"whisky-dave" wrote in message
...
On Tuesday, 22 September 2015 21:46:31 UTC+1, dennis@home wrote:
On 22/09/2015 11:23, whisky-dave wrote:

Using film gives an better apprecaition as to what real photography
is rathe rthan just taking a snap shot.


I disagree.
It means you have to write stuff down and/or remember why you did a
particular thing three days ago when you get around to viewing the
results.

No problem, sure if you take 1000s of snaps how will you remmeber but iof
you're limted to a few then you'll remmeber them, especailly when it's
costing you money.

While digital lets you see what works there and then and its easier to
see why.

This is not what people tend to do though.

It also allows you to experiment and produce different pictures which
you would never do with film.

in theory but rarely in practice.
Colleges are going back to film, you'll often here of schools and colleges
askign about darkroom stuff.





With digital there is no cost in taking a 1000 bad shots and then
deleting them from the SD card.

Time is the cost and until you can tell the differnce between a good
shot and a bad one how will you know which to delete.

You learn from your mistakes and you can make more mistakes with digital.

But you have to realises they are mistakes first, and how will they know.

Digital allows loads of truly dreadful photographs to be taken because the
cheapness means that you *might* take less care with composition, exposure
etc when you don't have the feeling of "this is going to cost me money so
I'd better take a bit more care".

But set against that is the fact that if you *are* willing to learn from
your mistakes, the fact that all your photos are free means that you can
experiment, and you can see instantly which is the right exposure in a
situation where an automatic meter would be fooled. Admittedly, because the
exposure latitude of digital is less (it is very easy to overexpose and
irrecoverably burn out details in the highlights) you *need* to get the
exposure more correct, but at least with a digital viewfinder (or at least
the ability to see a picture immediately after you've taken it) you can see
if you need to tweak the exposure.

The ability to take multiple shots increases the chance that one of them
will capture the action at the correct moment - eg just as the aeroplanes
cross if you are photographing the Red Arrows, just as the dolphin is
grabbing the fish that someone is holding, or to make sure that everyone in
a group has their eyes open and that no-one is pulling a silly expression.
It is better to take too many pictures and throw away many of them than to
miss taking the perfect picture because you are worried about how much it
will cost.

I would never take a "difficult" picture (eg against the sun or looking
through a window where I want the outside to be correctly exposed) without
previewing in the viewfinder or by taking a trial shot, to estimate what
correction I might need. With film I'd need to guess; with digital I can be
sure I've got it right.

Because photos are free, I find that I can even take simple record shots of
things like information boards in museums so I've got information to refer
back to later without having to take in all the information at the time.

Another advantage with digital is that it allows those who want to spend the
time, to be able to post-process photographs to correct for things that are
unavoidable at the time of taking the picture. For example you can correct
for deliberate off-axis photos, where you have to shoot something reflective
at an angle to avoid picking up reflections of yourself or your flash. You
can retouch objects that you cannot avoid including in your photograph such
as lamp-posts - I'm quite proud of a photograph that I took of St Pancras
station where the only place that avoided trees obscuring the building
involved including some street lights in the foreground: I was able to clone
details from adjacent brickwork and windows, spotting a repetitive pattern,
to paint over the street lights. Short of digitising a film negative/slide,
making digital corrections and then re-photographing the result to film,
that's simply not possible with film. Tweaking colour temperature (or
white-balancing for whatever the colour of the daylight or artificial light
happens to be) is so much easier with digital.

As long as you avoid the dreaded over-exposure and burnt-out highlights (I
find it better to under- than over-expose if I'm unsure and tend to set my
camera permanently on -0.3 stops) you can produce some stunning results with
a modern camera, especially one such as an SLR with a larger sensor and a
better lens. Which reminds me of one extra thing that digital allows:
correcting for known barrel/pincushion distortion in a lens (something that
is present to some extent even in expensive lenses, especially in a zoom
lens at some focal lengths): I have a utility that "knows" about the
distortions that are inherent in many lenses and can correct for them to
avoid rectangles looking curved inwards or outwards.