What do you miss most about film?

[sjmurray]

I started shooting film in the late 1960's with a Nikon FTn. After processing thousands of feet of Tri-X and Plus-X and printing in the darkroom, I don't miss it one bit. It was a different time and era. I'm ready to move on. I love digital. You can see right away what you've shot. I like the colors. The technology gets better all the time. Digital is good for me. I let go of film, my old friend, and said "welcome" to the new world of making pictures. I don't expect digital to look like film. When I look at a print made from film, I see two things: the image, and the film qualities. Digital has a different look, having a different substrate with different qualities. The FTn was new technology in 1969 and exciting to use. I now am excited by the DSLRs I use. They make photography fun for me now as the old technology did when I was a teenager.

[petrana_batik]

<p>-- "They will last, too. :-) Let's cut this stupidity and misinformation about digital archiving, please."</p>

<p>Karim, I think you need to straighten your bits and bytes, as well as your point of view. It's not that digital archiving is impossible, it's just very cumbersome, and keeps on changing. Film may accumulate dust and scratches, but will always be readable-- whereas digital copies are a drag to backup and convert from one media to the other. And yes, media deteriorates FASTER than film. I know so, because I keep moving my CDR/DVDRs every 2 years to new, fresh copies. I keep my negs/slides in plastic sleeves, and they remain the same.</p>

<p>If you have the time, read this <a href="http://www.pcworld.ca/news/column/a1ac9c720a01040800b24c9a7f5ded73/pg1.htm">article</a>.</p>

[albertdarmali]

Miss the optical viewfinder?

[Peter_in_PA]

I miss having the whole roll destroyed by a lab accident (only happened to me once). I miss

getting the roll back and finding out that I had something set wrong on the camera and my

whole roll of photos of an un-repeatable event are gone. I especially miss the way the

chemical process of processing film smelled and can only IMAGINE how much it was harming

the environment. (Note: It's not as bad for the environment as it used to be... they fixed some

of that.)

 

Okay, I miss almost nothing. But like others wrote, I miss Tri-X, too...

[gdw]

Grain. I am amazed now to look through some of my older books and to discover that photographs that I at one time considered extremely good are really of such poor technical quality. I was also surprised to discover that I missed that quality that grain the size of cow patties gave to some of the images. I loved High Speed Recording Film pushed in Rodinal, so yeah, I miss film grain.

 

Would I go back, absolutely not. I my wax nostalgic but I love my digital.

[thomas_sullivan]

Petrana....you are mixing two or three different types of people together in your comment. First, the person who doesn't back up digital files, doesn't move them from old medium to new medium........is the same person who can only find the print today, has no clue what so ever where they put the negative. I know this to be a fact with the recent film to digital point and shoot people in my family. and as much as I tell them the right way to handle film and the right way to handle digital..........they don't listen. the best I seem to be able to do is to get them to at least print every digital pic they like................then their film and digital experience is the same. They have their prints............and only a much higher power knows where the negative or digital file is. And I will still have to scan their prints to get copies made for them. I did get, at least my daughter, to use an online print place that allows you to store all your pics on their site........so, at least she has the original digital file (of sorts)...........but she still can't find one single negative she took from a film cam.

 

Now, the same person who uses gloves to handle negatives, puts them in negative file sheets, stores them away from direct sunlight and toxic chemical fumes...........is the same person who has at least 2 copies on different mediums and keeps changing those mediums as the technology improves/changes. I personally have been scanning negative since the year 2000, and stored them on CD. When DVDs came around, and Hard Drives became much cheaper, I copied them over. But, just as an experiment I kept the original CD copies. Which, I keep in cases, in the dark, and normal room temp.........and they still can be read (so far) up to 7 years later.

 

I personally am of the mind that it's more....not all, just more....related to personal habits.

[douglas_greenberg]

Nothing.

[chanh_nguyen1]

My age and my enthusiasm for photography belie the fact that I have no experience with film. (My madness started with the Coolpix 990.) I often wonder if film provides any photographic capabilities not achievable with digital. I see some posts here about Tri-X (it's a type of film, right?). Can you get the same visual effects by digital post processing?

[jeff_s]

I don't miss too much about film except it's "soft clipping" characteristics, particularly with black and white negatives, whereby it was possible to capture everything from glowing light bulb filaments down to pretty deep shadow detail, all in the same frame. That said, it was a real job getting there with special film processing, maybe applying ferricyanide bleach to the original negative, too.

 

Then there's the particular look you get with Delta 3200 or Tri-X, and while you can simulate film grain digitally, why bother

[petrana_batik]

-- "Petrana....you are mixing two or three different types of people together in your comment"

 

Thomas, all I'm saying is that digital survivability is complex. I shoot both, side by side, and the workflow is not godsend, it's quite a hassle. Archiving thousands of shots is not easy, you need to keep maintaining it, year after year. I have terrabytes of harddrives, CDRs, DVDRs.. I'm not a weekend shooter with 2GB of CF cards: sometimes a project consists of 4000 shots, multiply these by 15Mb per raw file, and you get the "picture". Sometimes I feel that I had changed from a photographer to an filing admistrator! ;)

 

-- "see some posts here about Tri-X (it's a type of film, right?). Can you get the same visual effects by digital post processing?"

 

Why do it? why migrate Tri-X shots to the digital medium? The same can be asked-- can an inkjet print be as good as an original silver print (it can be close, but not as good).

[Sanford]

TRI-X with a D80: B&W mode, red "Filter Effects", high contrast, and ISO 400 should get you close.

[tri-x1]

<quote>"I started shooting film in the late 1960's with a Nikon FTn. After processing thousands of feet of Tri-X and Plus-X and printing in the darkroom, I don't miss it one bit. It was a different time and era. I'm ready to move on. I love digital. You can see right away what you've shot. I like the colors. The technology gets better all the time. Digital is good for me. I let go of film, my old friend, and said "welcome" to the new world of making pictures. I don't expect digital to look like film. When I look at a print made from film, I see two things: the image, and the film qualities. Digital has a different look, having a different substrate with different qualities. The FTn was new technology in 1969 and exciting to use. I now am excited by the DSLRs I use. They make photography fun for me now as the old technology did when I was a teenager."</quote>

 

 

I agree with the above comments by Steve. Film was exciting back in the '50s and '60s when I first started shooting. But shooting digital today brings back some of those same feelings of excitement and adventure I had in the old days.

 

I don't miss the darkroom for one minute. Spent too many hours, days, weeks breathing fumes--in the dark, by myself when I should have been spending more time with my kids. At least with the computer and digital I can be in the same room with family--and you can get up and do something else without worrying about the chemicals getting too hot or cold--and there isn't any set up or clean up.

 

I have a lot of film cameras. I appreciate them for their design and history. I might use them more if I had a really good dedicated film scanner. But my high end flatbed that was supposed to be as good as a dedicated film scanner, isn't. And at this stage in the game investing in a good film scanner doesn't seem very practical. All I had to do was compare photos taken with a 6 mp D100 to the results I was getting on film with an F4, plus adding the time required to scan those negs, and I was a convert.

 

Film had its day and I had a lot of fun. It's still fun to shoot a roll of black and white now and then. But as someone said, "nostalgia isn't what it used to be."

[tri-x1]

Oops!

 

Should have added. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Tri-X.

[walterh]

I still shoot film besides digital so I do not miss much.

[warbler5]

In the early 1920's, my grandparents purchased a Kodak Jr camera that used size 116 B&W film. I remember that camera being used at every major family event, one of the last being my graduation from college in 1973. When my parents passed away, along all the junk I inherited, I found an old metal matchbox that contained all of the negatives from photos taken with that camera. I spent close to a year scanning all the negatives...it was like going back in time.

 

For my grandchildren, I miss the fact that they will never have this same experience! One of my biggest worry about digital is that we will lose so much historically in the way we archive.<div></div>

[joshua daniels]

I still shoot film and have adopted digital for most of my professional work, simply because of cost, convenience, and quality (esp. at high ISO). But I miss the human scale of film, particularly in low-tech cameras (esp. those not requiring batteries).

 

Digital photography is truly amazing, and if you've been a film user previously you can appreciate many of its qualities. But I'm concerned about the facile boosterism of digital. It seems to have been embraced as a panacea, without much critical examination. The comparison point is not just "film" but the whole infrastructure and technological extension--and cost--that goes along with it.

 

At a certain level, film photography can be carried out with a relatively low level of technology. Without large computer, chip, and software companies photography is still possible; not so with digital.

 

In some ways I feel that digital photography is far more complicated given the returns--and costs--compared with black and white film. Color photography, in constrast, has always been far more complex, and for the serious hobbyist expensive and difficult to master. But the supporting infrastructure of film resellers, processing labs, and custom labs has allowed the photographer to produce good quality color images with a minimum of investment. Digital, as we know, takes the level of control light years beyond what was possible with color previously, but at a significant cost of infrastructure (not just the individual purchases, but the ongoing computer techonology associated with it).

 

Perhaps most of all, as user, I miss having a truly high quality camera with good ergonomics. Yes, we have some wonderful gear from Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, and Leica, but none come close in balancing form and function as the best film cameras, and -- I'm sorry -- but the viewfinders of most of these cameras pale by comparison to the average decent quality 35mm SLR of the past 25 years or so. Pick up any manual or semi-automatic professional 35mm camera of the past 35-40 years, and look through the viewfinder, adjust the controls, go through the motions of framing, setting exposure, and taking a shot. Then pick up the digital-wonder-beast, and see which you prefer. There is no comparison in terms of ultimate capability, but in terms of less-than-extreme use where autofocus and other advances are not a premium, the state-of-the-art film camera rules.

 

Finally, I think that in allowing digital to replace film--at least in our orientation to photography's future--we have assented to an aesthetic shift that bears further consideration. The way in which digital handles the dynamic range and color of a scene is both distinctly different from film, and in some ways if not less satifying at least expressive of the underlying techonology. As someone who has spent many hours in Photoshop converting RAW files and correcting images, there is a certain mechanistic, repetitive nature of digital images (not that film doesn't have its own algorhythms), and this can be disconcerting (I'm thinking mostly of the way highlights are handled, and the shifts in color and loss of detail that occurs, in a very consistent manner).

[andrew_brown3]

I only use film -- Delta 100 or FP4. Fiddling about with pixels is just for technicians sending out speeding tickets.

Andy.

[blumesan]

What I miss most is the scarcity of competent labs to develop the film.

[oivind_toien]

I miss projecting the slides on a big screen with a Leitz Colorplan lens. Projector technology available to amateurs today cannot match that quality, and it will be many years until affordable digital projectors will be up to that resolution. (I do love browsing though digital shots on a high resolution computer monitor though and admittedly checking details at 100%...)

 

That said, after getting into rescanning slides, I have become more sceptic about the quality that was achieved, perhaps because of insufficient technique (less chance to experiment) and also lenses that had weak edges on the full 35mm format, and now perform much better on the DX format. Ergonomics of a camera like the D200 has everything missed in previous generations, except operation with thick mittens in a really cold environment, the simplicity of the F2 was superior for that.

 

I also "miss" the expression of Tri-X and D-76 that I used with my F2 back in the seventies although that does not have much to do with transition to digital...

[melvin_bramley]

Is an oil painting better than pastels? Photography is just the use of one or more types of camera. I just enjoyed looking at a book of Karch portraits done with a larger format film camera & a hard act to follow!

The darkroom is still, in my mind, a more enjoyable place for an evening than the computer screen.

[Ed_Ingold]

I miss the water spots from sloppy processing, having film cut through sprocket holes and sometimes into the image area, returned in two-frame segments because there was a blank frame or two. Most of all, I miss having the film stuffed, uncut and unsleeved, into a film can, where it takes a permanent curled condition.

 

On a more practical side, I miss waiting an hour for processing only to find that one-hour service is a myth. I miss spending two to six hours to scan each roll, staying up all night to have something for a newspaper or client the next morning.

[petrana_batik]

Edward, funny... I never had any of those mishaps happening to me. I did have a Canon 1Ds die on me in the middle of a shoot, SIX CF cards rendered unusable (Lexar and Sandisk) in 2 years, and inkjet prints not surviving through a humid outbreak... :)

 

I actually find the "Nostalgic Film Buff" quote to be quite flattering :)

[joey1]

Agfa Scala Rodinal Pan-X, Kodachrome 25 and soon perhaps Kodachrome 64

[msitaraman]

1. Getting my K25 boxes back in the mail, stacking them up in the bulk slide feeder, and checking them out on my Pradovit. What a thrill!

 

2. The smell of fixer in the darkroom, and watching the images come up in the safelight.

 

3. The look of Tri-X and Verichrome Pan.

 

4. Portriga.

 

 

What I don't miss is the interminable wait to get those slides back (up to three weeks overseas), the physical exhaustion at the end of a long printing session, and my friends leaving their fingerprints as they pawed my carefully ferrotyped glossy prints.

[bradfarlow]

I don't miss anything about it since I still shoot it every day.