Digital cameras are great -- the technology they are built upon is remarkable, underpinned by remarkably sophisticated designs. Not only that, but the pictures they acquire are of such astonishing quality that they make anything that went before pale in comparison. So why then do digital cameras have such (relatively) short lifespans compared to film cameras?
The Leica M10 Monochrom is a $9,000 digital camera dedicated to black-and-white photography, but how does it compare to a $10 roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 black-and-white film? That's what the folks at Camera West TV decided to find out.
Over 8 years ago, we over at On Landscape performed a mammoth “Big Camera Comparison.” We compared medium format and large format film against various digital cameras including the then cutting edge Phase One IQ280, an 80MP CCD sensor which we used on a Linhof Techno, an Alpa, and a Cambo technical camera (we also tested a D800 and a 5D Mark II).
Most unfair camera comparisons these days pit smartphones against APS-C or full-frame digital cameras. But for their latest video, Sonder Creative took it a big step further: they're comparing an 8x10 large format film camera against three digital cameras that, let's be honest, never stood a chance.
The recent release of the Fujifilm XPro3 camera coincided with me getting some recently re-released Fujifilm ACROS 100II film. Given my love of Fujifilm digital cameras, film photography, and ACROS film, I desperately wanted to shoot and compare the new XPro3 alongside a rangefinder film camera.
On my last shift at the film lab in Bondi, I picked up one of the last rolls of Fujifilm ACROS film. It seemed poignant -- as my job at the shop was finishing, so too was the production of this film stock.
Photographer Bill Lawson wanted to compare the dynamic range of film and digital photography, so he recently went out and shot 10 stops overexposed and 10 stops underexposed for a 21-stop comparison to see how far you can go before the photo is unusable. He shares the results in the 7-minute video above.
Film is very rarely used in music photography anymore. The reason for this is primarily because of social media and instant news. There’s no time to go home and start pouring chemicals onto film to develop it or wait until the morning until a lab opens to do it for you.
Having learned photography in the time of manual analog film cameras, I know digital feels different. And for me, it’s all about the "left and right of photography."
Photographer Irene Rudnyk often receives questions about film photography, including from people who wonder why it's even worth doing when you can slap a VSCO filter onto digital images these days. To answer these questions, Rudnyk made this 6.5-minute video comparing film vs digital through a portrait shoot.
It's an age-old question: why do people shoot on film? Can you tell the difference between film and digital? Is it enough of a difference to warrant the high cost of shooting film? Or is it just a fad? We are here today to hopefully answer some of these and more!
Are you setting out on your journey of discovery in the wonderful world of photography? Are you wondering whether to go for digital or follow the fad for film? Are you intending to invest in some gear but don’t want to waste your hard earned cash on kit that doesn’t help you to progress? Here’s some advice from a photographer who has seen both sides extensively.
Photographers Anita Sadowska and Alex Hutchinson recently did a "film versus digital" comparison through a fashion photography shootout. They photographed the same subject with Sadowska using a digital Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR and Hutchinson using an analog medium-format Pentax 67 as a comparison of film vs digital.
Have you ever heard the argument that digital just doesn’t have the same look as film? Well, let’s put that argument to rest. I have painstakingly made my own Lightroom preset that I believe is 96% the same as my favorite film, Kodak Tri-X 400.
For a recent project, I was tasked with shooting a hot rod. It was exciting from the beginning, because this particular kind of car is pretty rare here where I live. The owner also requested that their dog sit on the car's fender, and for the photos to be huge -- 100 megapixels were too few.
The digital revolution—and a revolution it was—enabled photographers to immediately start saving money after new equipment purchases. Sure, the quality sucked initially (and convenience was overstated) but after a few years, the whole thing really started to work properly, for the most part.
I’ve been a user of VSCO Film for Lightroom for several years now. I’ve been happy with the results, but I wanted to see how close VSCO's settings are to actual film, so I decided to do my own tests.
This whole experiment was a learning experience for me, especially regarding the digitization of a film negative. For this casual experiment I shot some Portra 400 film on my medium format Fuji GA645, snapped a few similar frames on my Nikon Df, and did a side by side with the VSCO Portra 400 setting from Pack 01 straight out of Lightroom.
I’ve shot digital for as long as I can remember, but for a number of years I have been considering delving into film for my street photography work. Every time I became adamant about pursuing it, I talked myself out of it.
"What are you going to do with your negatives? How will you print? It’s so expensive! Your hit rate on digital isn’t that great...you have more control with RAW anyway...It will be waste of money"
You will be hard pressed to find a reasonable working photographer today, who won't admit that film still has a place in photography and really offers some unique characteristics, even if they choose to not use it. But often photographers who love shooting digital and don't want to deal with film attempt to write off and make excuses for why they can't shoot film. I'd like to offer a rebuttal to such excuses, inspired by a recent thoughtful PetaPixel post.
I love film. I purely, madly, and deeply love film. I learned on film, I shot my first wedding with film, traveled around Europe with a film camera, and have taken Polaroids on road trips, adventures and portrait sessions. I have boxes of beautiful little Polaroids that I treasure more than anything I’ve ever taken with a digital camera. Film is a wonderful, brilliant medium for taking photographs with real soul.
I wish I hadn’t, but the other day I stumbled across an essay on PetaPixel entitled 12 Reasons Photographers Still Choose to Shoot Film over Digital. Bravely, the writer had polled his associates who shoot film and culled their responses down to a dandy dozen. I shook my head sadly, because I’d heard them all many times before.
But the worst part came next. I scrolled down to the comments section. I tried mightily to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t, and the lurid spectacle of grown men and women (but mostly men) verbally beating the living daylights out of each other while thousands cheered them on from the cheap seats proved too much for me.
In a world in which photographs are primarily taken with digital image sensors, there are a growing number of photographers who are newly interested in film formats of the past. But why would anyone in our age of technological convenience still choose to shoot with analog film?
This year will mark forty years since the invention of the first functioning digital camera, and despite it being a measly 0.01 megapixels, it heralded a new age of digital photography and with it came a death cry for film.
Prompted by this incredibly dull article published recently by the BBC, I decided to ask some fellow photographers what reasons they had for still shooting the so-called "outdated" technology. Here’s the list of what they told me...
The video above is an episode of the British television detective drama Midsomer Murders titled "Picture of Innocence." It originally aired back in June of 2007 and tells the story of a rivalry between a "traditional" (AKA film) photographer and a digital one leading up to a village's annual photo exhibition.
There have been a few film versus digital articles here and there on the interwebs, but seems like very few have approached the subject in a scientific fashion or with the advice of both film and digital experts.
However, with the help of Joe Cornish (a landscape photographer who made his living shooting on medium and large format but now shoots Phase One IQ280s), Chris Ireland (who sells Phase One cameras), and myself, Tim Parkin, (I shoot film and run a drum scanning service), a definitive test was born.
When it comes to the film vs. digital debate, many people are fairly entrenched on one side or the other. But can you really tell the difference between RAW digital footage and film footage? What about when the digital footage is made to look like film using filters in post? PBS Digital Studios wants to put you to the test.
Here’s Shoebox’s humorous take on the difference between film and digital …
Another sign of the times (and bad news for film-photography enthusiasts): one of the most prestigious photo competitions in the world no longer accepts film photographs. Earlier this week Nikon published a "call for entries" for its 34th Nikon Photo Contest.
Lost Memories is a beautiful 3-minute-long short film by Francois Ferracci that imagines a future in which cameras can share images with the world as soon as they're shot -- oh wait, that's now -- and can beam holographic photographs into the air for easy uploading or editing. In such a futuristic world, would analog photography still have any role to play?
You probably know that, like computers, digital cameras depreciate pretty rapidly — especially when a replacement model is announced …