The Quest for Knowledge Resumes

Some of us enjoy the holidays more than others. Here’s Granddaughter Mary who celebrates her birthday on Christmas day kicking back among the presents & wrappings and perhaps thinking everything is just perfect.

Well, the holidays are finally over and the family birthdays are taking a break for a couple months. LSU lost the big one and the Saints are out of the playoffs. I finally went to the doctor and got a shot and some meds to knock out whatever was plaguing me so I now that all the infections and distractions of the end of the year are over I can now get back to the task at hand.

Back before Christmas (December 20 to be exact) I posted my concerns about being able to tell the difference between analog photography and digital photography. At that time I noted that the pictures I take with film cameras are delivered and viewed as digital images because after the lab develops the film it is immediately scanned and the pictures uploaded to a web site and sent to me on a CD.

I went on to say that once I realized this dilemma the solution became obvious – get and compare prints instead of the digital images.  This however, is not as simple as it seems though because as it turns out most labs no longer make true analog prints directly from film. They scan the film and use the digital images to make the prints.

So while I do believe that analog photography can result in superior pictures what I have been doing (and most everyone else who doesn’t have their own dark room) is not really analog photography. It’s sort of an analog/digital hybrid and totally dependent on the resolution of the film scans used in converting the pictures from analog to digital.

Now as much as I love film photography it is certainly more trouble than digital and more expensive too. So if the results are no better than digital photography it begs the question – why do it? Before I consider that question in any depth I think I owe it to myself and all film photographers to at least try take an objective look at a real comparison of analog versus digital photography.

Towards that end I have started a search and sent out a couple emails to try to locate a lab that does real analog processing and printing. My goal is the have prints made the old fashion optical enlargement way directly from the negatives and compare them with prints made from digital scans of film and digital picture files and see if I can detect any noticeable differences in the quality of the various images. Ideally I would like to compare images of the same picture or at least the same subject and composition.

That’s the goal. First step – find an old fashioned lab. Stay tuned.