Is Film Dead...

http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1534

http://www.sportsshooter.com/index.html

If you go to the latest newsletter at sportshooter.com there are some interesting articles on the topic from news & sports photographers.

http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1535
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1536
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1537

Only in the last article was there a writer who didn't admit to using film for his personal shots (family, etc). That alone tells me film is going to be around for a good long time. People might use it as a business-expediting tool, but they rely on film for the images that are personally important.

Chris

Film is dead, we are all just pretending to be shooting film here (in fact we all use digital cameras), and this site title is just a cover up for a child pornography exchange forum.

Oh no, not again.

Yes, my refridgerator has a sticker on it--"Night of the Living Film".

Maybe soon I can switch to "Dawn of the Film". "Day of the Film" seemed to take it too far.

Matt

No, but the horse is. Let's kick it some more.

Honey... where did you put my hobnail boots?

Lee

Did you *read* the articles?

From the 1st article:

What does film have to do with this? Simple: film, like wine, is an organic process. It reminds us of our past, it teaches us about our senses, and it makes us work just a little harder. It can be frail and it can be unforgiving. It reminds us that a photographer's place should always be behind a camera, not in front of a computer. Think about those beautiful digital prints, for example. They can be printed 57 times and will always look the same. But what if they should each be different? I chuckle when I see numbered edition prints from an Epson 4400. 3/57 looks identical to 57/57. It's like trying to discern the difference between two cans of Coke. I'll take my prized; hand printed 16 x 20 Howard Bingham print of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali any day of the week.

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From the 2nd Article:

I'll still take my M-6 on vacation.

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From the 3rd Article:

I still carry a Leica M-6 and Fujichrome for the Davies family archive. I will trust my history to film. I know I will be able to pass those slides along to our son someday and he will have the unique and distinct pleasure of seeing his life memorialized in tiny, sparkling tableaus, as I have.

I'm less sure what he'll do with the Zip disk of his birth pictures, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Chris

WarEaglemtn said:

http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1534

http://www.sportsshooter.com/index.html

If you go to the latest newsletter at sportshooter.com there are some interesting articles on the topic from news & sports photographers.

Click to expand...

Yes it is. Now send me your cameras because you obviously do not want them anymore since film is dead.

I'll take my prized; hand printed 16 x 20 Howard Bingham print of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali any day of the week.

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I am jealous. (Of the Ali - couldn't care less about the eighth best band of the British Invasion.)

The first essay, by Mendelsohn, is beautiful. It really manages to sum up how I personally feel about the whole issue.

FWIW,
Kent

This is getting old ...

True, but Matt has inspired me to make an "Army of Filmness" sticker for my freezer.

As for the Rest, the Ali sounds cool, but I've always wanted a genuine print of "Nixon and Elvis".

WarEaglemtn said:

http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1534

http://www.sportsshooter.com/index.html

If you go to the latest newsletter at sportshooter.com there are some interesting articles on the topic from news & sports photographers.

Click to expand...

I've read the the article and just wanted say thank you for sharing the links.

Shane

Matt's article was brilliant. I wish I could write so well.

This is not a criticism, but simply a correction since this happens to me ALL the time, but my last name is spelled Calahan, not Callahan. We descendants of northern Ireland get no respect. HA!

I'm just humbled that he included me in his wonderful words.

Walt Calahan

Dead Link Removed

Any New Innovation must Incorporate the Old

I believe McLuhan had the above to say about technological progress. We should be surprised if the process of chemical photography continued just as we currently recognize it, but also if it did not continue along the trajectory so powerfully determined by its history.

If one assumes that photography is evolving and considers the connections between its states of development, one perceives that there are some important constants that cohere the discrete states in ways that other technological advances in recording media do not cohere. Consider the paradigmatic changes in photographic processes of the last 20 years to the equivalent changes in the audio recording industry: where obviously lossy, degenerating media like vinyl disks are rarely used outside of specialized creative applications ("mixing"), so too is film becoming the medium of expert expression. But: the end of the popular vinyl recording format has left little effect on popular music (beyond a couple of linguistic twists: we still buy "albums," for example), where chemical photography has determined all of the standards by which photographs of the present day are measured and established the logic by which they are produced.

Users sometimes forget that most of the processes available in Photoshop were first created in a chemical darkroom. More esoteric filters and effects are merely combinations of intricate darkroom choreographies first imagined in physical media – including (and especially) cloning. This retention of creative ideology over the long term is typical of visual media in ways that it just isn’t in others.

Nobody felt like cd's had to continue forever like eight-track cassettes used to; earlier, only a few had felt compelled to divide their albums into four discrete pieces to meet the eight-track medium's format, where most retained the two-sidedness of the vinyl medium until CDs came along. Then we met the "shuffle button" and all hell broke loose in audio media.

But the visual "digital revolution" currently uses the same system of ideas to describe the process by which photons can be made into pigment that has been in use for about a hundred years. We still “dodge” and “burn,” “blur” and “sharpen,” “crop” and “enlarge.” There are in film and electronica tangible limits and barriers -- many of which are expressed in exactly the same words: f-stop and asa, for example.

A friend asked my opinion about where to take her digital camera's memory card to have her snapshots "professionally" developed. I compressed the brow for a second -- I'd never thought of the drugstore photomat wallah as a "professional," but my friend was concerned about these pictures, and clearly thought the drugstore would produce the best result. I reckoned she was probably right about that, but there was still something that irked me about passing on one's digital prints to be re-histogrammed and automatically colour balanced by a stranger before they're printed or posted to a website. Finally, it struck me:

"You shouldn't give them your memory card. Ansel Adams would tell you that your memory card is like the score to a symphony, and you shouldn't let just any conductor perform it. Let me show you a few Photoshop tricks…"

Thanks,

Film did not commit suicide. We, the calling ourselves "photographers", amauters or professionals did not killed the film. So who did???

The biggest innovation in cellular phones was the import of digital cameras in.

The use of a camera without special knowledge from people that have never tried a camera before was the first step to chaos...

Today a lot of people buy a digital camera as a gadget, because of the no educational ability to act as a "photographer".

So we dont have a raise of new photographers but of new users of photography.

Photography today is more widespeaded but the film was left behind...

Bad news are that film is not like vinyl records that companies still produce at the same time with CD's.

I don't think that film will stop i suppose that a company or two will remain to produce film in small amounts.(I hope).

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE; Marshall McLuhan

"We are riding into the future looking through the rear view mirror"

WHAT?! Again!?.... oh, wait.... (walks to nearest camera)


OH GOOD GOD!!! ITS TRUE!!!

It appears to be a completely lifeless strip of a celluloid-like material with some sort of emulsion on one side... I am afraid its true - it shows no signs of life - its not breathing, eating, excreting, etc. Its true. Its quite dead. I need a valium or a support group... or a grief councellor...

dr_sills said:

Consider the paradigmatic changes in photographic processes of the last 20 years to the equivalent changes in the audio recording industry: where obviously lossy, degenerating media like vinyl disks are rarely used outside of specialized creative applications ("mixing"), so too is film becoming the medium of expert expression. But: the end of the popular vinyl recording format has left little effect on popular music (beyond a couple of linguistic twists: we still buy "albums," for example), where chemical photography has determined all of the standards by which photographs of the present day are measured and established the logic by which they are produced.

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I'm unsure what you know about audio recording, so the attempted analogies don't seem very applicable. No one ever recorded to vinyl directly for commericial use. Originally, cutting lathes (turntables with heavy platters and huge synchronous motors to reduce wow and flutter) were used to make the master. The masters were cut directly from the microphone onto metal master plates - hence the need for a "cutting lathe." Later mixing boards were added so that multiple channels (instruments, vocals) could be summed and sent to the cutting lathe.

That was the last time live audio recording was a true translation of the performance with no enhancements.

As soon as magnetic recording equipment became commercially available - the recording industry changed dramatically. Multi-tracking, multiple takes, etc. changed the entire dynamic of the recording process - this was a huge paradigm shift from direct recording. But, let's be clear, the paradigm shift has nothing to do with whether the distribution media is LP vinyl or CD. In fact digitally recorded music can be released on vinyl LP's if desired.

Today, the same arguments in photography about digital versus analog are used in the recording industry with some engineers adamantly insisting that tape still sounds better than digital recording processes (see "alsihad" in the Adventures of Mixerman for reference).

There is however, a middle ground in digital recording, with even the tapeheads mostly agreeing the RADAR system sounds equivalent to tape and not like the digital sound of Alsihad (a joke name for a certain professional computer-based digital recording system - I used it 'cause it's alls-I-had).

Nonetheless - all of the terms created from the original direct cutting recording through tape recording are applicable to digital recording with some new terms (like punch-in and punch-out) added to describe techniques that are only available through digital recording.

Not unlike the application of wet darkroom terms to actions in computer photo editing programs. It's a common language understood by people using the system so there's no need to invent new terms because of a shift in technology.

gnashings said:

I am afraid its true - it shows no signs of life - its not breathing, eating, excreting, etc.

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I wish someone would teach the bloody stuff to reproduce; it'd save me a small fortune...!

Then I ain't nothin but an old graveyard ghost...

And never called me mother

David.

Woolliscroft said:

And never called me mother

David.

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OK David, you made me laugh! Glad I checked one last time before setting this thread to "ignore".

Matt

Posted it because it was in interesting read for me. Guys who work nothing but Pixelography in the pro arena for publications yet slow down & enjoy the process and procedures of film when doing their own thing. A few interesting observations and opinions from those irrevocably wedded to digal technology on the job use film for their personal work.

"No one ever recorded to vinyl directly for commericial use. Originally, cutting lathes (turntables with heavy platters and huge synchronous motors to reduce wow and flutter) were used to make the master. "

Not to digress from the discussion on film, but the above is not exactly correct. I participated in many "direct-to-disc" recordings and they did not use the standard method of first recording to tape. In the late 1970s, "direct-to-disc" records were produced, aimed at an audiophile niche market, which completely bypassed use of magnetic tape in favor of a "purist" transcription directly to the master lacquer disc. Also during this period, "half-speed mastered" and "original master" records were released, using expensive state-of-the-art technology. for a catalogue of those discs, check out Sheffield labs. They were pioneers in the D to D market.

Ok, back to film. Is it dead? No. But, can those who desire to shoot film keep the film industry alive by generating enough demand? It's very hard to fight the growing technology trends when so much money is being spent to push it. (no film pun intended)

Lou

Digital still has this issue of highlights. This has kept movies and tv shooting on film to some degree. What I can't figure out is why still photographers choose to ignore this problem.

Doug