Film!

[Aljenau]

Hey, I sort of remember this stuff - came on those funny little rolls and needed chemicals to see the pictures...

[vanngirl]

and when you nail the exposure it's breathtaking (talking slide film here)

[geck]

oh yes... have a roll of Velvia 100 in the F5 right now

[vanngirl]

nice. I have HP5 in my F100.

[fabian628]

and the grain in b&w

[vanngirl]

*sigh* things look better in b&w film

[I @ M]

and the grain in b&w

I reckon a Nikon D200 @ 800 ISO puts just as much "grain" into an image properly converted to B&W

*sigh* things look better in b&w film

I reckon that you should put "used to" in between "things" and "look" in that last post, the D3, D3x, and D700 Nikons capture the film look better than any DSLR before them and have finally negated the usefulness of film.

Canon owners will have to wait for a model or 6 to catch up.

[Mat]

going to load a roll of Ilford FP4 in a Ensign (Trikon) Ranger

[Kym]

Film has it niche and is fun!
Enjoy it while you can.

[sunny6teen]

came on those funny little rolls

not always

[vanngirl]

I reckon that you should put "used to" in between "things" and "look" in that last post, the D3, D3x, and D700 Nikons capture the film look better than any DSLR before them and have finally negated the usefulness of film.

Canon owners will have to wait for a model or 6 to catch up. [/QUOTE]

lol, my teachers would no doubt disagree but I'm happy to agree

[TOM]

have finally negated the usefulness of film.

yep, poor Ansel Adams. If only he'd have know how bad his prints would look once we'd all seen the beauty of digital. I'm sure he would have overlooked all of digital's drawbacks just to have the ability to look at the image straight away on the back of his diggicam. and he would have figured a way to put that digital sensor into his enlarger so that he could make a proper print.

[sunny6teen]

people forget (or more likely, didn't know in the first place) that nobody rated the quality of 35mm film too highly prior to the digital age. it was for amateurs...and journalists
so when the old film vs digital argument comes around...which film are we comparing to? sheet film? roll? large format? medium? 120? 35mm? we've been sacrificing quality for convenience with each milestone.

do canon/nikon still shoot marketing images of their digital cameras with a view camera?

[I @ M]

do canon/nikon still shoot marketing images of their digital cameras with a view camera?

I don't think so, most of the recent Nikon advertising shots seem to have been done on Hasselblad and Phase One digital cams.

[I @ M]

yep, poor Ansel Adams. If only he'd have know how bad his prints would look once we'd all seen the beauty of digital. I'm sure he would have overlooked all of digital's drawbacks just to have the ability to look at the image straight away on the back of his diggicam. and he would have figured a way to put that digital sensor into his enlarger so that he could make a proper print.

I reckon that is a really long bow to draw Tom, Ansel had the eye, patience and ability to capture landscape scenes well. He then had the technical ability in the darkroom to make his images shine.
I don't think anyone could ever say that his prints would ever look bad in any comparison but if he were starting out now with his same artistic sense, a current generation (digital) camera and technical mastery of ( insert appropriate editing software here ) not only would his prints be equally as good but there would probably more of them.

Personally I would rank a few current generation landscape photographers, some who happen to be AP members, as equals to Ansel and yes, they purely use digital.

[TOM]

the overwhelming majority of professional landscape photographer today still use large format view/field cameras.

Ansel Adams may have been an unsuccessful photographer had he started out in the digital realm, with computers and LR or PS? Of course his eye for image capture would be the same, but he may not have really engaged medium.....we'll never know. But yes, Ansel's real ability was in the darkroom where he meticulously hand crafted each print. A big part of this craftmanship is why his prints are so valuable today. Had he have used a PC to produce a file, and churned out an inkejt print, I don't know if he would have had kept the passion that he maintained throughout his life. The ability to produce those one of a kind hand made prints is one of the big factors that sets film apart from digital. I know I can get a negative made from a digifile, but I can make a digifile from a negative, with arguably better results..larger resolution, better 16 bit colour et al. But a photographic print is always going to worth more than its inkjet equivalent, all things being equal...which they rarely are

[robz]

Film has it niche and is fun!
Enjoy it while you can.

I agree with you Kym completely. Film is fun and I have some chemicals waiting for me to finish a roll of HP5 in a box brownie!!.
I don't quite agree with Tom's suggestion that Ansel would be lost in the digital age because someone with artistic talent will learn the skills of their time.

I enjoy both media and the argument about film and digital is mostly irrelevant since digital is one layer of pixels on a sensor and film is multiple layers of pixels within gelatin (or other chemicals) . you can't partly change a molecule of silver bromide... sorry if i'm old fashioned.

[TOM]

I don't quite agree with Tom's suggestion that Ansel would be lost in the digital age because someone with artistic talent will learn the skills of their time.

sorry if I portrayed that, but it's not what I meant. Ansel loved the outdoors, particularly Yosemite Park, but taking the photo, the negative, was only ever an intermediate step for him. It was all about the print, but I suspect that he wouldn't have enjoyed making inkjet prints from a digital file nearly as much as his hand made one of a kind prints. Hey, he may have enjoyed it even more for all I know.

[robz]

I see what you mean now Tom. Thats an interesting thought.
In the words of Maxwell Smart... Two possibilities!
If he felt that the camera was used to its best and printed straight from the file with little or no image alteration... absolutely agree with your thought.
Other possibility... photoshop or gimp etc has exactly the same controls as a darkroom print plus more. Maybe he would have been a manipulation or Photoshop master?

[sunny6teen]

Adams' career in the digital age? ...probably would've lasted 2hrs at the most.
...you try and recharge a laptop in Yellowstone