Film is Dead!

[looker]

i'm sure we've just killed it...if it wasn't dead before...

[Rob Tucher]

We've seen all of this before. When photography was invented there were the people who embraced it and said that painting was dead, and there were the people who painted who got worried but insisted they'd go down with the ship. Then color photography came along and everyone said that B&W was dead. Here we are years later and digital is threatening traditional. Everything can co-exist with the wierd twist that modern companies need larger profit margins and dump products that don't sell to their large expectations rather than sell for a profit. But as someone else has said up there, we can make our own the way the early practitioners did. The deciding factor for commercially produced products is ecomomics now, but we do still have painters around.

[Chuck MacKarness]

Well, after spending my time attempting to get some contact sheets out of the "photo shop" at the mall, I realized digital is more convenient. I will not be easily convinced digital is "better", but the ongoing cost of consumables with film and the ability to have a good quality color lab on my desk top makes it "nicer" to operate with digital. High quality prints start with high quality artist; it is not the tools that provide art. It is not art that feeds us. We must understand each format (?) digital and film are what they are, and best used that way. Today. I just put my set of Nikons up on eBay looking for that *lover of yesterday*. But I will never let go of my medium and large format cameras, digital cannot go there. Yet.

[zaheer sattar]

We need to differentiate consumer sense from art sense.Have all the different forms of painting died or simply grown in terms of stature and ....price, to probably all of us "yes".Has AutoFocus technology really thrown manual focus in dustbin? to many "no". Isn't B&W still a superior and preferrable mode of expression, to many "yes".Film might become lesser option when digital format will be able (if ever) to compete economicaally, but on an art horizon film will never be dead.Life is not pixellated, it has its greys, its shadows, its blurrs and its sharps.