Do you ever just wish digital was BETTER?

[nancy s.]

Today I did a shoot for a museum and I was switching between a Nikon film

camera and a Fuji S2. I really like the S2 but man.. I sure wish the captures

I took were dead on correct and never needed any tweaking. If I shoot RAW I

have to fiddle and convert and fiddle a bit more to get it prefect. If I shoot

JPG then I bracket so I get one out of 3 right.. and that doesn't work well if

you are shooting candid stuff. So, I get home and I am back at the hated

computer (when I could be doing something a lot more fun).

 

Because full frame sensor cameras are sooooo expensive, I have an S2 (and it

wouldn't matter if it was an S5) the View Finder is cropped. I was shooting

B&W film with a Nikon FM which has a pretty poor view finder.. but it was just

so much more comfortable mentally AND physically to shoot than the digital

equipment.

 

Bottom line is this. I just wish digital was bettter. I wish I did not have

to convert RAW on the 'puter and image fiddle or lose information. I wish I

did not have to bracket if I am shooting Jpg so I lose as little information

beyond the compression as possible and get at least one exposure pretty close

to print ready.

 

I wish everything was full frame and felt comfortable to shoot.. not

so "pinched."

 

IOW I just wish digital capture was better. I wish I could take the photos and

not have to convert, tweak, resize, and fiddle... I could just go straight to

print and get a satisfactory product.

 

Oh I can shoot film but there are inconveniences with that for what I was doing

here (I shot some B&W silver based anyway).

 

Now the computer boyz and girlz can come up with Hi def screens, program games

and graphics beyond your wildest imagination, create math and drafting tools

which can practically launch the space shuttle... (oh yeah.. computer DO that

now).. and they cannot come up with a digital camera system with latitude, full

frame sensors and images that come out of the camera that need zero tweaks!

 

For all the money it costs, I sure do wish digital was a better product!

[les]

Nope. I wish I was a better photographer.

[saskphotog]

Digital is as good as film. Better in some ways.

 

Digital cameras are no more or less perfect than film cameras, it's just that with film someone else was doing the converting, fiddling, adjusting to get it perfect. Now you have to. One solution would be to hire someone to do it for you like you did before.

 

All this assumes you used a competent lab to process the film and make the proofs. Then you show the proofs to the client, make decisions about changes you need, and then get the lab to print your stuff the way your customer wanted it. Not so BETTER, is it? If you never did this with film, then, sorry, I'm wrong.

 

But digital is a great product. In my mind, one of the things that makes it great is the very fact that now I get to do it all.

[shots worth sharing]

I love digital but then I'm an amateur. Still I have to say, sure--I want it better, easier and cheaper. And I understand the value of a good rant now and again--hope it did you good.

[Ed_Ingold]

I gather that your film shots needed no tweaks. Exactly what was your role in the "film" process from the time you took it from your camera to when you held the prints in your hand? Have you tried taking the memory card to a camera shop or kiosk and having prints made without any work on your part? Do you know how to set the defaults in Bridge, ACR or Lightroom to homogenize your digital images?

 

Anyone over the age of twenty started photography using film. I have personally processed hundreds of rolls and printed thousands of images, mostly B&W. I think I'm pretty good at it, yet I share none of your illusions.

 

Do what makes you happy, but please spare us the sentimental view of things that never were.

[Brad_]

I'm happy with digital...

[eric_boutilier_brown1]

My suspicion, from what you wrote, is that you seldom did any of your own processing, either in colour or B&W. In all actuality, digital is no different from film, in that you get what you produce in camera, unless you post-process it. In film, that was either done in a lab, or a darkroom, unless you shot only slides. And haveing printed from slides, there is an INCREDIBLE amount of work that goes into making a good print from a slide, especially one with a full tonal range, which could never be captures on paper without serious masking and manipulation (analogue or digital).

 

Having spent 17 years working in a black and white darkroom, where a good print would take anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes to create, I find digital faster, more time efficient, and higher in quality (and I worked with 8x10 as my last film camera, for my bar for quality is pretty high). I do all my own processing and would never go back to film, for a whole mess of reasons - the first and most important of which is the image quality.

[stwrtertbsratbs5]

Maybe the issue is metering. A small incident meter may increase your yield significantly. Or you could learn to use a spot meter - pretty easy with digital as you measure the brightest part of the scene and open up 2 stops or so.

[bruce_margolis]

Nancy, maybe I am reading too much between the lines but I think you are saying that the post processing time for digital is more than you like. If so, I agree with you but......

 

With film, there is no control over the end product unless you do your own processing. I did for B&W, not for color. For color, I left the finished product to some lab tech who might -- or might not -- have had a bad hair day when it came time to work on my roll.

 

Like you, I shoot in RAW which guarantees PP work. Sure, I don't like all the time it takes but I love that the finished product is mine, not someone else's idea of what it should be. OK, it's not ready immediately but for perhaps 30 seconds to maybe a couple minutes work, it is at least as good as a lab would do. And I have it a lot faster.

 

Photography is all about tradeoffs. If you don't want to do the work yourself, just send it to someone who will do it for you. Concentrate your time on the shoot, then trust someone else to get the finished product right. Eventually.

 

But if you want to control the finished product, suck it up and commit the time. For me, it is a labor of love. YMMV.

[stp]

Pretty much straight from the camera, same settings. Yes, digital does take a lot of

tweaking, and I find them to be quite different in some settings.

[Spearhead]

It sounds like you aren't setting your camera up correctly. If you want the equivalent of what you get back from a typical film lab, you just need to get your jpg settings right, stop bracketing, and take your cards to the labs. I shot 6gb of jpgs last night (and 4gb of raw for some stuff) and all of the jps are useable out of the camera, assuming I composed right. It took me a while to get the settings where I wanted, but since then, it's been easy. I can't imagine getting the same results of the typical film lab these days...

[adaspin]

Nancy: You are a professional photographer, yet you have no portfolio here at PDN... how come?

[john tonai]

Andrew,

 

While I can't speak for Nancy, some photographers have problems with these terms:

 

By submitting material, however, you grant photo.net and its successors or assigns a perpetual non-exclusive world-wide royalty-free license to publish that material on the World Wide Web as part of the photo.net web site. You grant Us the right to edit, modify, quote, or reformat uploaded images and text, including the right to include advertisements and hyperlinks.

 

And this isn't PDN!

[steve_levine]

If professional shooters grumble about tweaking digital. How can the hastily learned, soccer mom-wedding shooters do it?

 

 

Unlike at NASA, failure must be an option?

 

 

 

To paraphrase the great Chuck Heston: "I'll give up my medium contrast portrait film, when they pry it from my cold dead hands" (or stop making it).

[matt_needham]

"...and images that come out of the camera that need zero tweaks!"

 

I need to get one of your fancy film cameras. All that comes out of mine are strips and sheets of opaque plastic that never look anything like the scenes I'm photographing. ;)

 

For all the hype of the supposed convenience and ease of digital I've found it to be much more demanding of skills at the exposure and after. When relatives ask me what digital point-n-shoot they should buy, I explain to them that C41 is probably the most idiot proof photographic process yet invented with uniform, automatic, and cheap processing and printing labs available almost everywhere, and they may want to consider sticking with film until a similar system is in place for digital. Personally I like being more involved in the processing; I hated having to drop C41 and E6 off at the lab for someone else to finish.

[steve torelli]

When you shoot film, do you just open the back of your Nikon and pull out prints ?

[nancy s.]

I think this is the issue.. I have a B&W lab in my basement.. and yes, it takes a good bit of time to produce and acceptable B&W print. I do this for pleasure and enjoy my time there. It is quiet and it is hobby time.

 

Perhaps I CAN set my camera differently for digital but if I shoot RAW I am guaranteed time at the computer. I really do NOT want to sit at the computer. I think that it is. And then, sitting there, I get into the whole perfection thing.. and then it is significant time.

 

Maybe the problem is that I do not do 100% of my living from pro photography and I have stepped back from weddings into other commercial shoots that offer me more variety and pleasure. I shoot digital for the convenience to the customer. I still have a very good pro lab do the prints when prints are required (after I have tweaked the images).

 

However, having said that, I also really hate spending time at the computer.. when I could be out making more $$ shooting another job. I also REALLY hate to sit at the computer if I do not have another job and could be out having (gasp!) FUN! :) I think it is the computer interface.. this artificial intelligence and software which is often anything BUT intuitive.. that just makes me really impatient.

 

I think, in re-evaluating my rant, (oh yeah.. that is what it is), that I just do not like working at the computer. I just hate it. I would like nothing better than to take the flash card, look at the images, cull the ones that are dups or that don't work (eyes shut etc.), burn a CD or do a FTP and be DONE with it. But noooo, can't do that.. and end up with a tweak here and there on most images.

 

I also really really do not like that image crop with digital cameras. That is really annoying to me.

 

Like I said.. I just wish it were better and mostly I wish it were better from a work flow - image capture arena.

 

I still shoot digital and I still give my customers what they ask for but every time I do I go through this rant silently as I sit in front of the %*^()&)*(_*** computer!

[DickArnold]

Nancy. If you will look at my gallery I just posted three pictures on my PN site that I took in 1994 in Russia with a Bronica ETRSi on Velvia. I just had the transparancies scanned and I posted them. I had never printed them before. I was really pleased at what I got. I did use CS3 to straighten a steeple on one pictures but other than that they look wonderful on the original transparencies without post processing. The exposures were spot on and the original colors are great as shot. Do I think my current quality is better than those transparencies? no. It has given real pause to think about all the money I have spent to convert to digital. Do I want to go back? Probably not because it took a lot of time to print Ilfochrome or then Cibachrome and I used gag and choke on the chemicals in the darkroom. But, I really love those 1994 slides. I wish I had done more.

[Brad_]

I just don't understand...

 

People get steamed about the time they willingly spend (apparently with no self-control) behind

the computer today, yet had no complaints when they did their own color processing in their color

darkroom.

 

Perhaps then, there were two slots in the door of their darkroom. Push a bunch of color film

canisters in the top slot, and a couple hours later... Shizaam! Finished prints executed by a master

printer, skillfully retouched, a printed on really nice fine art paper, popped out the bottom slot

ready to hang or give to clients.

[sandysocks]

In Lightroom, you can import a batch of raw, select it, bang it with the appropriate preset, and be done with it in about the same amount of time it takes to read this. That fixes sharpening, white balance, contrast, saturation, and everything else that there is a setting for. I don't see how this kind of precision can be approached with film.

[Brad_]

>>> I don't see how this kind of precision can be approached with film.

 

Or speed as well...

[ilkka_nissila]

Very few people ever did color darkroom work by hand. In any case that's more physical work while the computer stuff is just sitting in front of a screen - I do it all day at work, why should I want to do it at home afterwards? Yuck.

 

Digital prints from raw files? I don't know of a lab that does it, and even from jpgs the quality of commercial lab work isn't adequate.

[phule]

<<To paraphrase the great Chuck Heston: "I'll give up my medium contrast portrait film, when they pry it from my cold dead hands" (or stop making it).>>

 

To quote everyone who's ever read your endless trolling in digital threads Steve...

 

" *YAWN* "

[nancy s.]

In reading thru these posts it sounds like one thing I need to do is be better at using the software I have but it also seems I may need to upgrade that software (geeze I HATE to spend the money.. you have NO idea how much I HATE to spend money.. I hate to spend it on clothes, software, gas.. I really just do.. LOL).

 

I have CS 2 but no light room, CS 3, Bridge etc. (Like I said.. I still do shoot film). Then I would likely need to take some instruction (more money out.. sorry.. it is a gripe of mine on film too).

 

I sit in front of a computer all day.. I come home at night and on weekends I don't want to do more of that.. Many is the weeknight (this is an exception) I don't even turn this one on.

 

As to the film Vs digital debate this is not the place for that.

 

I am just wishing all this digital were easier for me. I really wish I liked working on the computer but I do not. I am pretty good at it, just don't like it.

 

I guess I am just a nancystockosaurus... (genus: Old Species: Fart)...

[thomas_sullivan]

I want everything to be better...I think if you had, had to take film, especially color, from a to z.........meaning take the pic, develop the film, and print the film.......you would think it just as big a pain in the ass as digital. It's just, the Lab did it mostly for you with film.........digital you have to do it all yourself.

 

I've done both.......a to z.........believe me when I say they both have their strong points and failing points.......neither is "better"....just different.