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?
