Recently the world of photography has been transformed seemingly overnight by a little phrase called "digital". This shift from film cameras and capture to pixels and computers has really created a bit of a debate within the community. In the early days of digital capture, the technology really was not present; a digital camera that took one photograph that produced a one megabyte image would cost around $10,000. The cost benefit was not even present, but the instant gratification was impressive. Fast forward ten years, and we take a photo on our cell phone that can rival a 35mm photograph printed at a typical retail lab…or is that entirely true?
In today’s debate, it is not so much about instant gratification, but about something a bit deeper. Depending on who you may talk to it may be a quality issue. It may be a color issue. It may be an issue with sharpness. It may even just be a debate of ambiance or nostalgia, but whatever the issue is, it is debatable, and in a world where Kodak stopped producing one of its most famous film products, kodachrome slide film and their New York factory being leveled to the ground, there is a fear that film is indeed dead.
But, and it is a big but, film may be making somewhat of a comeback. Is it true what they say, what’s old is new again? In New York, a group of ex-Polaroid factory workers are at work, even now, on new instant film for all those Polaroid film enthusiasts that were stunned when Polaroid announced that they would stop producing all instant film altogether, leaving some 300,000,000 Polaroid film cameras, and their owners, with no film to shoot becoming paperweights overnight. (The Impossible Project, 2010) In the mean time, a successful California based fine art wedding photographer-Jose Villa-is busy creating breathtaking sun-drenched, pastel engagement portraits and wedding albums using the tools of photography that have been around for years, a Mamiya and a Holga camera and Fuji 120 and 220 film. His success, and the success of others who are following suit, bring up the question again, ten years after the digital bug began biting, is film dead? I have to argue, it is not.
Please understand that just because film isn’t dead, that does not mean that the world over should ditch their digital cameras and shoot film alone. In the digital age that would not only be a bad idea, but a very impractical one. The realization that digital has made photography more accessible to the amateur (by amateur I mean simply those people who do not make their living as a photographer) is noted and is appreciated. There is huge value in giving a mother an inexpensive digital point and shoot camera that allows her to preview pictures that she takes of her children instantly so that if the photo did not turn out, instead of missing the moment and leaving it to chance, she can-in a matter of seconds-re-take the picture making necessary corrections. Instead the idea is to say that film is here to stay and therefore let us explore the reasons why, its practical usage, and also to demonstrate how film can be incorporated into the digital world without slowing down the fast pace we have grown accustomed to.
If one must begin at any place why not examine film itself? A brief overview of film is that to the general public there was one size and it was called 35mm. Sold in rolls in small canisters, it was available with 24 or 36 photos-or frames-per roll. This was standard for all 35mm cameras and was the most commonly used. The professionals had other alternatives depending on their subject matter and the focus of their profession. More simply put, landscape photographers would use larger film formats, negatives that ranged in size from a 4x5 inch frame to an 8x10 inch frame. Portrait and wedding photographers didn’t need to go so big, so their film choice was usually medium format film, which was probably equal to two to three times the size of 35mm, thus giving higher quality and also the possibility for larger reprint sizes. All this is to say that the most current high-end digital camera models being sold today boast about having a full-framed sensor, meaning a sensor that is as big as a 35mm negative (Cambridge in Colour, 2012), and cost in the neighborhood of $6,000. There are digital cameras that have larger sensors than that of a 35mm negative available, and by larger I mean a 50 percent increase in size, that will cost about $30,000. (Hasselblad, 2012) That larger sensor still hasn’t matched the medium format film size, which is double that of a 35mm negative frame. There are some particulars here about pixels and fracturing and the sort of computer babble a lot of these kind of debates get into, but the long and short of it is this: when a photo is taken on 35mm film, when scanned with a film scanner at a good photo lab, it produces a 25 megapixel photo. (Rockwell, 2008, para 5) The $6,000 camera that was mentioned before takes pictures up to 16 megapixels, 9 pixels short of 25.
Now, the point isn’t to bore you with technical know-how, but one more point must be made when talking about film exclusively. Film records higher quality of color, color gradient, and highlight and lowlight details. This gets a little complicated, but I found it best explained by Diana Eftaiha, “…the digital image is captured on a grid of light sensitive pixels, and each of these pixels produces an image result depending on the amount of light hitting it. Where in film, light-sensitive elements are randomly distributed along the film emulsion, overlapping to create a sense of continuous color tone gradation. Pixels on the other hand are not overlapping, so when an image is enlarged beyond a significant extent, these pixels become more and more visible. Furthermore, pixels can only represent certain color values as solid blocks. This means that one pixel can only represent one color value even though the light and color information falling on it from the original scene can contain multiple values. And this is why digital photography is known to produce a non-continuous, incomplete gradation of color tones, an area in which film photography is still ahead of the whole new digital trend.” ( Eftaiha, 2010, para 6).
Now that we have explored film and explained its differences from digital capture, as well as touched on the actual cameras a bit as well, lets look at this from another point of view, maybe a bit more economic. What I have found, in our digital world, is that more time is spent staring into a glowing screen than time spent staring into another person’s eyes. That is just a personal statement from me. A lot of photographers became photographers in order to connect with people either with their photos or through them. A landscape photographer may not photograph people, but they enjoy showing their photos to them. They enjoy the interaction they have through their art and watching it cause a reaction in his or her audience. A portrait photographer is all about the subject, and capturing the essence of that person. A wedding photographer is all about the event, the people, the cake, the flowers, the details, the dress, the groom, the bride, the kiss; on and on it is all about recording the day and archiving it forever. Today’s photographer has been sucked into the editing process, he or she has been slowly drugged, little by little over the years until suddenly they are spending three or four hours with their client and 24 hours in post production after the shoot ends. When Florida wedding photographer Ricci Valladares was asked by Rangefinder Magazine about his switch back to photographing weddings with film he stated his biggest change had been his workflow. “No longer does he spend several hours after each wedding uploading, backing up, editing and doing postproduction on his images. Instead, he packages his film and ships it off to the lab. Two weeks later he receives a DVD of high-resolution scans and a collection of proof prints.” (Perkins, 2011, pg.116 ) Signed, sealed, delivered. That equates to more time spent with clients and doing what you love, taking pictures; and less time spent on a computer eating up the time you could spend shooting something more.
Like stated at the beginning of this paper, it is understood that the majority of photographers will shoot digitally. It is understood that many parents, vacationers, and enthusiasts alike love the convenience and cost benefit of digital. Digital cameras are more affordable than the old film ones were in their day. One can see the image as soon as it is taken and know if it is a good one or not. Prints cost literally pennies at your nearest one hour photo lab, nineteen cents last time I checked at Wal-mart (cheaper if you have it delivered straight to your home). At the end of the day, one can peruse the pictures taken at the park, the beach, the fair, graduation, etc. and simply delete the ones that were bad! No more paying for wasted shots! No more fumbling with film cameras and trying to figure out how they work! This will be the argument for the majority of the public. Even when asked, professionals will admit to their digital love affair, “Can they [pro photographers] get a better shot with 120 chrome [film] than a 20MP DSLR [digital camera]? Probably, but only by a modest amount. But the DSLR is just so much easier to work with, and so much more flexible that when the final goal is digital (as it almost always is today) the choice for these photographers is not very hard.” (Templeton, 2010). Yes, even for the professionals it is cheaper, it is quicker-depending on how fast one is on the computer, and it is what clients are demanding.
In our digital world, though, film can still be incorporated, rather seamlessly, into the fast-paced instant gratification culture. Both professional and retail store photo labs offer scanning of 35mm film which they turn and put onto a CD. Once home, all one needs to do is put it into a CD rom drive and wait for the prompts in order to save it to the computer or order more prints. For the professional this can all be streamlined relatively easy and worked into the regular flow of post production. Even so, there still exists a certain thrill of seeing a photograph in print. At the start of the digital revolution, many clients simply asked for a CD of all the images and thus the job was done. Little by little, much like how digital duped photographers everywhere into hours spent editing, professionals are turning the tables by offering prints, proofs, and albums that turn pixels back into prints and again gives clients something to hold on to and the ability to establish an emotional connection, much like the former generation could do with their parents’ old wedding photos.
Allow one final emotional argument to be made that will lean towards the fantastic and the aesthetics that make up the world we live in. Film looks beautiful. I myself shoot weddings, and when I post four or five shots on my photo blog, I am always asked about the film shots I post. The client always asks what I did to the photo taken with film. My answer is always, “Nothing.” It is exactly what the client looked like. That is exactly what the scene looked like. Film has a quality that one just can’t put their finger on. It has an ambiance that can not be described with words. Jose Villa, the California wedding photographer I mention in the beginning blogged this on his website, “Film has such a classic timeless feel I just don’t get with digital. When I have tried shooting digitally, I find I spend all my time working to make it look like film. Think about how bizarre that is, when you could just shoot film to start with.” (Villa, 2010, para 2) Valladares, the Florida wedding photographer said, “many photographers have observed that digital lacks some intangible quality-some call it warmth, some call it a ‘film feel’” (Perkins, 2011, pg 114).
Many photographers are film buffs. They grew up learning the craft on film. Learning, failing, and learning from that. Digital offers up a much faster learning curve, seeing your faults instantaneously. That does not necessarily make a better photographer. It also does not necessarily make a better photo. Shooting film also represents a time when everyone was not in such a hurry. One could take a photograph and keep walking, and not check the back of the camera to worry if it came out. Film offered, and still does, a lot of latitude when it came to the light it absorbed onto its face. Overexposed photos could be darkened, underexposed could be lightened. Sometimes the camera had a light leak which could offer up some surprising ghostly results that in the digital world no longer exists. Within the analog community, they have grown fond of film’s little imperfections that could often flare a photo red or yellow. An improperly loaded roll of film would offer double or triple exposed frames that were unexpected but can actually be looked at as little forms of found art. A sky overlapping one’s aunt overlapping the hotel while on vacation, telling an entire story in one frame rather than an entire roll of film. It is pretty magical. When I first began falling in love with the medium and learned more and more about film, not only how to properly shoot it, but the numerous ways it could be manipulated, a whole other world opened up to me. I remember saying to a co-worker, a mentor at the time, “The more I learn about photography, the less I know.”
Film isn’t a thing to be feared, or rejected, or to be made complicated. If anything can be made complicated it is all this talk of pixels, sensors, scans, negatives, lenses, cameras, and the list goes on. Film has graduated from the photography community. Digital capture is its new student. Just because film has learned all it needs to know, does not mean that it has nothing to teach us. It has so much more to say, especially now that there is a new kid in school to compare it to. Digital will never disappear, but neither will film. Instead of rejecting one or the other, dig out Dad’s old film camera, buy a roll and give it a spin. You may be surprised by what develops.
References
Cambridge in Colour. (2012). Cambridge in Colour. Retrieved from http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-sensor-sizes.htm
Eftaiha, D. (2010, April 26). Film vs. Digital Sensor [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.thedphoto.com/gear-equipment/film-vs-digital-sensor/
Hasselblad. (2012). Hasselblad H-System Camera Specs. Retrieved from http://www.hasselblad.com/products/h-system/h46-31.aspx
Perkins, M. (2011, February). Caught on Film. Rangefinder. 114-120.
Rockwell, K. (2008). Why We Love Film [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/why-we-love-film.htm
Templeton, B. (2010). Pixels [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html
The Impossible Project (2012). Retrieved from http://www.the-impossible- project.com/about/
Villa, J. (2010, January 26). Loving Film in Today’s Digital World [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://josevillablog.com/2010/01/loving-film-in-todays-digital-world/
