I'm done with film.

Many are asking why one should scan film in the first place. If you just make a digital file, why not shoot a digital camera, right?

Simple.

Because I am a negative person......

Simple.

Because I am a negative person......

 

Film forever!

 

Hmm... I'll let that slide...

http://bayouline.com/o2.gif

Film forever!

 

Hmm... I'll let that slide...

http://bayouline.com/o2.gif

LMAO.....

I don't blame you. I can do everything and more with my 46mp DSLR that I did with MF. Many will argue that film is cheaper, if you add in a $2000+ film scanner or $100 per negative high res scan it is not.

I will still use my film cameras on a limited basis, mainly just for fun. Given the choice of taking my Bronica and 400mm nikkor for a shoot vs my D850 & 400mm Nikkor, guess which one wins...its a no brainer. I get very clean noiseless frames to ISO6400 with my DSLR. I would typically pack 3-4 film backs with ISO 100-800 loaded. It is a lot to carry.

My local labs stopped processing film and I hate mailing it out. Besides cost I can't stand waiting. I will keep my darkroom for B&W and enjoy it, but everything I can do with B&W film I can duplicate.

 

Your making the right move, move ahead and don't look back.

I have been shooting film for about 10 years after a few "spray & pray" years of shooting digital.

I still shoot digital for it's own advantages

For fast changing OR technically challenging scenes

I went to film for two main purpose

1. It is inherently a more contemplative process because you are forced to slow down (LF for sure)

2. There is a unique look to an image shot on film. Not necessarily better but different.

While I want to "wet print" just for the experiences, I have no problem with a hybrid process and why should I.

On a decent large printer, I get some nice prints.

The film is a "different" sensor and lends it's personality.

I use both DSLR & Scanner (Epson 4990) to digitize. One is an easier workflow, the other can get you more detail & dynamic range.

I find that for 35mm& medium format, the image quality form a 4990 scan is quite good. Certainly good enough for 16x20.

I have had good success with large format on certain image with the scanner.

As far as cost goes, I buy about 50/50 new & expired film and have had almost zero problems.

I process all my own B&W and could do C-41 but send most out.

I still enjoy the process as it's still rewarding. Sometimes fun

I guess it all about what floats your boat.

Yeah well I ditched the film idea wasn't able to get a dark room too much hassle too much trouble don't have the space like others have said anywhere from $50 to $100 to get a good high res drum scan of something that you like another thousand to $1, 500 scanner constantly buying film in the long run digital way cheaper, even though the initial investment and digital is more to start out not in the long run you count up all the five the $8 rolls of film you're burning how many times you sit there and pay $75 to have a drum scan.

 

I say it again love film love medium format film cameras love the look of wet Prints do not like the look of scanned images. They do retain some of the film look not a whole lot of it but some of it. I can shoot a Fuji xt2 in Arcos mode simulated black and white mode and put it up against anybody scanning film.

 

it's very realistic looking there are some very good presets or some very good software out there that helps you simulate film it's not perfect but it looks pretty darn good and while you sit there and try to roll film around your 120 canisters to process them I'll just push my little 32 gig card into my camera and I'm good.

 

I don't regret leaving film at all in fact it's the smartest thing I probably could have done it's i just too much of a process to shoot to shoot it to develop it to have it scanned. Now if scan film look like a wet print I'll drop my digital gear in 5 seconds and go back to a film camera.

 

I'm very happy with the switch to digital No Doubt I'm still learning how to process my images better and print them but that's all part of photography.

 

and I'm not knocking film you guys that shoot film and scan it and are happy more power to you.

 

Exactly like the previous poster said it's whatever floats your boat.

“Your making the right move, move ahead and don't look back.”

There is no reason to ever take a photograph if there is to be no looking back.

Looking back is what photography is all about.

Without looking back it is pointless.

 

;)

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah well I ditched the film idea wasn't able to get a dark room too much hassle too much trouble don't have the space like others have said anywhere from $50 to $100 to get a good high res drum scan of something that you like another thousand to $1, 500 scanner constantly buying film in the long run digital way cheaper...

 

Once you start getting scans, you've gone digital, so that's a digital expense. Digital equipment is way more expensive than film equipment, then there are software expenses, computer/printer expenses, having to read 500 page manuals in order to use the cameras, then there is the time to edit the extra hundreds/thousands of digital images shot compared to film, etc etc.

digital is cheaper as long as you arent taking it too serious. to just get pix, photoshop them, then take them to wallgreens for prints on their million dollar machines for a couple bucks is the way to go cheap. software can get expensive but there is enough shareware and outdated stuff available for cheap. i have an ancient version of photo elements 6.0 registered copy i got at a garage sale for $1. works great on my old windoze Xp machine. good printers n paper n ink can add up... oh and lets not forget the time involved in archiving digital pix. external drives, clouds, raid systems etc. but since im not taking my digital stuff very serious, i dont care if i lose it all because my hard drive droped dead. i do put my pix on those memory sticks you get for a couple bucks.

 

film can be expensive but you can cut costs just as easily. make your own rodinol n fixer using household chemicals. scan your negs on a cheap outdated epson, photoshop the scans and print in wallgreens. but the biggest difference, you have the physical negs archived for generations down the line.

 

biggest difference between digital and film?.... digital technology changes fast. if jpegs arent supported you are skunked. if the media your pix are stored on isnt supported, you are skunked again. oh you can chase technology n convert as you go but consider how much you have to be converted by then.

 

with negatives... put a neg on your belly n lay in the sun and you will have a beautiful tatoo.

 

 

 

.

put a neg on your belly n lay in the sun and you will have a beautiful tatoo.

I guess that's what they mean when they talk about a "positive outcome." :D

“Filmtats”.

You just started a new millennial hipster craze......

“Filmtats”.

You just started a new millennial hipster craze......

 

Hmm... that means they'll

have to start using film to

get the negatives (or even

positives)...

http://bayouline.com/o2.gif

Turning a negative into a positive.....

People come to their own conclusions about what medium is best for them and they usually do so with good reasons, the OP being no exception. I'm shooting a 6x9 rangefinder now because a) I can still focus using a rangefinder but not an slr focusing screen, b) I live in a place where there are still labs and processing is cheap, and c) I find digital photography to be about instant satisfaction as Moving On said. And I still shoot a lot of digital but my heart is with film. The point is, debating the two is silly. People do what they do in the way it suits them to do it.

- I have files that I scanned from film about 20 years ago, and pictures from my first digital camera, that are totally viewable today on any common computer platform. In fact I can now view them on my phone, which was impossible/unheard of when I took them.

.[/quote

 

I have to agree. I recently dug out some NEF files I'd taken with a Nikon D70 in 2004 and I was able to make far better prints from them then I was 14 years ago.

 

One of the main reasons I shoot film is that I can get a decent print relatively easily. I like having control over a process that I can (almost) fully understand. I’m sure I could get a decent print out of my computer printer, but I just don’t have the energy. Likewise for the imaging process, I shoot digital when I need it out of convenience, but for anything I consider serious, I use film. To me they are two separate disciplines - one is photography and one is digital imaging. For now, I prefer the former, but things may change.

I had been one of the best die hard film shooters and my defense and war threads go back well here may be infamous, I hope not, but I had the same dilemma and studied intensely the options and bought and XT-2 and my enthusiasm for Photography has hit the highest of highs, more importantly the Fuji XT-2 provides so much creative flexibility, it offers no more excuses for me to whine about not getting the shot. Now I just create to the best of my ability and intern I think I'm growing at a rate like the days I first picked up a camera. I still have and use my Pentax 67II its here to stay as long as it hold up, but its use falls into critical specificity. Like when I know the shot, and I'm referring to landscape work, places that I return to, a habit of mine. I agree with you as to the look of inkjet, it was never something to warm up to, but lightjet prints are as close to classic darkroom wet printing there is at the moment. Cibachrome is gone, but Fuji papers: Supergloss and other media suiting the subject are superb. I didn't need to sell my film cameras, and I won't, I'm a sentimentalist when it comes to this kind of stuff.

I agree with you as to the look of inkjet, it was never something to warm up to, but lightjet prints are as close to classic darkroom wet printing there is at the moment. Cibachrome is gone, but Fuji papers: Supergloss and other media suiting the subject are superb.

 

Inkjet/Giclée printing is moving along in outstanding quality all the time, and the range of media far surpasses the "traditional" wet RA-4 media from lightjet printers, themselves very close to extinction with none manufactured new and spare parts costly and indent, when and where they can be obtained. Fuji's media is good, but out there a large number of types and qualities of media are challenging Fuji-san's offerings.

 

I printed Ilfochrome Classic for 31 years and can vouch for its quality and archival stability, if not for the tedium. It was a very, very difficult media to print, and later quality control problems originating from the factory (together with non-existent public relations!) pretty much turned printers away in droves from 2008 onward. Nobody misses it now because printing standards, diversity and quality are much more easily controlled and repeatable than to use materials that often turned up crossed-over, expired, damaged, warped or otherwise compromised and unfit for use in printing.

 

I have discontinued RA-4 printing and switched to wide-gamut inket/giclée that is more suitable to RVP50 and RDPIII which require a fuller gamut rather than one truncated.

Fly fishing is soothing, gear fishing is effective, but who can argue the technically superior killing power of dynamite?

 

If you are a pro, use dynamite. If it's your hobby, use what makes you happy!

 

I use film.

I was one of the first in my photo club to try scanning negatives and slides and printing them on Epson paper. People say they can tell the difference between a color print and a digital epson print, but in my rather limited experience with the club that was not the case. Actually the fact that I and others were getting quite decent prints of our negatives eventually caused something of a backlash against us because we were said to have an unfair advantage of being able to produce better prints than the people still doing their own printing with a darkroom.

 

I feel like I was always a pretty poor black and white print maker. It was magical stuff but I just didn't really have the talent to do it well. Adequate for my early yearbook work, but not up to the challenge of producing really good silver prints and not able to afford a color enlarger and the attendant equipment to do my own printing in color. For me, the NIkon Coolscan V (LS-50) and my Epson printers allowed me to finally create some adequate prints of my work and represented a sense of freedom that I really appreciated at the time.

 

I don't think that photographing skill necessarily translates to wet darkroom skill OR to digital darkroom skill. And I'm not a great digital darkroom worker either, but even the skill level I have allowed me to achieve a small level of success that I wouldn't have achieved if I had tried to keep my wet darkroom going. Maybe it's just a matter of what talents you have and what system feels comfortable to you.

It is very plain to see. Not entirely the fault of film, my friend.

Prepping, colourimetrics, profiling, inter-image profile and corrections... you are missing a heap, and this is in my view the reason for your persistent poor results. Very high quality prints are not achievable with simple desktop scanners, nor if done cheaply, or by an operator with limited or next to no experience or knowledge of what he/she is doing, at the scanner and/or at the print step. It is not an overnight, one-hit-and-I'm-there job. Never was and never will be.

 

RA-4 and inkjet prints, either and both have their own followers, provide undeniably excellent quality print results from analogue and digital (especially analogue). Both require their own, individual metrics set up to achieve the best results for printing. What would have thought of that?

 

To a large degree, the quality of the input image — the photograph you took, also plays a big role: think of the things that are obviously wrong, or "might" be wrong: images high or low in contrast, poorly exposed, casted, excessively grains, poorly processed... all manner of things, can impart their own problems that no scanner nor skilled and experienced operator will fix, not least the home hobbyist battling demons of frustration and angst.

 

For many, the to digital results in tears. For me, it results in passing so many Fail scores at adjudications that, really, there should be mandatory film-to-digital transition courses to teach people how to be a photographer, and not a blind and imprecise spectator holding a fancy camera. Remember also that a good photograph is always created in the mind's eye, first. If you don't get what you want with any camera, analogue or digital, where do you think the problem might lie...?

 

Anything potentially valuable in this post was lost in masturbatory pontificating. There was way too much of this rubbish the last three pages of this thread from seemingly perfect film photographers who I suspect are just over the hill and enamored with their own experiences.

As long as I can wet print, I won't ever give up black and white film. I have been shooting digital now for 26 years, it is old hat to me, the low light performance and sheer ease of use can't be beat. But I only use camera systems that will allow me to fully integrate film use into the digital use because film use is where my heart is.

 

So after some 10 years of relentless work, searching for the right property to buy and saving, I finally have a real darkroom. It's in my new house, is about 500 square feet, very modern ( all LED lighting ) and I can print up to 45" x 55". Two of three build phases are done, the last being the design / building of the mural system and all the details to be filled in like cable harnessing, moving my iMac Pro into the space, etc.

 

Maybe there are a number of things I could have done different in my career but one remains steadfast and that is staying true to myself and the long standing belief that the future of *my* photography is my vision for it.

 

That future vision is largely based on film.

 

 

I just took three rolls of color film in for developing and scanning. B&H charged me $71.00 and, remember, I had to pay for the film also. To be sure, I asked for a step up from the basic scan level, but still that is big bucks for processing. I really enjoy the lenses and handling of film cameras, but if the prices go higher I may have to give up the hobby.

Sorry, but I don't buy this 'do it all in the camera' philosophy, and neither did Ansel Adams.

 

One of his most memorable aphorisms was "The negative is the score, and the print is the performance". (He was a trained pianist of concert standard, BTW.)

 

There's also anecdotal evidence from his printer that 'Moonrise over Hernandandez' was an absolute pig to print. Likewise with many of Dorothea Lange's negatives apparently. So much for getting it right in the camera every time.

 

And who wants to be stuck with the 'look' that some Kodak or Ilford chemist thought was right when they designed the emulsion/developer/paper that you use?

 

The almost infinite manipulation of tone curve and layering that digital allows is far in excess of what can be achieved by chemical means and dodging and burning.

 

20 excellent created prints are surely worth more than the one that happens to fall into place in front of the camera when the light and subject just happens to be right? And by 'created' I don't mean montaged and faked.

 

Or perhaps Ansel Adams completely wasted his time writing 'The Print' after 'The Camera' and 'The Negative'?

Edited October 10, 2018 by rodeo_joe|1

As long as I can wet print, I won't ever give up black and white film. I have been shooting digital now for 26 years, it is old hat to me, the low light performance and sheer ease of use can't be beat. But I only use camera systems that will allow me to fully integrate film use into the digital use because film use is where my heart is.

 

So after some 10 years of relentless work, searching for the right property to buy and saving, I finally have a real darkroom. It's in my new house, is about 500 square feet, very modern ( all LED lighting ) and I can print up to 45" x 55". Two of three build phases are done, the last being the design / building of the mural system and all the details to be filled in like cable harnessing, moving my iMac Pro into the space, etc.

 

Maybe there are a number of things I could have done different in my career but one remains steadfast and that is staying true to myself and the long standing belief that the future of *my* photography is my vision for it.

 

That future vision is largely based on film.

 

 

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Wow that's amazing. How are you doing fixer/bleach type disposal? It looks like you have a system under the sink. That looks nicer than my darkroom at high school or college and bigger too. Beautiful.