Why we shouldn’t forget about film just yet!
I can hear you all sigh reading this title. Here comes another ‘film vs digital’ debate, but that’s not really what this post is about. Not all of it anyway.
We’ve probably seen the biggest single advance in photography in recent years with the relatively low cost availability of good quality digital cameras. We all talk about how many megapixels our cameras have, and enjoy playing around in image manipulation software like Photoshop to produce work of different styles. We replicate the old darkroom techniques digitally, and it’s cleaner, easier and much quicker.
But, in my opinion we shouldn’t write film off just yet. There’s something about an image taken on film – it has that quality that digital can’t yet reproduce. Digital is certainly catching up, there’s no question of that, but it will never match film. It will always be different in one way or another. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, I’m simply saying that they have different qualities.
When I refer to film here I’m not speaking purely of the standard 35mm film that we used to buy from Boots years ago. I’m talking about a range of formats, from 35mm through to large format. If we compare a cheap compact film camera to a modern digital equivalent then I think digital will win every time. Compare a modern digital compact with a Leica IIIf (35mm film) from 1955 and you’ll probably find the opposite.
There’s still a general consensus that if you spend over five grand on a new Canon EOS1Ds Mk III you’re going to get the best possible results – far better than film anyway. This is true up to a point, but even a camera of this cost can’t quite compete with a well taken medium / large format film image that has been properly exposed, developed and hand printed. If you’re a purist looking for the best possible quality then you need film. You need to take a perfectly exposed image, develop it correctly and produce the print yourself. Provided you have the skill, expertise and experience to be able to do this then the results will speak for themselves – though not many photographers have this skill now.
The best way to get the ultimate quality digital file isn’t to use the best quality digital camera. It’s to use medium or large format film and scan it, but get it scanned properly. From here you can use Photoshop rather than a darkroom to carry out your post processing, but your original digital negative has all the characteristics of the film source, like grain (or lack of), sharpness, and exposure latitude. One of the biggest problems with digital at the moment is the way that it handles highlights. With film you tend to find that highlights are handled much more naturally, similar to the human eye. Digital has a tendency to clip highlights quite severely. In colour you find that one of the colours tends to clip first (either red, green or blue) producing unnatural results. The best camera we’ve seen so far for handling highlights has been the Fuji S5 Pro – that’s why we use this for our ‘people’ photography. As good as it is though, it’s not as good as film.
All things considered though, I’m sticking to digital. The reasons for this are many, but ultimately it’s a trade off between the absolute image quality of scanned medium / large format against the convenience of the digital workflow. I find that the results I get from digital are certainly good enough for my purposes as I don’t produce 5 metre billboard images, and don’t think I ever will. I can use a number of plug-ins in Photoshop which do a pretty good job of replicating the properties of film I have enjoyed using in the past, like Ilfords beautiful FP4 for black and white or Kodaks classic Kodachrome 64 colour tranparency film. I don’t really have the time to develop my own prints because as much as I would like to I can’t pass on the labour charge to my customers. I’d be priced out of the market in weeks.
What I can do though is carry over the principles of film photography into my digital workflow, especially at the capture stage. There’s a discipline that’s missing in many photographers today, and I find that more and more tend to work in a ‘smash and grab’ fashion. Holding down the shutter in machine gun fashion hoping that one of the shots you take is ‘the one’ just misses the point. For our ‘people’ photography we always, always remember that there is a person on the other side of the lens, and taking a good image depends on engaging with them, and taking a little time to make sure we get everything right, not just firing off a blast of shots.
Jerry Avenaim is a well respected professional photographer who has had his images used on covers of all the leading fashion magazines. He says:
“A photographer can’t simply accept what is in front of them and take a picture, that’s not being a photographer, that’s not even being a photo journalist, that’s paparazzi at best.”
He suggests carrying out your own experiment. Cover the back of your LCD panel on your digital camera with paper and sticky tape, then find a subject and spend as much time as you like photographing it. However, you are only allowed 15 shots. Compare this with your attitude to your photography if you allow yourself only 10 minutes of time but unlimited shots. You’ll probably find that following the first route will make you think more. Each shot is now more valuable than the last, and patience and discipline will ultimately give you a far more pleasing result than the alternative.
My conclusion? For ultimate quality you still can’t beat film, but digital is a pretty good compromise, and in 2010 is certainly good enough for most applications. However, to me the way we worked with film at the capture stage is something we should remember and try to include in our digital routine.
