Defensiveness about film photography

[F4user]

So much hate ... seems a terrible waste of energy

overcompensating when I was looking at my 25 years old slides.

I am too old and get older expecting perfect digital. Industry make a digital camera /year ( maybe 2 years ) and waiting perferct digital ... i will die.
An old F is near perfect, also an Fany Nikon. An 5 years old digital is a disposable junk but digital industry happily will sell to you "the perfect" junk every year and must wait a decade for a decent zoom.

 

[Alan Klein]

..Easier still to never hang out with camera club types who care what other people are shooting with. I barely notice which cameras other photographers use, but I'm sure it'll have no correlation with the aesthetic quality of their work.

I moved and joined a local photo club. Since it's a retirement community, you can be sure that everyone there had used film cameras earlier in their lives. Everyone else uses digital now (I think). I submitted one digital photo and one film photo to a recent photo competition that allowed two entries per person. I said nothing about the equipment I used and no one asked. The judge told me my film shot perspective should have been changed for better impact. No one even realized the one shot was film. The photos were projected on a screen so the entire auditorium could see each photo as the judge rated them. Of course I had to scan the film shot. But the point is no one asked about equipment used, lenses, digital or film, etc. or how much post processing was done for that matter.

 

[blockend]

But the point is no one asked about equipment used, lenses, digital or film, etc. or how much post processing was done for that matter.

Congratulations. You found the world's only photo club whose members aren't interested in gear. [/cynicism]

Seriously, the only camera club people I've ever met were fascinated by equipment, took unoriginal photographs and were obsessed by exposure and sharpness. I doubt they'd have known a great image if it bit them on the a***. If things have moved on, I'm pleased.

 

[dorff]

So "if the film goes away the cameras are usless" then? Well, so? The same is true of 35mm, at least the cameras if not the lenses. I guess I still don't see the point behind the point, as it were. (Nor do I think there would be an gap to fill quality wise, just in making old equipment useful again and nothing lasts forever.)

Hi Roger, I actually agree with you. But to take that back to the original topic, the point beind the point is that many photographers who have been using MF and LF for some time, and even newcomers to MF and LF, feel uncertain and jittery about future availability of film, and that is partly what causes the defensiveness (and other emotional responses, not excluding film snobbery and digital-bashing) the OP was referring to. It is a major distraction for some, which is really a shame. The best way to counter the disappearance of emulsions and formats is to buy and use them, and for as many as possible people to do so. Buying and shooting one roll is infinitely better than a hundred thousand posts bemoaning the rate of decline, as if moaning does anything to the bottom line of the companies producing film products. There is one additional point about digital, related to my own cameras/lenses and emotions about them. When a system can accommodate a hybrid approach, it adds longevity. That is why the Mamiya 645 AF-D II that I have is still in my possession, even though I haven't found a particularly good deal on a digital back yet. It just makes me feel better about it, and I don't particularly worry about what the future holds there. The same to some extent goes for my Nikon equipment. If I tally up everything I've spent on Nikon film bodies, it still amounts to less than 1/4 of what I spent on a single D800. In the mean time, I happily use my F100's and F5's, knowing that even if I scrap them eventually, I still lose less money on them than my digital acquisitions, and it's not as if what I produced with them suddenly becomes obsolete or vanishes. The slides and negatives will still be there. The peace of mind opens me up to concentrate on photography and not to fret about what my equipment is worth.

 

[dorff]

overcompensating when I was looking at my 25 years old slides.

I am too old and get older expecting perfect digital. Industry make a digital camera /year ( maybe 2 years ) and waiting perferct digital ... i will die.
An old F is near perfect, also an Fany Nikon. An 5 years old digital is a disposable junk but digital industry happily will sell to you "the perfect" junk every year and must wait a decade for a decent zoom.

Being happy with your F is not helping Nikon to show 10% growth per year, is it? Ironically, the fact that Nikon is still in business and doing reasonably okay means I can use a raft of new lenses such as the 60/105 micros and 24-120/4 and 80-400 AF-S on my F5 and F100 film bodies. Life may not always be this good, but for now it comes together nicely.

 

[F4user]

I would like Nikon produce 18-180 / 2.8 for 35/FF cameras. I will buy 3 for sustaining Nikon business.

 

[pbromaghin]

I am defensive about using film only when some busybody tries to tell me I how much more wonderful digital is and I really should be doing that. As if I haven't spent thousands of dollars on digital equipment for my wife. There are too many of those people and it's none of their f*****g business what my hobby is. This subject makes me crabby.

 

[jp498]

I honestly think hybrid workflow will support the film business to a greater extent than 100% analog workflow, because it's the tools lots of people like or have, and for many people the end product is a scan or requires a scan. But there's room for both. But don't say 100% analog workflow better supports the film ecosystem if 90% of film users don't work that way.

 

[Zedwardson]

As a example, I cannot use a 100% analog workflow. I do not have a room that can be made light-tight that has ventilation. And there is a fair number of people like myself. So I scan in to see what I have and then choose to see what gets printed. Perhaps as my skill rises I will look into renting a darkroom to produce analog prints, but till my skill increases, I am better off learning. Of course I do not go into detail on APUG since this is a Analog only forum.

As for defensiveness of film, most folks I encounter think it awesome that I am still using film and many times people strike up conversations with me, and recall that with film they took less pictures, but they where better, and how they don't like the fact that they are a hard drive crash away from loss of photos. However they don't view it as film as being worth dealing with unless you are "serious".

 

[Maris]

Realist painting has been the core of Western Art for the last 800 years and most of our conspicuous art treasures are in that form. Modern digital picture-making is by every dot and tittle a robotic version of realist painting and shares its capacity for grand pictures. It also bears the cost of not being believed, at least by sophisticated viewers, in the same way that nobody really believes paintings.

The making of pictures out of light sensitive materials is not replicated by digital activity and for several important purposes anything touched by the curse of the hidden pixel is not worth looking at.

No defensiveness for me! And I never fail to champion photography over digital picture-making for the special qualities that photographs, pictures made of light sensitive materials, uniquely deliver.