Benefits of film photography?

[Paul Ron]

It's the chemicals, man!
The chemicals!

 

[reg]

5) Film is much better at very long exposures

Well, there is reciprocity failure...

 

[deanimator]

Shooting film can help control your output...36 exposures - one film on a job or at the beach with the family (compared to 400 with the digital camera maybe). And you will most likely store these negs carefully (or should!)

Digital can mean hours sorting, labelling and editing...converting, archiving etc, and worrying about losing a ton of data if your discs degrade or HDs fail (which they will do!)...you simply tend to shoot too many pix!

An example: The famous shot of Bill Clinton kissing Monica Lewinsky was shot on film...the photographer later said had it been a digital file it would have probably been erased since at the time the "event" was not thought to have any particular meaning...the scandal broke about 2 years later...4 days of searching physical archives turned up with the Picture of the Year
Read about it http://digitaljournalist.org/issue9807/editorial.htm

 

[saltface]

Film does not require electricity to expose. Useful in areas where batteries are scarce. Also nice for all night exposures.

Assuming you're using a full manual camera. I've used up new batteries in a matter of hours with film doing star trails.

 

[Stogie]

I kinda like the idea of my negatives still being around 50 or 100 years from now. I know my digital files won't be around that far into the future. If they are, will the present format still be usable 50 years in the future? I was going thru some boxes not long ago and I found some negatives that I shot about 45 years ago, when I was a kid. That was a great moment.

 

[saltface]

I kinda like the idea of my negatives still being around 50 or 100 years from now. I know my digital files won't be around that far into the future. If they are, will the present format still be usable 50 years in the future? I was going thru some boxes not long ago and I found some negatives that I shot about 45 years ago, when I was a kid. That was a great moment.

Oh! Look! Great-grandpa's pictures are on this... this... eight track?

 

[Alex_B]

film latitude is unbeaten, even slide film is better than today's digitals in that respect. Very useful in landscape photography where you cannot control the light like you do in a studio.

Also you get higher resolutions if you go to formats beyond 35mm, in particular large format.

 

[Alex_B]

I kinda like the idea of my negatives still being around 50 or 100 years from now. I know my digital files won't be around that far into the future. If they are, will the present format still be usable 50 years in the future? I was going thru some boxes not long ago and I found some negatives that I shot about 45 years ago, when I was a kid. That was a great moment.

negatives do degrade, some faster, some slower.

And all this digital formats will be unreadable in the future talk is quite a hype if you ask me. Unless there is a serious destruction hitting our civilisation, JPG and TIFF will be readable in 50 and also in 100 years.

You just have to be careful with the media, don't store it on a harddrive, CD or whatever and leave it in a box for 50 years, then you might have a problem. Store it with all your other data that accumulates and either outsource the storage, or keep your data vault alive by migrating to new media from time to time. I still have my electronic data from 20 years ago, and there is no problem.

 

[Early]

The biggest advantage of film is that digital is way too easy.

 

[Alex_B]

The biggest advantage of film is that digital is way too easy.

I still think exposing Fuji Velvia correctly is easier than exposing my digital sensor correctly. Also I spend more time with processing since I went digital.

 

[epatsellis]

negatives do degrade, some faster, some slower.

And all this digital formats will be unreadable in the future talk is quite a hype if you ask me. Unless there is a serious destruction hitting our civilisation, JPG and TIFF will be readable in 50 and also in 100 years.

You just have to be careful with the media, don't store it on a harddrive, CD or whatever and leave it in a box for 50 years, then you might have a problem. Store it with all your other data that accumulates and either outsource the storage, or keep your data vault alive by migrating to new media from time to time. I still have my electronic data from 20 years ago, and there is no problem.

I find that for most of my fine art/landscape work, a hybrid approach works, with color negative film scanned, there's an insane amount of dynamic range to work with, more than raw digital files, from my experience.

erie

 

[Paul Ron]

"Oh! Look! Great-grandpa's pictures are on this... this... eight track?"

Gee, I wish we had a something or other to read these pictures. I can't see anything on these silver donuts. Oh but wait, there's a shoe box full of 100 year old negatives... see the images? ummm makes you think hey?

So what your CDs will last 10, 000 years... there will be no computers around that could read em. What happens when Blue Ray takes over?... convert 1000 CDs over to the new format? YEAH! I still havea a closet full of 8mm reels waiting to be put on Beta.

 

[8power]

i was going to talk about 'shoebox' too..

i have 800mb of raw files after a day out today.
i shoot raw because i want something that equates to a negative (in my mind). however i find it very tedious to have to use an app like REVEAL
to inspect them on my mac, then open SILKYPIX to take a proper look/export, then open GIMP to size them up. i miss the shoebox full of prints that can be shared around over coffee. it's hard to think of a decent s/n thats available of flickr etc these days - and all the admin decisions of privacy/share access of images on those interfaces. i think i'm bored of digital technology and electronic culture. i think i'll get myself a contax 139q with a zeiss 50 and pull the plug on internet photosharing.

 

[doobs]

Why should one have to ask the advantages of film over digital? Aren't the results enough obvious proof?

 

[Early]

Digital is rapidly creeping up on the resolution of film. And, who knows? They just may be holding back some to allow more sales of the old technology.