"dennis@home" wrote in message
web.com...
I would never go so far as to say that film is an obsolete
photographic medium (in the same way that I wouldn't describe vinyl
as an obsolete sound-recording medium), but it's becoming more of a
niche product.

I would say vinyl is obsolete as a recording medium, some still use it
for playback but I doubt if many cut vinyl these days.

The only record that I've heard that was recorded to vinyl (well, actually
shellac on aluminium) was a recording made by the BBC of a talk that my
grandpa made on Children's Hour, probably some time in the 1950s. It is
notable for the weird more-posh-that-Mr-Cholmondley-Warner voice that my
grandpa puts on, under sufference, to mask his own "educated West Riding"
Yorkshire accent. He was talking about how steam trains work and comes out
with the phrase "end now the steam is caming aout of the chimney laike an
ballett fram a gan" (and now the steam is coming out of the chimney like a
bullet from a gun) - forever after we used to tease him about "a ballet fram
a gan". Knowing grandpa, he was hamming it up as a protest against the daft
rules which said that little children in Chobham or Weybridge wouldn't
understand anyone who didn't speak in a Home Counties accent.

Vinyl is niche, like film: it has its devotees who prefer it, but the
convenience and superior sound quality (eg lack of hiss and scratches,
better frequency response and dynamic range) of CD make it a no-brainer to
go for. MP3 has been a backward step, because it allows lossy compression
and all the horrible artefacts that this introduces (like JPEG for pictures)
but a lightly compressed MP3 (eg 192 kbps or higher) sounds
indistinguishable to my ears to a CD.

Is there anything about photography (the creation of pictures using
light) which you would lose if you didn't teach about film-specific
issues like reciprocity, different light curves of different makes of
film, the need to choose the speed of film before you start shooting,
given that these are not relevant to digital.

They aren't very relevant to most photography as most people would correct
for them in printing and there isn't much you can do when taking the
picture without adding extra light.


Choice of colour v black and white is an after-shooting
post-processing issue with digital (indeed the photographer who took
digital photos of my wedding presented a few shots both in colour and
monochrome, with contrast-enhancement to emulate a B&W negative as
opposed to straight colour-to-monochrome conversion).

Choice of emulsion can be controlled after the event using programs
that alter the gamma curve to emulate different brands of colour
slide and negative film - again, deferring that decision until after
shooting.

There aren't many emulsions that you can easily get these days.

It's ages since I've bought film. Kodachrome is no more, I believe, both in
terms of manufacture and Kodak labs to process it. Is Ektachrome still made?
I imagine if any slide film is still made, it will be something like
Ektachrome that can be processed by any competent lab. Negative film of
various speeds is probably still made, both B&W and colour? What about that
Ilford XP5 that was B&W but which used colour chemistry (eg the image was
made up of dye rather than silver)? That was amazingly fine-grained for 400
ASA, but it was a bugger to process consistently because of the higher
temperatures needed, but fortunately it seemed to tolerate a wide range of
under/over development!

And of course the cinema and TV industry still use negative film, though
there aren't many programmes that use it in preference to high def video.
"Lewis" still uses it (I went to watch them filming scenes when I lived near
Oxford) but the cameraman said it was becoming rarer and cinematographers
who were used to (and preferred) film were becoming rarer.

Choice of ISO speed can be made from shot to shot. When I used film I
used to wish I could do this. As a photographer you need to know why
you don't shoot everything at 3200 ASA (greatly increased noise,
maybe different tonal and colour representation though I can't detect
any with my cameras), but you don't need to decide on a fixed ASA for
all shots.

It is not a deficiency of digital that some of these issues do not
exist. Some might even see it as a bonus that you have fewer
restrictions like this.

Of course if your pupils intend to use film as well as digital then
they need to be aware of them, but since most people will only ever
use digital, it may no longer be necessary to know about them, in the
same way that we don't need to know about choosing the correct amount
of flash powder to use, now that everyone uses electronic flash, and
we don't need to use a tripod for every single shot and the subject
does not need to remain still for many seconds now that film/digital
sensitivity is a lot higher than it once was. Knowing that all these
restrictions used to exist is probably sufficient.


A five minute talk will tell you all about the differences.

For example my wedding photographer said that he no longer uses film
for any of his work (portrait, wedding, landscape, buildings, as far
as I could see from his portfolio) because digital allows him to do
everything that film could, but for a minimal per-exposure cost and
with fewer restrictions such as need to choose film before shooting,
and inability to preview shots in the field if necessary. As such,
knowledge of film is starting to become unnecessary.

Digital has exceeded the quality of film for a few years, that's why very
few film cameras are sold. There is nothing a film camera can do that
can't be done on a digital camera and you can restrict yourself to doing
what a film camera can do if you want to.

What intrigued me about Whisky Dave's comments was that he seemed to imply
(though never elaborated) that you use aperture and shutter speed
differently for film than for digital, which was why it was better to learn
on film. At least I think that was the gist of his argument. Within a normal
range of shutter speeds, you used them identically. All the same rules
applied: a short shutter speed freezes motion, a long one allows it to blur;
a wide aperture gives a shallow DoF and hence separates the subject from the
background; a small aperture gives a large DoF. Halving the shutter speed
requires doubling the aperture (ie going from f8 to f5.6 - I'm surprised he
didn't know where the 1.4 factor came from). All that knowledge from one
medium can be transferred directly to the other.

I've never experienced reciprocity failure because the only photos I've
taken at long exposures (eg 10 sec) have been of lighted buildings etc at
night - situations where the light is too dim to use a meter, and there's
not just one correct exposure but a whole range according to personal
preference. When I took a series of slides of the Christmas lights and
floodlit buildings in Bristol when I was at university, using a blue filter
to correct for tungsten light on daylight slide film, I probably experienced
horrendous reciprocity failure since I was using exposures of a minute or
so, but since I was wildly guessing exposures anyway, and since most of the
lights were coloured rather than being white tungsten (and many were
discharge tubes which reproduce very oddly on film) I wouldn't have know if
there was a colour shift. It would have been more apparent if I'd been
taking photos in proper white light, eg metering at f 2.8 and then stopping
right down by n stops and simply applying the normal multiply-by-2^n factor
to the shutter speed.

Thank goodness digital is immune to reciprocity failure. As a test, I took a
photo in room light at wide aperture and maybe 1/20 second, and then through
almost-crossed polaroids as a crude neutral density filter and with the lens
stopped right down, resulting in an exposure of something like a minute. And
the brightness, contrast, colour and tonal range were indistinguishable; the
only way to tell the pictures apart was the greater DoF.

Talking of discharge tubes as a source of light, one thing that has changed
from the days of film is the horrible green tinge of photos taken under
fluorescent light. It's not down to auto white-balance because I've fixed my
digital camera on daylight and photos come out with either no colour cast if
the lights are daylight fluorescents (6500 K) or else with a pale orange
cast if warm white fluorescents are used (around 5000 K) - a less extreme
version of the stronger orange cast under tungsten (2000 for normal bulbs,
3000 for photographic lights). So the results with digital are more as the
physics of light would suggest. I wonder if there was something in
Kodachrome that reacted to the small amount of UV in fluorescents.

If you white balance off a sheet of paper, it's possible to take copies of
the same subject under a wide range of lights (room tungsten, fluorescents,
LEDs, sunlight, shade) and get results which are all very similar, apart
from a slight muting of some tones of red under fluorescent and LED because
these are not a continuous spectrum. Imagine the range of filters you'd have
to carry around to cope with all those different light sources on slide
film. Negative is less critical because they can (and do) correct at
printing - confession time: if room light was fairly dim I didn't even
bother with a blue filter which would have "stolen" about 2 stops of light,
and I used to let the printing take care of the adjustment.

And then there were the joys of push-processing. HP5 push-processed to 1600
ASA resulted in grain that made the pictures look like pencil sketches!
Ektachrome 160 tungsten pushed to 640 was vile: very saturated and very
contrasty, though in fairness the stage lighting was probably a bit harsh
and shadowy as well.

I must admit in some ways I regret the passing of film: there is
something evocative about the smell of a box of slides or a wallet of
prints; the noise of the projector; watching slides in a darkened
room on a silver screen; the way that a slide would occasionally go
out of focus as the projector lens started to "hunt". And the moment
of anticipation when you first opened the box of slides or the wallet
of prints - remembering what you had taken pictures of, maybe several
weeks/months ago, wondering whether such-and-such tricky shot had
"worked" (ie whether you'd estimated the non-metered exposure
correctly).

But I wouldn't want to go back to those days.

I might dig some film out of the freezer and run a roll through my Nikon
SLR if i can find a battery as it doesn't work without one.
I could use the MX but I don't have any 35mm film.

Yes, finding a battery for an old camera is always a problem. I had a film
in my film SLR which I forgot about after I got a digital camera, and only
discovered several years later. Because my camera was motor drive, there was
no way of rewinding the film other than with the motor, and the battery was
dead. I got the photo shop to remove the film rather than buying a battery
just to do that job! It was weird to see photos taken some five or six years
earlier!

I tried to sell the camera and lenses on eBay but all I got were offers of
50p or £1 which says a lot about what value people attach to film cameras
these days. Sad - it was a good camera (certainly lighter than my DSLR and
its long lens!) though I skimped on the lenses and forever after wished I'd
bought genuine Canon rather than third-party which had more pincushion
distortion than I'd have liked.

It's great with packages like PT Lens to be able to correct for lens
distortion like this: it picks up the make of camera and lens, the focal
length and aperture, and adjusts using its database of known lens
distortion. Purists might say that it's cheating and that you should buy a
more expensive lens in the first place, but zoom lenses will always have
*some* distortion somewhere in the range of focal lengths, and it's not
always practicable to change your position to alter the framing to match one
of your prime lenses.