Will Digital Make LF obsolete?

[Andrew Herrick]

I would be interested to hear people's views about the long term direction of di gital photography, and the impact it will have on large format photography and d arkroom practices in particular. I have seen some discussion to this effect in t he archive but the most recent I found was a year old so I hope people won't min d if I reignite the debate. I am currently saving up a substantial amount of mon ey to buy a large format lens I have covetted for some years. Part of my justifi cation for spending so much money is that it is an investment for life. I am 27 and plan to be using this lens when I am 70.

But will I be able to? Will my new lens be made obsolete by digital in just a fe w years? Will manufacturers bring out a "35mm" digital camera with LF format qua lity at low cost as I have heard a pro photographer say? Will conventional film even be available in five or ten years? I have heard many criticisms of digital photography. The main one I am worried about it does not seem to be as much fun!

In all areas but this I am a technophile. I love all this new digital stuff. But I like fooling around with photographic chemicals, dark slides and enlargers. I am dismayed at the speed with which CD's replaced LP records. Will digital came ras do the same thing and make all my fun a thing of the past? Will film be wide ly available, or will it be made by boutique specialist firms who make fiendishl y expensive film for die hard photographers who insist on doing it the hard way? Or is film quality such that it will always have an edge, in LF at least?

Maybe I have completely misunderstood digital and have nothing to worry about. B ut I would welcome any views before I spend my money! I would be interested in v iews from both die hard digital and old school people.

[Don Sparks]

The world could end tomorrow....buy the lens you have always wanted and have fun today.

[james mickelson]

Not for a long time. It will eventually and that may be a good thing. But right now and in the foreseeable future digital will be digital and silver imaging will still be as it has been for over a hundred years. Say I have a nice D5 Nikon. Okay I also need a computer, scanner, the computer programs, time to learn them, and a quality printer with paper and inks. Now how much does all this cost? I'd say for a quality end product, traditional methods are still much cheaper than digital for now. I didn't say better, just cheaper. Somewday all will be digital except for people like me. I love the work it takes to produce a Fine Art Print. And a nice carbon print is a thing of beauty not easily matched by digital methods today. Buy the lense. You can always sell it to us old farts when the world goes comp[letely digital. James

[neil poulsen]

Check "Last Year at PMA" in the "Uncatigorized" archive for a closely related post. I asked basically the same question.

Since that time, my group has had presentations on digital, and work done in ink can be stunning. Even last night, someone brought in work from a 35mm slide scanned and printed on his home system. (700 dots/inch.) I was impressed, because it had the same textures one would expect to find in large format. Recently, I saw some large 16x20 examples that had been "tossed off" a ($500,000) Lambda printer. The saturation in color was really something. (Again, the source was a 35mm slide.) I'm looking forward to seeing something done with care on a Lambda with a larger original.

A problem that I see with digital (or for us) is that the best work, and the larger work (e.g. prints above 11x14) in digital, must be done by expensive equipment (6 digit) that can't be done at home. With silver, and for a reasonable (?) amount of money, the enthusiast can achieve first-rate results in a home darkroom. This isn't true for ink.

[Struan Gray]

I have been told that the main reason for commercial use of LF is not image quality per-se but ease of retouching. Repro work is almost exclusively digital these days as the necessary equipment reduces in price daily and it is no longer hard to find a qualified digital retouchers. So scanned roll film is increasingly edging out LF, with direct digital capture taking over in areas like catalogue work where the cost is justified by the throughput.

All this says to me that hobby and fine art LF photographers will find film stocks increasinly difficult to come by, especially in colour. This is already true in formats larger than 10x8.

Mind you, there's nothing to stop us making our own plates and printing paper. It's a pain, but the results can be excellent and it's almost certainly easier than persuading Kodak that small markets can be profitable.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Buy the lens and you'll be at the head of the "photography unplugged" craze when everyone is tired of looking at "perfect" digital images in 2035. Look at the resurgence of historic processes and the Holga/Lomo fad today.

That said, your large format equipment won't go obsolete, even if you do decide to give up film for digital methods. Like all technology, the cost of those high-end LF digital backs will come down, and you'll be able to produce images with millions more pixels than a "35mm"-style camera, with outstanding lenses and camera movements. Even if you can control perspective (at the cost of having to crop) and focus with a digital image in Photoshop, it's hard to produce the natural result you can get the old-fashioned way.

[John Laragh]

No.

[Doug Paramore]

Andrew: There is no doubt that digital will take over the magazine and publication end of photograhy, but there will always be those who appreciate classic photography. I wish you could spend an hour or so in my booth at an art show and listen to the comments on the pictures. So many people have never seen a properly printed, toned and presented LF black and white image. I have had people spend an hour or more in my booth just looking at the prints, and I don't claim to be a world famous photographer although my stuff sells well. I expect nearly all commercial and portrait photography will go digital but at the same time the hard core artists-craftsmen hypo- breathers will never accept digital as a serious method for fine art photography. Buy the lens and enjoy it. I am 62 years old and have had heart surgery, but I still buy lenses just for the sheer joy of using them and looking at them. I obviously am not buying them to use for 20 or 30 years. There is just something wonderful about a precision lens that makes it a joy to own. Good shooting, Doug.

[Scott Walton]

I have to agree with Doug, production stuff will be digital but the fine art stuff will still be there. I plan to start Platinum printing this year and am looking forward to it.

[Charlie Stracl]

Another interesting thread.

Except, perhaps, for fine are, digital will eventually completely replace silver based photography, but I don't know if it will happen within the next century.

Here's why: silver memory is very, very cheap. The amount of information you can store on a piece of film is much more expensive in the electronic or magnetic domain, even today.

But, most importantly, silver is "parallel processing" and electronic is "serial processing". You can expose an entire sheet of film in one ten-thousandth of a second, or 100 microseconds. This is electronic flash. There is no memory that can move all the data contained in a single piece of film in that short of a time frame.

Our company produces catalogs for our products. All of our photography is silver based. It then gets scanned for PhotoShop work. But it starts out as silver.

In any case, buy the lens. Even digital photography uses lenses. And, at least in 4x5, when digital takes over you will be able to buy a digital back at an affordable price for your view camera. (You can buy them today, but whether they are affordable or not depends on your viewpoint.)

And LF will never be obsolete. It's lasted as long as photography. No other camera has the full range of controls as a view camera. It simply isn't practical with the short focal length lenses that 35mm and MF use.