Is film photography "alternative photography" yet?

[darr]

Here is a recent short read by Brooks Jensen on "Dead Media" that touches on film photography:

http://daily.lenswork.com/2012/04/dead-media.html

[Bill_1856]

Lol!

[Kimberly Anderson]

Excellent points by Brooks.

[Renato Tonelli]

How ironic. My own children prefer to use their cell phones instead of the digi cameras I bought them for Christmas.
Last year I started using a Canon 5D to photograph musicians in performance. I tried, honestly, I really tried. I went back to Tri-X/Diafine.

[Merg Ross]

Thanks for the link, Darr. I believe that Brooks is "dead" right!

[E. von Hoegh]

Your portraits were likely called "alternative" because you use a Petzval lens. I don't think film has much to do with it. The contemporary use of Petzval lenses is clearly an alternative to more mainstream sharp-focused photography.

When using a Petzval to get "swirlies", it's not "alternative", but a perversion of the original design of the Petzval, which was to be a fast portrait lens - any careful worker getting "swirlies" in 1865 would have gone to a longer lens.

Petzvals aside, I think film has become an alternative process, just as wetplate did.

[SamReeves]

We're officially old fogeys now!!

[Jim Noel]

"There was a kind of perfection to the images that I didn't like, a sort of sterility and an overly-clinical quality that just didn't work with the sensibility that I was after."

I think you have hit the nail on the head.I have been searching for a word or phrase to describe what is unappealing about digital image, and I believe sterile and overly clinical are certainly a part of it.

[cyrus]

Actually nowdays I consider film photography - especially LF - to be more "printmaking" !

[E. von Hoegh]

"There was a kind of perfection to the images that I didn't like, a sort of sterility and an overly-clinical quality that just didn't work with the sensibility that I was after."

I think you have hit the nail on the head.I have been searching for a word or phrase to describe what is unappealing about digital image, and I believe sterile and overly clinical are certainly a part of it.

"Sterile" and "clinical" are two words I've heard used to describe audio CDs compared to vinyl. I've heard both, on equipment that can show the differences, and it's about right. There's a nuanced smoothness, for lack of a more thought out descriptive term, that is missing from both digitised music and digitised images.