On 25/09/2015 17:09, whisky-dave wrote:

1st you have to understand why your adjusting those variables and
why.

So you get your digital camera out and adjust the settings and see what
happens. With film you adjust the settings wait three days and forget
what setting you adjusted. There are no settings on a good film camera
that aren't on a good digital camera. You can even tell them to record
in B&W if you want to, but it only saves a bit of space on the card so
why bother?


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 how come those with the lower end cameras don't notuice such
things.

they do but they remember how bad film was so don't care.


which is were the interesting point comes in , if you give an person
a FF fully features DLSR with they get a better picrure than they
would from a cheap camera. The coirrect answer is they wiull get a
better quailty image, whch says nothing about the quality of the
photograph they end up with.

You give the same person a to flight film camera and they will get the
same results, so what?


Giving a person a DSLR does NOT make them a photographer. They may
well find it easier to take a photo but that's not the point.

It is the point, you want to teach them to make better pictures not prat
about with stuff they don't need to know about to make an equivalent
picture using film.


If the object is to enable them to take better pictures then don't throw
old obstacles in the way. You may as well teach them to paint.

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.

but doesn't make you a better photgrapher, or better at taking
photos.

How does using film?


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) .

I had a canon A1 with the MA motor drive that took either 8 or 12 AA
batteries .

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.

Lucky 'bstard my first camera was a Praktica L no battery, no meter,
My next was the Praktica VLC 2 which had a meter and a battery and a
detachable top.


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.

Probbably not but its a function I rarely use as I have an
approxamate appreciation of what DoF is. DoF isn't an exact sceince
it depends on many things.


What you do get with digital is the ability to take a shot and SEE what
the DoF is.


As regards getting a photo without a battery, I think you'd
struggle to find a film camera that didn't need a battery.

My practica L didn;t neither did my fathers camera that were 2/ 14
square. My ploriod land 110B camera doesn;t have a battery either.
Olympus trip.


So you want to teach photography using a film camera without batteries now?

(*) ie a photo-voltaic light cell in the light path generated a
voltage proportional to light intensity and drove a needle,

Yep the LTL3 I borrowed had that. Trouble with those cds cells was
their memeory.

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.

I have a lieca rangefinder add on but not the camera.


I don't need a rangefinder I can estimate distances to a few percent
with ease.