When Asked Why You Are Not Shooting Digital, What Do You Reply?

[Ken Nadvornick]

i will kill you if you bother me again

Can I use this?



Ken

 

[mopar_guy]

If I wanted to be like a sheep in a flock, I would use digital. I am more like a lone wolf.

 

[2F/2F]

"Who wants to know?"

 

[fstop]

I want a digital view camera though.

 

[lxdude]

If someone is really obnoxious I say, "I do not use digital because I do not want my hands for be dirty and smelly." They will say why and I answer, "I leave the digital work to urologists and proctologists." After a long pause that usually grosses them out so much that they leave me alone. I am so bad!

A Hassle-bad, to be precise.





Or maybe it's "I am so blad!", as in glad you're bad...

 

[winger]

I usually just reply that I enjoy working in the darkroom and can't do that with digital. Most of the time it's started a conversation about how they used to shoot and just don't have time anymore, but do snapshots on a digi P&S.

 

[Eric Rose]

Because I find that the voices coming from my digital camera never shut up. If my digi cam is close to another one then they start to argue and that REALLY PISSES ME OFF!

 

[fstop]

Because I find that the voices coming from my digital camera never shut up. If my digi cam is close to another one then they start to argue and that REALLY PISSES ME OFF!

From my experience that only happens with female digis.

 

[lxdude]

That being said, being a younger fellow, people tend to want to lecture me on why I need to switch to digital. Seriously. In Bryce canyon, a "Pro" started our convo with "Shooting 35mm? What a waste of time" and the next thirty minutes was him explaining the fine details of his new D70...

If he'd done that with me, it would have been the next thirty seconds, then I would have told him to shut up and leave me alone. Some people quickly go from being obnoxious to just noxious.

Note my sig. I've done it.

 

[lxdude]

I just say that I prefer film. I don't criticize digital, expressing a "Whatever you like is cool" attitude, unless I start getting lectured or sneered at. Then I employ my preferred personal digital device.

I mostly used Kodachrome in the last several years, and found after the hoopla about its discontinuation that lots of people were impressed to see the box end on the back of my cameras. I doubt many knew much about Kodachrome, but they knew that it was something special, something venerable. I went from being a behind-the-times ignorant fossil to being something of a respected elder, who obviously knew his stuff. I had one fellow rather sheepishly show me his new dslr; I remarked that I'd heard good things about it. I invited him to look through the viewfinder of my tripod-mounted camera, and he was quite impressed with its size and clarity.
I figure being gracious about digital with people who are not disrepectful or obnoxious is the best way to be.

I have less trouble than I used to with digi-chauvinists, most of whom, in my experience, are converts from film, or equipment freaks.
By now some people realize that a film user is using it by preference. To the young ones it is rather unfamiliar, therefore intriguing. I find by using analog by choice I'm now often regarded as being not just another person with a fancy camera, and accorded respect instead of scorn. I certainly get a lot more questions about what it's like to use film than I used to.

 

[perkeleellinen]

I haven't had this type of encounter for a few years now. When it did happen it was always, always, elderly men. I think they were flushed with hubris - sort of really excited to be caught up in the next big thing. But now, some years later, I think those elderly chaps who happily told me I was wasting my time have realised that all these new tools haven't actually improved their photography in a way that matches the quantitative expense with a qualitative reward. Perhaps there's a greater tolerance for film as it's no longer seen as the domain of Luddite dinosaurs but is now a valid artistic niche that can stand on its own merits requiring no mega-pixel equivalence.

 

[Steve Smith]

Yes that is true, but publishing is a manufacturing process to be competitve and deliver quality goods on a timely basis you have to use the latest technology.

That's not always true. Last night, our camera club had a competition. The judge was a commercial photographer who does a lot of architectural work. He was saying that the last digital camera which he bought was a Nikon D2X. He was thinking about upgrades but realised that he would need to spend between £3,000 and £5,000 to make it worthwhile. Then he remembered his extensive Hasselblad collection sitting on the shelf which consisted of about six bodies, numerous film backs and almost every lens ever made for the system.

He now shoots film, sends it to the lab and gets back super high definition scans, the quality of which he could not achieve without spending tens of thousands on a medium format camera digital or a digital back. His change to film didn't cost anything as he already had the equipment.

Not every client needs everything immediately, so film via a lab is a viable option.

He was urging everyone in the room (except me!) not to ditch their film cameras as he thinks film is making a bit of a resurgence. This view was partly based on his visit to the Focus on Imaging exhibition in Birmingham a couple of months ago.


Steve.

 

[Excalibur2]

WoW so many posts and I don't know if someone have mentioned this:- it's all simple for me in that I need a reason to change and film does what I want and the expense of using film long term is still reasonable.

 

[Ken Nadvornick]

That being said, being a younger fellow, people tend to want to lecture me on why I need to switch to digital. Seriously. In Bryce canyon, a "Pro" started our convo with "Shooting 35mm? What a waste of time" and the next thirty minutes was him explaining the fine details of his new D70...

That's funny. A while back I had almost the same experience, except it was a Calumet C1 8x10 I was using. The first question was the tip-off...

"What IS that thing?"

"A camera."

"A film camera?"

"Yes."

[Joking, I think.] "So have you ever considered stepping out of the Dark Ages?"

[Initial silence from me, then...]

"Want to see the size of the camera sensor?"

[I pick up one of the film holders from its backpack and show it to him...]

"It's good for about 1100 megapixels per exposure."

[Silence now from him, he realizes he's been trapped...]

"And I paid $1100 for the whole kit. That works out to a dollar per megapixel."

[Then, springing the trap...]

"So how many megapixels can YOUR camera record?"

At this point he correctly anticipated the coming final inference and simply walked away without saying anything further before I could ask the begged question, "And how much did your camera cost you?"

I always felt the remainder of my photographs that day were marginally improved by this short exchange.



Ken

 

[Diapositivo]

Also, I think it is meaningless to compare the cost of new digital equipment to older used film gear. A lot of that stuff was pretty expensive in its day, too! It's cheap now because it is old and used, and no one but us wants it.

I am not sure I agree about this. In the past, let's say in the early or mid eighties, professional 135 cameras like a Minolta XM, a Pentax LX, a Nikon F3, a Contax RTS or an Olympus OM-4, and a few others, which expressed the best technologically the industry had to offer, costed probably around half of what nowadays a top of range Nikon or Canon digital costs, correcting for inflation.

In a modern digital SLR you have all the complexity of an SLR plus all the electronics. But you cannot replace the electronics and keep the bare SLR so the obsolescence or the aging of the electronics will make the camera less useful in time.

The fact that you can reuse the SLR for decades while the DSLR will probably become somehow obsolete or be broken in a few years (motors break, capacitors fail etc) is I think relevant to the cost comparison.

When you bought a Nikon F2 or F3 you knew you could have used it for 20 years and so the expense was more a long-term investment and even today when you buy a film camera you know it will last quite longer than a digital. I bought a second-hand Minolta XM which is probably 20 years-old and its prospective residual life is certainly much longer than that of my digital Sony, so that its yearly cost is much less and would be even if I had to buy it new.

And when asked about why I would use a film camera today, rather than a digital today, I think the cost factor is important. I went to the Boca district in Buenos Aires with my Yashica T3 - and yes I underwent an armed robbery attempt, but the guys wanted my purse not my camera - and I wouldn't have done it with a Nikon D3.

The relative inexpensiveness of film cameras allow you to have them with you in situations (seaside, mountain, skying, motorbike, desert, dangerous or bumpy places in general) where one wouldn't be comfortable in bringing a €5000 camera. Actually I would never feel comfortable in using a €5000 camera. With film I can have the same general level of professional quality in a very inexpensive and sometimes very small package.

Cost is often cited as an advantage to digital but, in the present circumstances however determined, I don't think digital has a clear cost advantage for most users (it certainly has an advantage for things like sport or wildlife photography).

Fabrizio

 

[moki]

The relative inexpensiveness of film cameras allow you to have them with you in situations (seaside, mountain, skying, motorbike, desert, dangerous or bumpy places in general) where one wouldn't be comfortable in bringing a €5000 camera. Actually I would never feel comfortable in using a €5000 camera. With film I can have the same general level of professional quality in a very inexpensive and sometimes very small package.

Cost is often cited as an advantage to digital but, in the present circumstances however determined, I don't think digital has a clear cost advantage for most users (it certainly has an advantage for things like sport or wildlife photography).

So true... My EOS 50d (worth about a year of saving every penny) is a great camera, but when I'm at a protest march where there might be tear gas and water cannons or when I'm out camping in the mud, I prefer a Zorki or other relatively cheap mechanical camera every time. They're not only cheap enough to replace or repair, if anything breaks, but are also much more reliable in these situations. And I don't wan't to have to rely on electricity too much... guess who'll be taking pictures when the lights go out? So the dSLR stays locked up safely most of the time, except for planned shootings in a safe environment or the very few occasions when it's useful (or necessary) to take a few hundred pictures at once.

Digital users may cite cost as an advantage, but their reasoning is flawed... if you take 2000 pictures a month (some actually do that, though it's usually over 95% crap), convert that to film (55 rolls of 36 exposures), multiply that by 5$ for decently cheap film plus developement, you'd pay 275$ per month, probably more if you do prints! By that formula, you'd save enough to buy a new digital camera every few months, but honestly, how many photos do you take with your 35mm camera? I'm at about 5 rolls per month, maybe 10 when I'm in a creative mood... and more than half of those are absolutely usable and worth printing. All my analog gear and the cost of film and developement added up for my whole life (well, about 4 years since I got into photography) doesn't even come close to the price of a digital camera that could have given me the same results and that I'd still have to replace every few years.

 

[flyingfloyd]

Why Film?

I say: "There are over 200 complex chemical components coated on to a film base in up to 18 unique, precision layers, which in total are half the thickness of a human hair. Now that just gets me flippin exited! CMOS chips and those funny things just seem...boring, predictable"

 

[David Lingham]

This thread reminds me of an experience I had a couple of years ago. Whilst setting up on a beach early in the morning, a guy and his young son who were walking there dog stopped to talk. The young lad soon got bored and in a loud voice said “he’s not taking real pictures like you dad, he hasn’t got a window on the back of his camera.” The innocence of youth.

As for why I still use film, I enjoy it, simple as that.

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

I say that I can't bring myself to love the digital process. I love working with film, it's what I'm passionate about; digital would be a huge compromise for me in my artistic endeavor.
While discussing I always bring up that I have a lot of respect for what other artists can achieve with their digital work flow, and that in the end it is the resulting pictures that matter. Honestly, I don't really care how they were created. I care about people being critical about their work, trying the very best they know how to, with an open mind, to show their pictures and to show their passion.

Who cares if it was captured on film or with a digital sensor? I know I don't, and to try to convince anyone that film is better is just a big waste of time, and the worst thing that could happen would be to come off as defensive, and making someone that's actually open minded to feel bad about shooting digital. That would not exactly further film photography. So, showing respect for the talent is extremely important.

- Thomas

 

[Dave Ludwig]

First let me state that not all digital photographers ask, because they know. I believe the ones that do ask, do so because they simply do not understand or comprehend light and how to use it. Or,deep down they ask because they want to gain some insight they have yet to attain. I attained insight at the age of 12 and it had nothing to do with equipment or process. Those who ask may believe lack of insight can be compensated by technology, and to some degree I am sure it can, but for them it still leaves the glass half full. Having said that, Yes, someday I would love work with glass plates, as well as many other earlier processes, and yes my glass is half full as well. The difference being, I know where to find the other half glass. So what do I say to those who ask ........."It is who I am".

 

[limnides]

I've only recently returned to analogue photography within the last few months - the last time I was in a darkroom prior to this was about 11 years ago. I've always leaned toward traditional processes (I come from a painting background) - there's something really rewarding about it that I don't seem to get with digital.

When I bought my box Brownie I didn't have a bag to hold it in so I had to carry it in the open. I wasn't finished shopping, so while I was buying something I needed a place to put it. I sat it on the bench. The girl at the till actually asked me...

"Is that an old digital camera?" I was a bit speechless.

I'm sorry it's not entirely related to the topic, but when I read the title it jogged my memory. I'm actually getting loads of encouragement around me for choosing analogue. Well, almost - my boyfriend (a digital photographer) thinks I'm being pretentious and elitist. I like to think he's not being serious. Hah.

 

[JBrunner]

I just use the tools I choose to create my prints. I don't have a need to explain.

 

[Worker 11811]

I just use the tools I choose to create my prints. I don't have a need to explain.

Cheetos, tortellini, a stopwatch, a slab of bacon and a lump of coal?

95% of the people would take one look and just keep on walking!

(Just kidding! )

 

[PeterAM]

My answer depends on who is asking the question. If they appear to have a genuine interest/curiosity, then I'll explain why. If it's a "my camera is better than yours" type of approach, then it's mood driven.

I was at a local kid's soccer game one morning, using a Pentax DSLR to take pictures of a grandchild and had a women come up to me carrying another brand of DSLR with a big zoom on it. She launched into a discourse about how her camera was the best made and I should get one instead of the one that I was using. Having just had a cup of coffee and being in a pretty good mood, I spoke to her just long enough to find out that she knew nothing, about anything, and just had a very expensive digital point and shoot. As far as she was concerned, it was just another status symbol/piece of bling. Made me wish that I had my Mamiya M1000, with a long lens and winder with me.

 

[wblynch]

Last summer I had a young person ask about the camera I had in hand:

"What the heck is that?" - "It's a 1965 Kodak Instamatic, I have to prepare my own film since they don't make it anymore"

"Where'd ya get it?" - "It came with the car" (pointing to 1965 Mustang Fastback)

"Cool" (snaps pic of car with iPhone)