Chemical Photography as AM Radio?

The latest issue of Popular Photography has a letter comparing the

brouhaha over digital vs. chemical photography to the dust up in the

fifties and sixties over FM vs. AM. FM, with its superior fidelity,

was going to eradicate AM. Of course, AM is still around. It is used

for talk radio while FM is the choice for music.

 

 

 

 

Do you think there is a place in the world for both types of

photography? If that makes Leica users like AM radio station, which

would you be? I think I would be a Flea Market of the Air.

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I think a better comparison is analog radio transmission vs. digital radio transmission. Besides photography, one of my other hobbies is ham radio and short wave listening. I love the idea of radio signals skipping across the atmosphere and ground to get to me thousands of miles away. Digital signals beamed to a satellite, then back down to a receiver, is somehow just not the same to me � no element of chance, hit and miss, or �natural� physics.

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What good will your old huge old Collins tube rig be when all the signals are digital? What good will your M2-7 be when film is ���.

The reason AM radio never died is because FM tranmission is line-of-sight and in mountainous/valley areas FM reception is bad or impossible.

 

Film vs digital is more like black-powder guns. There are small companies who produce the black powder and percussion caps and other paraphernalia for the niche market of enthusiats and collectors, and several manufacturers make reproduction muzzle-loaders and cap-and-ball handguns. That is where I eventually see film going. I no longer believe it will die for a long time, if ever, thanks to the black-powder model.

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I hope Jay�s right, but I find myself shooting my Springfield Amory M1911A1 a lot more often than I do my black powder 1858 New Army .44 ;-)

I'm a shortwave listener too, and the same thing with digital vs analog is happening now, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent. I think it's to a lesser extent because people who listen to shortwave like the "art" of picking up far-away stations, even though the sound may not be perfect. It's the same with photography really. Yes, there's grain and dust spots, but we like the grain, we like the craft of it. There's no craft with anything digital. You pass control over to the digital voodoo and the computer geek teams who designed the stuff. A person is in more direct control of things in the analog world, and that's a nice feeling. I don't own a Leica, not that I wouldn't if I could afford it, but I do use prime lenses, so I can't be all bad :)

I'm no digital guru, but it seems like the difference is more like the difference between single-shots/bolt action rifles and semi-autos.

CD's are definitely more convenient (smaller, faster) and the audio is digital. Similar to digital photography.

 

Vinyl is still preferred by many enthusiasts/professionals for the un-reproducable sounds and tones. Unfortunately, not many people use vinyl anymore, let alone have record players. I hope FILM never goes that way.

I still use vinyl: Linn LP-12, full Linn system for the stuff that hasn't come out on CD's.

 

Use a boombox for the CD's I have.

Steve, if one day you find your Linn missing... don't blame me! ;)

<<Better analogy might be Vinyl vs CD's>>

 

No, no, no, no, no! Turntables will always be useful to play existing records even if no more vinyl records are produced. Film cameras will become useless if film production/processing stops, and even in freezers film will not last indefinitely. Film cameras and black powder guns both depend on the production of *consumable* products where DIY is not an option.

Carl, not sure where you're going, Smith?

 

Huh?

"Film cameras and black powder guns both depend on the production of *consumable* products where DIY is not an option."

 

Good point Jay, but diehard chemistry guys like you could always go a bit more retro and do the soup-your-own-wet-plate thing with a view camera or even with the cut film holder for your old Hassy's ;)

I think it's more like tubes... Sure you can get better more accurate sound, and there is no need to change tubes in a solid state amplifier, but the sound is much more depthy and natural.

 

Digital produces good images that cannot be pushed nearly as far, if at all. And i am not even sure about fidelity, as CCD images always look to me a hair better in color and contrast than VHS, Betamax SP at the most (I ahev said this before...) After all, it is basicly the same technology.

 

I don't think compairing it to AM is very fair. Have you seen an ISO 400 film v ISO 400 digital? I think that the noise in the digital is far less pleasent than the grain in film. This thinking that digital is "grain free" is 100% accurate, at ISO 50, at which point printing a ISO 50 slide at the same resolution as the ISO 50 digital, I kind of doubt that that argument stands up, even moreso with larger than 35mm, plus atleast with silver you can enlarge past the grain further than you can interpolate past a cameras maximum resolution.

I think Jay is partly right. Film is, of course, a consumable, so the vinyl vs. CD argument is invalid. But his musket-shooter analogy is off base. Film will become slightly less common. It may well go up in price. But it ain't gonna become some fringe-dwelling hobby like musket-loading. I'm so sure of this that I'm thinking of buying a Heiland Splitgrade for my V35 so I can make fiber-based B&W prints in a more timely manner. Why? Because I like them. But more importantly, from a financial standpoint: Snob Appeal. People pay more money for products that confer status. If everyone has a digital camera spitting prints out of their computer, then there's NO STATUS in it. Sad, perhaps, but true.

Yours is best-case scenario, mine is worst-case scenario.

"Film cameras and black powder guns both depend on the production of *consumable* products where DIY is not an option."

 

True of film cameras, but not black powder guns. You can certainly make your own black powder if necessary. People did it for centuries.

"Yours is best-case scenario, mine is worst-case scenario..."

 

My 'best-case scenario' would be that film and digital coexist peacfully in the cockfight we call an 'economy.' But that's a pipe dream. So we'll have to wait it out and see who's comes closest to being right. :-)

By the way, when the big power failure occurred last week, at first, the only station I could get to find out what was going on was an AM all news station. It took a little while for any of the many FM stations to get going with generators, and when they did, most of them were carrying the AM station's signal. It just goes to show sometimes, there's welcome room for the lower tech solution. All the digital TV was useless. At the same time, there was lots of radio on the shortwave bands, including the ones where Hams operate in Single Sideband - and shortwave is AM too. Unlike digital cameras and all their paraphernalia, film isn't that hard to make. As long as there's a market for it, someone will make it, somewhere.

I don't remember which one of the twenty groups I'm in that brought up this web site but you all should read what this guy has to say about the whole Mind numbing debate. I have read and even once and a while involved myself (for which I am sorry) in this on going waste of time but now that I have read this article I'm satisfied to enjoy my film cameras until hell freezes over and try to figure out how to use all the gizmos on my Canon G3 digital (which should happen about the same time).

 

Anyway you might also check out a couple of his other articles I think the guy is a genius or something close.

 

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm

 

enjoy

 

Mark W.

repairable ... disposable

It's a moral and religious issue: digital is the anti-Christ.

 

And I really don't like my use of a Leica being compared to the level of talk radio. Repent!

It's a moral and religious issue: digital is the anti-Christ.

 

And I really don't like my use of a Leica being compared to the level of talk radio. Repent!

I must be right. I only posted once. Divine intervention made it post twice.

Jeez, Mark, a genius? C'mon! With comments like this?:

 

"For "film" we have slide film (used by most professionals and I) and negative film (used by amateurs)..."

 

Bad judgement AND bad grammar.

Most of these analogies are ridiculous.

 

Want a good analogy?

 

Daguerrotype. And glass plates and a host of other technologies used for making photographs. They're dead, except for an absolutely miniscule number of photographers.