Film Rules

B&Wpositive said:

They were supposed to have 25 features in the article. I counted 17 and looked through every page of the magazine for the rest, thinking it was an error. The rest were nowhere to be found. There was no end marker at the end of the article, either. Where did the rest go?

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Didn't notice that but you are right.

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Hatchetman said:

I find it hard to believe that B&W will ever disappear.

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Perhaps just need more fixer?

momus said:

No gasoline for me. Electricity and pedal power for the last 12 years.

I agree, the environmental damage done by the small niche film community is like a microbe on a beach ball compared to what is dumped into the environment from digital and computer production.

There is no real reason for film to disappear. It's a superior medium, so there will probably always be some demand for it from those who value quality.

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Does not matter, regulators will start with the easy targets who can not afford to fight back, then chip away at the whole structure. China will make film for a long time. All they care about is profit.

Example. Some of our purchasing people went to China to source components. It was below zero F. NO HEAT in the factory. Parts can not even be measured properly at that temp. Standard was 68deg F when I supervised a metrology lab.

A tour guide was asked about one man doing an obviously dangerous task. "It`s ok, we have plenty of people" was the response.

accozzaglia, I agree with a lot of what you say, but I am very pessimistic about our ecological future and one of the things that makes me that way is the area where you live: the GTA (Greater Toronto Area, for our American friends).

I cannot imagine how that gigantic mistake in suburban development will ever turn around. For decades, developers have done whatever the hell they wanted and the traffic problem just grows and grows and grows. Small grocery stores in the neighbourhood? Maybe for hipsters in a few places in TO and for those who can afford to pay upwards of I million for a house, but for everyone else living in vast suburbs, the car is the only way to get anywhere. Electric cars? Sure, they don't emit pollution but in order to supply the electrical needs of huge cities and even larger suburbs, we are going to need nuclear energy which is clean until you have to dispose of the waste. And the number of personal vehicles is only going to grow in my lifetime because people have no option. I am retired and I live where I can walk to almost everything. I realize what an incredibly privileged situation this is.

As for clean vs dirty technology, traditional darkroom materials, if handled properly, generate far, far less ecological problems than digital devices. Surely the problems of electronics manufacture and disposal are not a big secret.

Doc W said:

Electric cars? Sure, they don't emit pollution but in order to supply the electrical needs of huge cities and even larger suburbs, we are going to need nuclear energy which is clean until you have to dispose of the waste.

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Electric car are non-polluting if the power comes from hydroelectric power, however much of our power comes from burning dirty coal and natural gas which pollutes the rest of the country. If someone in California buys an electric car, they are polluting the four corners area with the coal fed power plants. The end result is that those electric cars are more polluting than gas cars, just not in their back yard.

A gas engine is 30% to 40% efficient.
An electric motor is 30% to 40% efficient, but to product the electric power the coal power plant is ~40% efficient. 0.30 * 0.40 = 0.12 That is 12% efficient. So who is really the polluter? [This is covered in Thermodynamics 101, so do not bother to argue about that.]

Malinku said:

I got the same mindset. I don't feel like digital will ever be good enough to fully replace b&w films and enough people will want it around for the look of the final print.

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ever is a very long time.

Think of the quality 15 years ago of digital photography compared to the ~50 mp DSLRs today. Now imagine another 15 years. I think digital will be good enough to replace all analog photography.
Doesn't mean it will though. Analog will (or has) entered the realm of art supplies, and will go on forever in some small way likely.

skorpiius said:

ever is a very long time.

Think of the quality 15 years ago of digital photography compared to the ~50 mp DSLRs today. Now imagine another 15 years. I think digital will be good enough to replace all analog photography.
Doesn't mean it will though. Analog will (or has) entered the realm of art supplies, and will go on forever in some small way likely.

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True. My little Canon SL-1's trounce those first gen EOS-1D cameras from back in the day. I use them all the time. But I think digital is another tool to use, and I think it excels in situations like news photography, stuff where you have a quick turnaround. I haven't seen a lot of people shopping for "digital masterpieces" though. Most photographic art I've seen have been shot on celluloid. I've been to Peter Lik's gallery in Vegas and Maui and he's still using those medium format wide cameras.

Digital is cool, it's good for those products people need, like headshots, but the last time I did a family portrait shoot, they wanted it on film, and I had to go borrow a film camera!

bo eder said:

True. My little Canon SL-1's trounce those first gen EOS-1D cameras from back in the day. I use them all the time. But I think digital is another tool to use, and I think it excels in situations like news photography, stuff where you have a quick turnaround. I haven't seen a lot of people shopping for "digital masterpieces" though. Most photographic art I've seen have been shot on celluloid. I've been to Peter Lik's gallery in Vegas and Maui and he's still using those medium format wide cameras.

Digital is cool, it's good for those products people need, like headshots, but the last time I did a family portrait shoot, they wanted it on film, and I had to go borrow a film camera!

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There's definitely certain situations where not using digital is self-inflicted torture (low light action for example, press where you need 50-100 pics of a politician speaking, etc)

In other less challenging situations digital has less of an advantage, is is more just one of many 'looks' possible, where various films are some of the looks. For example portraiture, landscape, anything where each shot can count.

Also "Most photographic art I've seen have been shot on celluloid." That actually makes sense to me, because that's where I'm at currently. So far any photographic art I've sold has been digital, although admittedly photos taken with my 4mp Canon G3 actually accounts for more of that than with my later ~10-12 mp Nikon SLRs. But I haven't done any sellable artsy photos for a while. From reacquainting myself with film in 2015 however, I find the slower more contemplative pace of film photography gets me more in an artistic mood. It's all mind games, there's no reason why I couldn't use digital completely, but film for whatever reason is a crutch that makes me more creative.

skorpiius said:

Also "Most photographic art I've seen have been shot on celluloid." That actually makes sense to me, because that's where I'm at currently. So far any photographic art I've sold has been digital, although admittedly photos taken with my 4mp Canon G3 actually accounts for more of that than with my later ~10-12 mp Nikon SLRs. But I haven't done any sellable artsy photos for a while. From reacquainting myself with film in 2015 however, I find the slower more contemplative pace of film photography gets me more in an artistic mood. It's all mind games, there's no reason why I couldn't use digital completely, but film for whatever reason is a crutch that makes me more creative.

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Viva la G3! I had one of those, and when you take care with how you shoot, it's a very capable camera. I hear you on that one. I recall an interview with a photographer who went back to film (actually, LF, he went into 8x10) and he was talking about the "soul" he feels in his film shots as opposed to his digital shots. And I think you're right that it's a mind game. He said when he shoots digital, it can be fast and he's not really thinking all that much because he can see if he's getting something immediately. The soul part for him and film is because he felt like he had to work much harder to get the shot. And when he was considering the fact that each 8x10 shot was costing him about $15 each, he mentally labored over the details before firing the shutter, putting more of himself into the process of getting the photograph. Like each 8x10 shot was some mini vacation as he positioned, re-positioned, metered, re-metered, checked focus,. etc.,....I've begun to feel the same way, only I'm staying with 35mm for now. I'm much more involved in the photograph, and I'm really looking now for things worthy to shoot before I fire off that frame of expensive Velvia (or Tri-X).

And I've been reading Rockwell's and Tim Layton's sites too. There's the whole archival quality too. My digital shots are stuck where they are technologically. So if I have a frame I shot with that ancient Nikon D1 (2.47MP for $5000!) it stays at whatever file and size it is. If I have film, and in ten years a 1,000,000 dpi scanner comes out, I can scan it at that resolution too. That made more and more sense to me as I realized what I was doing with my DSLR upgrades every two years. In those terms, I feel like a fool. I sorta wish I never listened to anybody (or read Shutterbug magazine) and just kept shooting that old Nikon FM I started out with. I'd be financially richer and hopefully smarter

C 41 will be gone long before B&W, the only 2 current manufactures are Fuji and Kodak, both have very large plants and cannot make small runs, coupled with dwindling labs and other hassles of getting C 41 processed, don't know how long C 41 will be profitable. If Ferrina is able to bring their coating line on line then at least there will be E6, don't know if Ferrina can coat R4 paper to keep C 41 alive other than as hybrid. On the other hand Ilford and Foma seem to have plants that be right sized to keep black and white in production. What is likely to kill off all film is the lack of inexpensive cameras, the number of used cameras will continue to decline, unless new film cameras are brought to the market it is only a matter of time until all that is left is what we call alternative processes.

EPA will kill everything... no matter the real truth of what's 'environmentally friendly'.