"whisky-dave" wrote in message
...
Whats that got to do with film vs digital?
Digitals can be manual the same as film can be automatic.

which digital camera would you choose for teaching photography ?
could you treach photography without a battery ?
Can you take a photo without the aid of electricity ?

Any camera (film or digital) that has the ability to turn off its automatic
features which are useful when time is tight and they are the difference
between getting reasonable picture or not getting it because you're still
making manual adjustments such as focus, aperture and shutter speed, but
which should not be relied on in all situations because, as you rightly say,
the settings are not always correct and because they don't encourage you to
acquire a greater understanding of the techniques of taking photos and the
variables that you can adjust.

That probably includes many compact cameras (eg Canon G9, Canon SX260) which
have auto-everything modes but also have manual focus, shutter/aperture
priority (as opposed to Program mode) and also have Manual mode which give
you control of both aperture and shutter speed.

Results with one of those cameras are surprisingly good, but there is
noticeable "noise" (random speckle, analogous to film grain) and optical
distortion from a fairly cheap lens.

So maybe you need an SLR - again, with auto-everything if you need it but
with the same degree of manual or semi-auto settings. A larger sensor and
better, interchangable lenses give better quality images.

Incidentally, the same degree of auto-everything but also manual focus,
exposure etc that I had on my film camera (a Canon SLR with motor drive,
roughly 1990 vintage) with various metering modes (spot, centre-weighted,
average over whole frame); my previous one (my dad's old Yashika from the
1970s) had manual focus and manual meter only, with ground-glass focussing
screen and metering that required you to adjust aperture and/or shutter
speed until neither a --- (underexposure) nor a -- (overexposure) LED came
on. I have to admit that it was easier to judge manual focus with the older
camera's ground-glass and split-screen focussing screen than it was with the
Canon's focussing screen which was ground glass only with no split screen.

One thing you don't get with compact cameras (film or digital) is the
ability to stop down the lens to see what DOF the aperture will give you.


As regards getting a photo without a battery, I think you'd struggle to find
a film camera that didn't need a battery. All the ones I've had over the
past 40 years, except my grandpa's old Voigtlander that had a passive meter
(*), have needed a battery at least for the exposure meter and also with
some for the film advance motor drive. I *think* that those cameras would
not even fire the shutter without a battery, even if you used an external
meter to determine aperture/shutter speed.


(*) ie a photo-voltaic light cell in the light path generated a voltage
proportional to light intensity and drove a needle, without needing a
battery; it also had a dual viewfinder (not through the lens) which
presented two images from about 2" apart in the camera and relied on
parallax to show you when those images overlapped and hence you had focussed
on the correct distance