On Wednesday, 23 September 2015 14:12:28 UTC+1, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 23/09/15 13:41, NY wrote:
"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.

+100 to all of that.

-100 for avioding the fact that we're talking about getting a good picture
which is more than just getting teh correct exposure.