth do eighty million little digital cameras have to do with it now? If we
    just want family snapshots to share on computer screens, we'll probably end up
    picking up one of those things ourselves. But it will be no substitute for what we
    do with view cameras. A much better comparison would be what's going on with
    display advertising. Big prints with a lot of detail are still very much in demand and
    generate of a lot of dollars for the industry. This means either high-end digital or
    real film and high-end scanning. Inkjet output is only a part of the market; real silver-based color paper still has strong demand. It's used in botique window advertising all over the place. Someone's certainly paying dearly for that. And while there's a lot of speculation about what Hollywood might or might not do with film as the years go by, there's an even bigger market called Bollywood. Even all the old Technicolor cameras and dyes have been bought up by foreign film interests, and are still available if someone comes up with the budget to use them. Different style movies necessitate different methods of presentation, and I have no doubt that film will remain a favored option for many of them. It just looks different, and those folks know it too. After all, video was a significant innovation which didn't push real film off the block.
    In my mind, the consumer film photographer is significant to the view camera photographer because all those millions (if not billions) of folks who shot a roll or two of film a year paid for all the R&D and tooling for film technology over the last several decades. Like it or not Large format photography hasn't paid its own way for a long time, not that I'm saying that it's not profitable for Kodak or whoever, rather that LF is not the driver for advances in film technology and isn't the reason a film company would invest in new plant. Large format is dependent on the success of other formats for its survival and if for example, motion picture film goes it will most likely drag colour film LF with it.

  4. #84
    Drew Wiley
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    Sep 2008
    Location
    SF Bay area, CA
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    18,337

    Re: The Future of Film Photography

    Tobias - I suspect that both Kodak and Fuji have absolutely mountains of unused R&D
    available, and that it's marketing decisions, enviro rules, and the availability and cost
    of materials which are going to factor into future decisions. Virtually all the developments we've seen in the past several decades have merely been refinements on basic film options already extant. I'm no insider, but if film mfgs are like everyone
    else, and the engineers want to keep their jobs, they'll always be a number of steps
    ahead of the market. As a comparison, in the plastics resin industry, chemists are
    constantly inventing new formulas just for the hell of it, experimenting with potential
    uses, and then waiting. Maybe only 2% of what they concoct ever finds a practical
    market, but the odds increase whenever one has the most new options. And since these guys are probably only 2% of the payroll and are considered valuable, they tend
    to keep their jobs even during tough times, at least more than most. But all I'm really
    implying is that films and color papers could hypothetically keep improving for several
    decades based upon already extant research (practical development is driven by probable markets, which unquestionably have lost ground to various digital options).
    We probably got things like T-grain technology from the demand for finer grained
    small camera films, so your point certainly has relevance, but it's just one factor
    among several.

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