Henry, I was thinking about this post for a few days. Though I don't have a film camera at the moment, I could list out 5 reasons for giving my DSLR a rest:
Hi Prabir.
Thanks for the reply, and for sharing your observations about the proposition of giving the dSLR a rest.
1) With film and film cameras, one wouldn't normally bother about image stabilization and all.
Technology is wonderful in that respect isn’t it? How it is that we can get several stops of additional camera-motion stopping with electronics nowadays. I reflect on what we had to do in the past, to wit: use a wider aperture, faster film or development, brace against something, or add mass to the camera itself, use a bean bag, or a tripod… just to name several workarounds.
2) One wouldn't have to bother much about the white balance.
Ahh.. those color correction filters 85A, 85B, etc... I’d almost forgotten them. Thankfully, we can just dial it in now, and mitigate it in Photoshop in minutes if we missed it a bit. So many filters we just don’t need anymore. That’s a really good thing.
3) one doesn't get to see the image immediately and there is no undo/delete option available. But the print/scan emerging after processing gives a lot of pleasant surprises.
Right. I confess to chimping. It has spoiled me, being able to “test and see” in real time. I haven’t forgotten how that we used to shoot a “test roll” just to learn the characteristics of a new batch of film before beginning a serious shoot. We even had a Polaroid back so that we could see those things that have a way of being on the film, but which we did not notice in the viewfinder. Now we just take a shot and see how it works before getting serious.
4) The grainy images produced under certain lighting conditions give beautiful dated and nostalgic outputs. Trying to generate similar images with digital processing often look artificial.
I agree. The author said the best way to get the authentic film look is to shoot film. He’s probably right in that.
5) In film cameras, one often moves around with a single lens, which challenges one's creativity. But the results are often more than satisfying.
That might be a good challenge to help one's development in seeing. I wonder how it might affect us today if we put a 35mm lens onto FF and shot with only that one lens for a month or two. Would it cause us to see in a different way? Do zooms make us lazy? I remember when zoom lenses were not very sharp, and their barrel and pincushion distortion was awful. I think of my Nikkor 43~86, my first zoom. Only at about 60mm was the linearity okay. But with subjects that had no straight lines, it got by. Back in the 70s I was pleased to have it. Some people shoot without zooms even now. Just about everyone who still uses a rangefinder would fit that measure, I suppose. I guess they have their good reasons.
This may sound crazy, but what I miss most about film is not film itself. Somehow I think of digital media as a different sort of film, one that has variable speed and variable color characteristics. The digital darkroom is orders of magnitude easier, faster, less messy, more affordable, and more flexible than the wet darkroom that it replaced. It’s a godsend, IMO.
What I miss most about film is the way of the basic film camera itself. Think about the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, the Nikon F, Leica M, Contax, Fed, Kiev 4a, and such cameras. Really simple controls. Uncomplicated layouts. Solid equipment. No software, batteries, and menus. Aperture, shutter speed, focus, and ASA/DIN if one had a meter. One had to understand more about the physics of how light and photography work. And after a while it got to be second nature, like riding a motorcycle, swimming, or typing a paragraph.
Knowing those fundamental things about photography should be useful to the digital imagemaker too, don't you think?
