jamescredland

<p>@Stuart - what a brilliantly useful set of pictures you've taken. Someone should stick them on the front page! I think you should label them all with numbers rather than distinguishing between the film and digital ones so obviously, and then turn them into a little quiz :)<br>

@Dan - I'm not sure it's the printing, I have an Epson R2880 here and over the road is a professional dark room where Michelle does B&W prints from film for me when I want them. I shoot film and digital, but recently mostly film. On occasions the B&W prints come out better than the digital print of the same scene, and then on other days we both massively prefer the digital prints. Perhaps at the absolute upper echelons of B&W printing there's a significant difference, and I do intend to take some digital prints to look at against some execllent B&W prints somewhere (excellent = ones i've had nothing to do with ;-) ).<br>

Having sat through the same debates in the music industry for years (analogue vs. digital), I can tell you a few things from that experience: <br>

Digital has all the options but old equipment and processes are beautiful; in a proper blind test people suddenly lose the ability to separate the analogue and digital emulation of the same thing*; digital will keep getting better until there's no argument; sometimes the older stuff is better because there are fewer options; and finally some people will never change!<br>

*See also hi-fi cables for more of the same (http://usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp)</p>

Now my view camera has the loudest shutter of any camera I've ever used. It's a separate thing behind the lens and sounds like a printing press :)

I think it's a silly question. I don't think you'd choose a view camera just because it has a quiet shutter.

(Cue lots of disagreement..)

I bought an RB67 about a month ago, it's bloody brilliant. It's made a world of difference to my 35mm and DSLR work already just as a result of the steadying of the process. The viewfinder is amazing. The thing was so bloody heavy though I've gone and grabbed a Mamiya C330 for travelling around with so I can have the same mellow medium format experience elsewhere.

I just need to find a vaguely portable light meter.

So I say do it! My DSLR is dead jealous as it gathers dust on the shelf.