Black and white film look from digital camera mainly post-production?

[Vautrin]

I'm rather enamored with a lot of pictures I see coming out of Hasselblad 500cm's, Leica M3's, or even cheaper alternatives like the Kiev 60 or Pentacon Six, but a lot of the digital pictures I see just lack something that the film has. Maybe it's sample bias and the people shooting on these other cameras are better photographers, so the pictures end up looking better?

I'm not at the point where I want to go off and dive into the world of film cameras just yet, but I was curious if there are any digital cameras out there that do a better job of emulating a film look like the black and white image below has, or if it's primarily just a matter of taking the right shot on anything and then doing some post-production work with something like silver efex?

small boy with paper | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

If you shoot with a Leica or a Hasselblad, and compare that with a shot with, say, a point and shoot you convert to B&W, the film will win as:

1. Both Hasselblad and Leica use EXCEPTIONALLY good lenses. Maybe even better than a modern Nikon or Canon lens, but that's arguable and it's best not to start flames
2. Digital cameras suck at black and white out of camera.

For point #1, the only thing you can do for digital is get a digital version, which is out of most everyones price ranges.

For point #2, there's all kinds of things you can do to make digital look as good as film

Check out this post on the forum, which is almost exactly the same question posted at nearly the same time you started this thread:

http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...me-techniques-get-really-good-b-w-images.html

 

[Vautrin]

VSCO Film | Visual Supply Co

Becareful.. last time I posted about emulating film... Mayhem!
http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/film-discussion-q/293162-film-digital.html

The issue with trying to compare film to digital is youd really need to look at finished prints of both

There is SOOO much information in film, your scanner will never capture but a good printer (a person in a darkroom not a machine) will

But i can see the difference in a traditional silver gelatin print and an epson print

 

[gsgary]

I'm rather enamored with a lot of pictures I see coming out of Hasselblad 500cm's, Leica M3's, or even cheaper alternatives like the Kiev 60 or Pentacon Six, but a lot of the digital pictures I see just lack something that the film has. Maybe it's sample bias and the people shooting on these other cameras are better photographers, so the pictures end up looking better?

I'm not at the point where I want to go off and dive into the world of film cameras just yet, but I was curious if there are any digital cameras out there that do a better job of emulating a film look like the black and white image below has, or if it's primarily just a matter of taking the right shot on anything and then doing some post-production work with something like silver efex?

small boy with paper | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Leica MM

 

[ceeboy14]

VSCO Film | Visual Supply Co

Becareful.. last time I posted about emulating film... Mayhem!
http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/film-discussion-q/293162-film-digital.html

The issue with trying to compare film to digital is youd really need to look at finished prints of both

There is SOOO much information in film, your scanner will never capture but a good printer (a person in a darkroom not a machine) will

But i can see the difference in a traditional silver gelatin print and an epson print

If you really want to see how much information you can get from a film negative, go to http://www.piezography.com/PiezoPress/ and query Jon Cone's remasters of Dorothea Lange's original negatives rescanned. My, my my. I have two of these prints and it's incredible, the detail and tonality captured. Jon said in several of the Lewis Hines rescans he had to dilute the image quality slightly to get an exact recreation but that Hines, had he the technology at the time, had so much more richness and detail in his images than he could have ever imagined. I don't remember the exact scan dpi but beleive it is in the 2,400 range. I know it takes a good long time to scan one 4x5 negative. These scans are available from the Library of Congress. What is not is Jon Cone's printing systems, and that's another story altogether.