Specialization is for Insects

I recently uploaded pictures of Yosemite from 1996. These are significant because they are about the last pictures I took with slide film. From the time I first started photography till 1996, I used slide film. I believed that slide film was somehow superior to print film. Then I read something profound on photo.net. To paraphrase, if you want your final result to be a print on the wall, you should use print film.

As you might guess, my next photography task will be to scan negatives (or maybe the prints) from 1996 until July of 2004. In July of 2004 I bought a digital camera. Let no one accuse me of being an early adopter.

It has taken me over 6 months to scan my 2000+ slides. While waiting for my scanner to do it’s thing, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the digital photography revolution. Every once in a while I’ll read a blog post by someone lamenting the death of film. Trust me, I have lost almost nothing by abandoning film.

What have I gained by switching to digital?

• Instant feedback. I can tell right away if I took a good picture or not. And if it is not a good picture, I can usually tell what I need to do to fix it. This isn’t perfect: every once in a while I’ll miss that I’m not in focus — it’s kind of hard to tell on the little 2 inch screen on the back of my camera.
• Easy cataloging, organization and viewing of images. Especially with iPhoto.
• The marginal cost of pictures is almost 0. It used to be close to $0.50 per picture.
• Much much easier to share images.
• Following the wisdom of the commentator on photo.net, if I want my final result to be pictures on a web page, then I should be shooting digital.
• Image quality is superior on a digital camera. This might seem like a controversial statement. But if you doubt it, compare the pictures I have posted scanned from slides to pictures I have posted taken with my digital camera.  And remember, this is the format I view my pictures in.  Don’t tell me my slides would look better than digital if I made slides from digital and compared them on a light table.  I don’t care.

I guess I should admit that I do miss a few things about my old film camera.

• Batteries weren’t much of an issue. My old camera required a battery to run the LED and to fire the shutter. The battery would last about a year.
• Because the camera didn’t rely on batteries so much, it worked much better in low temperatures. If I want to take pictures in the cold now, I need to carry a spare battery in a warm pocket and swap the batteries back and forth when the camera dies.
• The manual focus interface on my old A1 was much nicer. Of course, this was negated by the fact that it was hard to focus with my glasses on and hard to tell if I was in focus without my glasses.
• The autofocus on my old Elan worked much better in low light than my current digital camera. I suspect if I had bought the mid-range model Canon DSLR instead of the entry level model I wouldn’t have this complaint.
• The film camera had a much longer life expectancy. When I traded in my old A1 it was 20 years old (I had bought it used 12 years before) and it still worked fine. The only problem I had with it was the lack of autofocus and my worsening vision. My current DSLR is now 4 years old, and is at least 3 generations behind the current Digital Rebel. It still takes good pictures though.
• Even after 4 years, I still haven’t really come to terms with the smaller sensor size, meaning there are no high quality wide angle prime lenses available.   The solution is to buy a Canon 5D, but that’s kind of pricey.

Don’t talk to me about archival quality. It is apparent that my slides haven’t aged that well (or they were never that good in the first place). And while the hard drives my pictures live on will certainly not last forever, there is no reason the image files themselves won’t retain their quality as long as they are backed up and restored across media.

After I was most of the way finished scanning the slides myself, my brother Andy pointed out ScanCafe, which provides offshore scanning services at a fraction of the price a U.S. photo lab would charge. He has sent a bunch of his old pictures to ScanCafe, and I’m curious to see if the quality will be noticeably better than I was able to do with my flatbed scanner.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 9:53 pm by matt and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.