> > Posted by Innocent (Innocent) on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 12:27 > am: > > I'd been trying to find the post where comparison was made between > digital and film but could'nt find it. However, I am just wondering > why in all my digital shots the sky is so poorly resolved. I looked at > the NikonPro s&les for the d2x same bland sky, no clouds at all in > all the shots, compared it with the s&les from canon 1ds different > picture. Is something going wrong here?
A matter of exposure. Shooting digital is the equivalent of shooting chromes in a film camera. Blow out the highlights and they are gone forever. Both cameras can give excellent results - in fact most cameras can give excellent results give proper exposure.
Like Kodachrome, the dynamic range capability of a sensor is short. Shooting Kodachrome, even with the most accurate spot-meters, a pro may bracket a whole roll of Kodachrome to get one keeper. With digital, RAW and careful processing will extend it considerably into the shadow areas, but one still MUST protect the highlights. As you probably have found, you need to check the histogram on every shot and make appropriate adjustments based upon it. With digital, you have the histogram and instant review, so no excuses for any sub-standard images either from technical quality or content.
> I should immediately acknowlege that I'm no expert in photography but > the results I get from my film slr, even with some images I shot using > consumer negatives and F80 are far more better than all the digitals > Nikon had ever contemplated to produce.
Consumer negative films are extremely forgiving, and the big expensive machines in the labs do a fine job of image processing. Chromes and digital images are not nearly so forgiving, but with careful processing, digital images will give you much of what you get from negatives. However, you don't have the big expensive machine - only your own Photoshop skills. Digital demands a far higher skill level that shooting negs and handing the film off to the operator to save your sorry attempts. With digital, you are in full control, so you also are saddled with full responsibility for your work.
In the days of black and white, "amateur" Verichrome Pan snapshot film was the pro's dirty little secret. It was made for non-adjustable cameras and had a spectacularly long scale capable of extreme over and under-exposure to take up the slack. Pros discovered it would also allow great shadow and highlight detail with careful darkroom work. Gorgeous photography was done on it.
When having to shoot under mixed light and when a chrome was required, I would shoot medium format negative film and then meticulously colour balance each area onto a sheet of Vericolour Transparency film. The published results simply could not have been shot on Kodachrome. It involved roughly eight hours of darkroom time, while the same could be done with an equally skilled professional in an hour or two in the digital darkroom. Much of the time it took in the fume-room was processing and re-dos.
> Therefore it seems Just for > some of us to stay with the old tradition of films. By the way, it > seems to me that most pros are still shooting medium format because > the price on the shelf is still as high as it always was. Hardly can > you find any used decent medium format kit at any pro shop, and if you > do the price will tell you to buy a Canon 1Ds instead. So what is > actually going on? are the pros telling us one thing but doing the > other?
Both/and. As a pro phasing out of my career, much of my shooting is now purely personal. Time is not the factor it once was, and I have a fine arsenal of medium format equipment that has paid for itself many times over. It is capable of equaling or bettering a 22MP back when shooting low speed films. With my relatively new scanner, I can easily do digital prints equal to or better than any I ever got done by top pro commercial labs. So, when large prints are required and time is not the key element, medium and large format is still viable, though 35mm certainly is not except perhaps in a very limited range of specialized tasks - none of which I can think of at the moment.
The most expensive line item in any photo shoot is time. Commercial shoots involve a LOT of people and everyone is getting paid. Digital is extremely efficient compared to shooting film, getting it to the lab, getting it back from the lab, getting it scanned, getting it approved and so on. With digital it is by its nature already digital and available within seconds of the exposure. Thousands can be saved on any given shot (any currency).
A 1Ds or digital back on a medium format body will pay for itself in days, since it is designed for catalogue work and other studio tasks, and is a decent camera on location - just in the time it saves. In a busy product studio, shooting Ektachrome, every product setup must be left in place until the film is processed and the client signs off on it. Setting up for a re-shoot is very expensive. Thus productivity is impacted either way. With digital, the image can be immediately viewed on a large calibrated computer monitor and hours are saved - along with the shooter's, art director's, assistants' and client's reps wages. In commercial photography time is money.
I also know of a number of top retail photographers using it for portraits and weddings. One friend in California felt it only took a month or two for payback. She does very pricey weddings, and does them extremely well.
Nikon remained true to their primary clientel. The D2X is designed for photojournalism. It is not in any way competition to the 1Ds, but blows the 1D MkII out of the water. It is the ultiimate news camera just as the F5, F4. etc. were before it.
It allows a shooter to work on much tighter deadlines, FTPing the images to the photo editor. I had to take no assignment later than 8:30pm in order to be back in the shop, process and print my pictures for a 10pm deadline. None of my film was ever archivally processed. Often barely washed and same with the prints. An 8:30 assignment probably meant processing began at 9:15 if there was any driving time across the city.
With the D2X and the accessory WiFi transmitter, I could have been shooting at 9:59pm and still making deadline. Deadlines were extended when the event was big enough, but a lot of times good stuff simply was not covered.
The D2H has most of the same advantages as the D2X when a lower resolution image is needed. With the superb quality of which it is capable, a 4MP image looks great in a glossy magazine. I shot for a high-end, high-tech Brit magazine with a 3.34MP Coolpix 990 and even with the large page size, my stuff looked every bit as good as 35mm. Resolution is of substantial importance in big prints, but a full page shot with a 4MP camera looks great when the camera is capable of such high performance.
The D2H and the 1D pretty much covered the SuperBowl yesterday, and I suspect that the magazines and wire services were already in posession of D2Xs. Editors were choosing pictures long before the game had reached the end of the first quarter. I would not be the least bit surprised to see a D2H MarkII introduced at PMA this month. Probably 8MP with super-fast processing and huge buffer-space. It will still have the DX size sensor. As long as Nikon remains loyal to their traditional clientelle, full-size sensors remain a far off dream.
Last year, Sports Illustrated had 11 photographers on the ground and they collectively shot 16,000+ images. Can you imagine the logistics of doing this with film, when the deadline for the finished magazine is Tuesday? This is where high-end digital shines.
For me, when I travel, I will carry both. My digital cameras will cover what I would have used 35mm for a decade back. Epic landscapes and panoramas will be shot with my film cameras - anything where there is time to carefully spot-meter, and contemplate. Street and personal shots will all be digital. I will actually shoot very little film in comparison - only stuff that I contemplate blowing up to large prints. It is a matter of using the medium that is appropriate to the requirements of the shot.
larry!
http://www.larry-bolch.com/ ICQ 76620504
