Technical Time Out – Film vs Digital, Round 2

Here’s a nice seasonal shot of some local decorations to keep everything real but once and a while I have to take a break from sharing and discussing pictures to consider the underlying theme or what blog is all about, exploring old fashioned film photography.

I have read the writings of many other writers who go on at great length about how pictures from film photography are better than those from digital photography. I confess that I do indeed believe this too but I have been having some concerns lately. 

My greatest concern is that I cannot always see a clear difference in quality between the images originating from my film cameras and my digital cameras. In fact, there are times and situations when either one of them may actually produce superior results. I think the real problem however, is that since I started this blog and the associated photographic activities I have been looking only at digital images. 

Yes, that’s right. Even 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 have yet to have any prints made. Once I realized this dilemma the solution became obvious – get and compare prints instead of the digital images.  This is not as simple as it seems though because as it turns out most labs no longer make prints directly from film. They scan the film and use the digital images to make the prints.

The lab I routinely use, The Dark Room, when queried recently confirmed that this is exactly what they do. So while I 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.

For example, most of the film I have processed at The Dark Room comes back to me as a set of 4-5 MB files that are based on the 1034 X 1536 pixel scans.  Now for an additional fee I can request “enhanced” scans which results in files that are approximately 18 MB based on 2048 X 3072 pixel scans. By way of comparison, the digital pictures taken with my Nikon P-300 are 4000 X 3000 pixels and result in files that are nearly twice as large as the enhanced scans I get from The Dark Room.

So what does all this really mean?

Well, essentially it means that even if negatives produced by film photography represent 25-30 MB of visual information, a digital scan of that negative that only contains 4-5 MB of information cannot reflect the superior image quality associated with analog photography since it only contains 20% of the analog information available. I haven’t figured out what to do about this yet but clearly film photographers who are not making their own prints from film are being short changed by what has happened in the film processing industry.

The question remains – what’s a film photographer to do?