Emulsion Fascism?

Any professional whose industry is threatened will react the same way. See commercial printers with the advent of PostScript for a recent example or Designers with the advent of Powerpoint for another... :)

Every medium has its value, you're right, but in today's world, digital is the most economical, flexible and widely used option.

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Powerpoint is not a design application

Give me a digital photo in high-resoltion and I'll make you a silver nitrate in 15 minutes.

:)

I experienced it too. And, I think it's bull. I love digital for all the above mentioned reasons. Analog should only be used for art purposes. Not place for commercial photography anymore. Not even if you want to do a billboard the size of a building.

Over the past five years my dad has developed prints of negatives 100 years old. Will you still be able to do that in 100 years with digital? 200 years?

I think one of my photography professors (who has been in the industry for like 30 years) put it best when he said that film is for artists and digital is for professional photographers. He loves film but he has done most of his professional photography work digitally for years using a 16 megapixel (if I remember correctly) grayscale digital medium format back that shoots a series of three images using colored filters to produce the final full color image (he does product shots mostly). It is an old kit (so old that he has to keep an older PowerMac around running Mac OS 8.5 and a really old version of Photoshop just for it) but it produces killer product images. For any portrait work he was using a high end Nikon DSLR last time I talked to him.

This said he loves doing more artistic stuff on film and often teaches specialty classes on alternative processes at the college and does workshops on lots of other classic photographic methods (I had a blast doing cyanotype with him).

Good title for this post!

Of course you can use Photoshop to get many of the effects that Twist is talking about - mimicking historical photographic methods. I'm not talking about the crappy effects that most people use but the specialized filters that reproduce many of these classic effects.

In fact, these photoshop techniques often improve on the original because you can tweak the effect in ways that you can't with emulsion. A good digital image is in effect a blank canvas to put any effect that you wish, and it takes just seconds.

I think there is a misunderstanding about the term 'digital' as if you can only do 'digital' things. If you can do it with emulsion you can do it with digital; only you don't suffer from the problem of being locked into a choice that you made early in the process.

For example, if with emulsion you decided to use a film that is well known for landscape you are locked into that choice whatever pictures you ultimately took. With digital, you take the photo and choose the 'film' later.

Any professional who goes around denouncing digital is full of crap - there are some amazing digital photographers out there, and some amazing cameras. Digital is my choice because I don't have the facilities to develop my own film, and film is too costly with the amount of photos I shoot.

I wholeheartedly agree with Ken on The Camera Does Not Matter - a truly good photographer can use either. A crap photo printed in high resolution from an amazing film is still a crap photo...

I love traditional methods (as a designer I love traditional print, letterpress, etc) but I also love modern methods. A great artist, or designer, creative, photographer, whatever, should be able to work with everything at their disposal to create great work. They are all tools and methods used in the creative process. Use whatever method gets you to that goal!

the opening argument doesn't consider two factors that influenced me to dramatically reduce digital usage in favour of a 6x7 film camera and a Nikon LS-9000...

digital storage costs next to nothing in real terms and therefore the digital photographer has virtually no limits to the number of images that can be made on a shoot, this can encourage a "snap happy" approach. hire a medium format camera that'll give you no more than 16 shots per roll of film (i only get 10 on my 6x7) and i'll bet the cost of processing the roll that you think far more carefully about composition, light and your exposure settings. if you bracket over and under with 16 shots that's basically reduced your roll to 5 frames!

the second aspect i think you should reconsider is the notion of quality. have a peep at the links below, i think they might open your mind to the "megapixel" resolution that can be achieved with film.

i'll pre-empt the response that scanners cost money, film costs money, processing costs money etc. but the tradeoff between cost and the burning desire for 39MP and beyond can be tempered with a visit to robert white's second hand page (link also below). you'll find many labs with an imacon capable of 5x4 scanning.

just my two pennies...

robert.

http://www.kalons.nl/otten/Comparison.html
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/scandetail.html

http://www.robertwhite.co.uk/seconds.htm#LabelLarge

things will change after this is released

http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canoneos1dsmarkiii/page2.asp

film is a beautiful art but digital photography has mastered everything film could and will never do. all those oggies are just upset they spent years learning film for nothing...maybe something but in essence nothing.

It's the same argument pertaining to music. I swear by analog gear and tube amps, but others fight for digital and solid state. You can hear bigger difference with the analog/digital music argument, so how that carries over to film vs. digital is probably just as subjective. Being in the industry though, I can appreciate our photographers that shoot film...but damn it's so much easier and way more convenient when they do digital.