Why should you shoot film ? : a POV from a digital maven.

Wow -- see what happens when my e-mail goes down. Amazing...!!! I just deleted about 40 comments. I tried to edit and did but then finally I just threw up my hands and deleted any comment with insults. Please - best to ignore the nasty unhelpful comments... I will come along and delete them anyway! Normally my email works..so write and let me know if this kind of thing is going on again. <p>Actually someone did the right thing - which was to email me but I didn't get it until yesterday and didn't get to do anything until today.

Although the quality went down, the thread was and is beautiful--one of the best I have read on PN. I don't know much, but after this exchange I do know some more things to look for. I think I'll just put everyone down as "Interesting" and let their photos speak for themselves, even as I know that their prints would tell their stories better.

 

Marc and Al and others, thank you for the great new things for me to watch out for. Grant, thanks for the great pics. By analogy, I can say this: as a person trained in social and political philosophy, I have found that many subtleties are lost on the untrained and those lacking in insight, but sometimes the raw insight of the untrained philosophical natural just blows me away. Surely the same is true for the photographic natural such as Grant. Humility reigned supreme throughout a great part of this thread, to the point that I was asking, "How long can it stay this good?" It didn't, but I still learned something from everyone even after it turned a bit sour. (I didn't see it before your housecleaning, Mary.)

 

Who was right on "bokeh" and "Leica glow"? I have no idea, but I'll keep my eyes open a bit wider from now on. And, oh yes, I'll keep shooting both film and digital as long as I have life in me, and I'll start with the Nikkor 85mm f/2.8 that B&H sent me just today--entry level, not the best, of course, but a new one for me to experiment with. I still wish that I had had the money for the next one up the scale. I also wish that I could hang around for another fifty-nine years to see what happens.

As an update to the wedding Marc and I shot together last spring the groom, Mikal, had me soup a couple of rolls of Tri-X for him yesterday. He was eager to see what his newly purchased 45 year old 85mm f/2 Nikkor Leica mount lens could do. His looks next to brand new. I've been using the hell out of mine for over 30 years and it was well used when I got it. He'd fallen in love with the pix I'd shot with mine at his wedding. He also booked me for a baby shower in December! He's going to make me shoot color though.

I'm going to have to try what you guys are trying, and to take your recommendations about film. I don't have the money for a new camera, or the money to test a lot of different types of film, but at least I can try two or three of these various B&W films in my old N80 with my new Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 (typo on the previous posting) and see what I can get. I won't get anything like what you guys are capable of, but the challenge will be worthy.

 

What I can do is to try virtually the same shots with both film and digital and see what seems to work. Thanks for the inspiration, and thanks again for a truly great thread. You guys ought to be teachers. The interplay of ideas has been fascinating, even if I am nowhere near a position to say who is right or wrong about a single substantive claim that has been made.

 

Thank you again, Marc and Al, and to you, Grant, for the photos and the counterpoint. Thanks to you, too, Mary, for the reference to landscapes and abstracts in your early years. I think that it is time for me to try to rise to the challenge of people-centered work, whether of the portrait or street/photojournalistic varieties.

<i><blockquote> What I can do is to try virtually the same shots with both film and

digital and see what seems to work. </blockquote> </i><p>

 

Do a search and you'll see this has already been done, oh, a million times already. Lots

of good stuff on the web. Try <u><A href =

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml>here</a></u> and

<u><A href =

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout-followup.shtml>here</a>

</u> to start.

Thanks, Bailey. I appreciate the links, since it has been a while since I visited those pages. I only have a handful of newer lenses, and they are all Nikon mount, and I want to try them on both my 14n and my old N80, just to satisfy myself--nothing scientific, of course, just something to satisfy my enduring questions and doubts about having gone almost totally digital since 2002.

 

I also miss the simplicity of shooting film. It was quick and I almost never missed a shot, something I really can't say with this Kodak monstrosity, even if the resolution is out of sight under the right conditions.