I agree with you totally - if the world had stopped at 1998.
Film still has a slight edge with large format black and white, providing you are truly an expert printer. Medium format colour also has an edge as long as you scan and print inkjet. Even a flatbed Epson 7x0 series scanner will produce results way beyond the best enlarger and enlarging lens. Sheet film is simply not in the same league as view camera scanning backs. Both require a whole bunch of contraption to work in the field.
In the fume-room, film is simplistic compared to digital. A determined person can pretty much get a job after a couple of years of hard work at printing film. Double or triple that for the digital darkroom. Printing colour film with a wet process, all you have control over is lighter-or-darker and colour balance. Dodging and burning complete the picture. If you have a pin-register enlarger and enormous skills, you can use contrast control masks and unsharp masks to improve sharpness. With the digital darkroom, this is only the first month. Add curves and levels for red, green and blue channels. Layers and masking for precise dodging and burning, Saturation, hue and lightness. Lab colour mode for grain control, separate processing for lightness and colour, accutance control that can only be done with B&W and and choosing the right developer for the right film - but done digitally in the same way for colour. If you can gain the skills, the snapshot you quickly run off to hand to a friend will be of equal quality or better than any print in a professional photographer's portfolio. It is in the interpretation, where great photographs are created from the raw materials gathered on location during the exposure. Ansel Adams said "The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance."
Up to now, we are only talking about the tech end. From the viewpoint of a Photographer, I have my choice of using my legacy medium format cameras that still give me a slight edge over exposures with my Nikon D200. The edge was great when I bought my first digital camera. It is on the borderline now. The D3 that is just beginning to ship, probably has erased that difference. But we are back on image quality again.
Content is everything. I have been trying to capture a passage of time - almost like a movie - but represent it in a single photograph. This is the flight path of a crop crossing the lawn on the other side of the street from me. Try this with film.
more at:
http://www.larry-bolch.com/sequences.htm
Film is dreadfully limited to the contrast range it can hold. Chromes require an accuracy as low as half a stop. Worse, an ideal chrome for reproduction is significantly denser than a slide for projection so there is no such thing as a perfect exposure. HDR can handle a 70+ EV range, and can be reduced to an 8 or 16-bit per channel range, retaining incredible highlight and shadow detail for reproduction. It can also be used as is, in image-based lighting for totally realistic light in CGFX. It is a 32-bit with floating point file for 96-bit colour. We have been exploring it for the past couple of years, but it will still be a few more before its potential is even close to being understood. Try that with film.
I have only begun to tame it, since getting the Nikon D200 - state of the art in HDR for now, though I expect the D300 and D3 will move it a quantum step forward. This image was shot just before midnight with a 35mm manual focus f-2.0 Nikkor. It was dark other than the strings of lights. Yet using HDR, I was able to get rich shadow detail without a single blown out highlight. The contrast range measured just under three million to one. Try to do this with film.
RAW format allows one to use layers and masks to colour balance each area of a mixed light photograph to optimum. I did an all nighter in the fume-room creating an 8x10 chrome of a shot with an area primarily lit by very green fluorescents, with an overall evening light from the sun, mixed with tungsten and neon area lights shot on film. It was to be the cover shot on an annual report of a very big corporation, in very bit financial trouble. Had I been able to shoot RAW - this was over 20 years back - I could have done the job in an hour or less and got a good night's sleep. RAW is much like a negative in ways. It has far more capability to capture a great dynamic range than chromes or JPEGs. It also takes a much higher level of skill. Here is a shot in a much more difficult venue. There was a low level of incandescent and a bit of fluorescent, but most of the light was from dim neon tubes. Try to get skin tones this accurate and a colour balance this pleasant, and an image this sharp at 1/4 second, f-3.5 at ISO 800 with film.
Shooting digital, I shoot fewer shots than film - many fewer. I have an instant red, green, blue and luminance histogram screen that is both the greatest light-meter since the Weston Master IV Zone System meter, I used all my working life, but also gives me rich information on the colour content of the scene. From this I can fine tune to highly accurate or highly expressive colour - my choice. Try that with film.
In the 21st century, there is no teaching device as eloquent as a digital camera. Remember how hard it was to comprehend the reciprocal relationship between shutter speed, lens speed and film speed? Remember how difficult it was to learn depth of field as controlled by aperture, focal length and distance? Remember how hard it was to remember what you were trying to do when it took days to get the results back from the drug store? Remember the lectures from parents about the cost of film and processing and the time it took to get the film to the processor and pick it up again - assuming that your and your parents time was worth something?
Now the student can try it and get instant, meaningful feedback, while the idea is still fresh. YOU CAN SEE what effect a change of aperture has on depth of field moments after you shoot. You can see how depth of field varies with distance and focal length. You can see what difference a stop of over exposure or underexposure makes. You can see the difference between f-16 at 1/15th of a second and 1/1000th at f2.0. You can see how much more difficult it is to get a sharp image at 300mm than at 30mm and learn what is necessary to get the image without spending your parents retirement savings. Yes, this was available during the film era using a Polaroid back on a medium format camera, but the cost was horrendous.
Digital cameras pay for themselves in days over film cameras, if you are a working photographer. For an enthusiast it may take a few months, but soon you will be shooting for free. It is all about the total cost of ownership. A film camera may be reasonably priced compared to its equivalent film camera, but when you buy a digital, that is the cost of ownership. When you buy a film camera, that is only the beginning. Consider the cost of a roll of film, the processing and the time it takes to get it to the lab and return to pick it up, paying yourself for what your time is worth. In fact I shoot many fewer shots on any digital shoot. I know when I have the image I want and there is no point in shooting ten or twenty rolls, "just to be sure". However, I pick up the camera whenever an idea strikes, because it will not cost me more than a fraction of a coin for storage space - or I can delete them.
I still have a Nikon F3 system, and the lenses are in use every day on my D200. I doubt that the body will ever have another roll run through it - and my Leica M3 as well.. I have a GraphicXL, Bronica ETR and Linhof medium format system, along with a few specialized medium format cameras, which may get used again - I don't know. I also have a WideLuxe 140° panoramic camera that probably will get used, since panoramic photos are very easy to digitize and print. I must have loved film - I probably have shot over a million exposures on it. I have some of the finest lenses every made on high precision bodies, but in most cases, digital just does it better.
In 1998 you were absolutely correct. However, time has not stopped while perceptions have. With digital, the outer edge is constantly receding, while film slowed down and stopped. The Nikon D200 is my fourth digital camera, and with each generation, the barriers to my imagination have moved farther and farther away. I am not only able to see things I would have dismissed when shooting film, but now I can actually capture them, knowing that I will get precisely what I am after, without luck being involved.
larry!
http://www.larry-bolch.com/
