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If you're a serious photographer who's only shot digital, shooting film for some 'burner' shoots will improve your photography significantly. Film is a much mor

If you're a serious photographer who's only shot digital, shooting film for some 'burner' shoots will improve your photography significantly. Film is a much more intentional process, you have to pay attention to light and composition at a very deep level before you capture an image. That practice improves technique that leaks over into the digital realm as well. Typically, when you go back, you take fewer photos but more of them are usable, and those that are usable are better overall. Also taking fewer photos has the side benefit of improving ingress/processing time which are non-trivial if you're taking photos for a living. Don't get me wrong, there's a time to motor drive f8 and get the shot, just in most cases it's better to not.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
This is a bunch of retro-grouch reverse-snobbism hogwash. Buy a digital interchangable lens camera and make a conscious effort to both shoot a lot (and be willing to purge stuff, don't become a packrat) but also spend time experimenting and focusing on getting a particular shot or style of shot as best you can, technically first, and then artistically. People who lack the discipline to be "intentional" without being forced to by the medium will not have the discipline to a)take the notes required so they can later understand how and why things didn't work, and b)shoot film long enough to actually learn the technical skills needed to then focus on artistic skills. They'll find it frustrating because they'll get back a bunch of badly exposed, blurry shots and have no idea why. It might not even be their fault, because labs fuck up developing all the time, film can be bad (and its performance varies with temperature, age, etc) and film cameras can be horribly unreliable or broken and you have no way of telling unless you take it for repair. Even the most serious, dedicated, methodical beginner will find it all exhausting unless they're practically autistic. Digital is superior for serious beginners because beginners more than anything need to actually just go and shoot lots of photos, often...and know what when wrong when things don't work. And they need a minimum number of variables to keep track of. If it's a film camera, they'll "save" the film, and worse, by the time they develop a roll, they won't remember anything about what they were doing. None of these problems exist with digital. Not only are frames essentially free, and not only are the cameras nearly perfectly reliable - you can instantly see what did or did not work, and try again. Or try multiple things, and see immediately how it worked out. You get complete metadata ranging from aperture and shutter speed, usually lens data, and various modes the camera was in and nowadays often even including location. It becomes trivial to pop open your photo editing program and search for photos taken with a particular lens and effortlessly compare them down to the pixel, see histograms, etc. Further, film is fucking terrible on a technical level; 35MM dSLRs surpassed it nearly two decades ago in nearly every technical capacity; micro 4/3rds / APS-C surpassed full-frame 35MM as well quite a while ago. Film has terrible dynamic range, resolution isn't very good except for expensive and low-sensitivity film...and usable ISO levels for natural light have terrible resolution. Forget about trying to shoot indoors unless you have some sort of lighting equipment, and that's a whole entire level of additional complexity. If you're an experienced photographer who wants an extra challenge from film, fine. But stop telling beginners film is superior. It is not, in any way/shape/form. It has not been for two decades.
- ghaff 3y ago
  High ISO is one of the most under-appreciated benefits of digital. B&W film topped out at 400 (Tri-X and HP5) which could be pushed to about 1600 though it started to show both significant grain and loss of shadow detail at that point. Color slide films were really suboptimal once you got above 100. Even my somewhat older digital cameras can easily handle around 3200 or so without much noise.
- dietrichepp 3y ago
  > This is a bunch of retro-grouch reverse-snobbism hogwash. The advice isn’t bullshit, but neither is it some technique that will “improve your photography significantly.” People who draw will do all sorts of weird exercises to develop their skills. This includes targeted practice, and yes, digital artists will sometimes practice with pen and paper. I see that practice as being kindred with the photographers who shoot on film as an exercise. Mostly, it just encourages you to spend more effort visualizing the end result before you press the shutter release on your camera. It’s not some powerful technique to unlock your skills, but neither is it snake oil or hogwash. It’s easy to get stuck in habits, and one of the habits you can get into in photography is to just take a ton of pictures, hoping that one of them will look good. Maybe you just keep taking pictures and making adjustments until you get the right picture. Spending some time with film just forces you to break the habit. It would be nice if you could just tell somebody to slow down and think about what they’re doing, but we’ve got these messy human brains which don’t always follow our instructions as well as we’d like. > Even the most serious, dedicated, methodical beginner will find it all exhausting unless they're practically autistic. We used to teach film photography to ordinary high school students, maybe age 15 or so. I don’t think our current generation of high school students is substantially different. > Film has terrible dynamic range… This depends on the type of film you use. B&W film has phenomenal dynamic range. Color negative film has excellent dynamic range. Color positive film has narrow dynamic range. If you shoot slides, you have to be damn precise with your shots. B&W negatives are very forgiving as long as you don’t underexpose them too much†. The dynamic range of B&W film is probably higher than the capacity of your lens to produce a high-contrast image. If you took pictures pointing your camera into a laser beam, or pointing into the sun, your picture would get overwhelmed by flare. †Likewise, digital is very forgiving as long as you don’t overexpose.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

This is a bunch of retro-grouch reverse-snobbism hogwash. Buy a digital interchangable lens camera and make a conscious effort to both shoot a lot (and be willing to purge stuff, don't become a packrat) but also spend time experimenting and focusing on getting a particular shot or style of shot as best you can, technically first, and then artistically. People who lack the discipline to be "intentional" without being forced to by the medium will not have the discipline to a)take the notes required so they can later understand how and why things didn't work, and b)shoot film long enough to actually learn the technical skills needed to then focus on artistic skills. They'll find it frustrating because they'll get back a bunch of badly exposed, blurry shots and have no idea why. It might not even be their fault, because labs fuck up developing all the time, film can be bad (and its performance varies with temperature, age, etc) and film cameras can be horribly unreliable or broken and you have no way of telling unless you take it for repair. Even the most serious, dedicated, methodical beginner will find it all exhausting unless they're practically autistic. Digital is superior for serious beginners because beginners more than anything need to actually just go and shoot lots of photos, often...and know what when wrong when things don't work. And they need a minimum number of variables to keep track of. If it's a film camera, they'll "save" the film, and worse, by the time they develop a roll, they won't remember anything about what they were doing. None of these problems exist with digital. Not only are frames essentially free, and not only are the cameras nearly perfectly reliable - you can instantly see what did or did not work, and try again. Or try multiple things, and see immediately how it worked out. You get complete metadata ranging from aperture and shutter speed, usually lens data, and various modes the camera was in and nowadays often even including location. It becomes trivial to pop open your photo editing program and search for photos taken with a particular lens and effortlessly compare them down to the pixel, see histograms, etc. Further, film is fucking terrible on a technical level; 35MM dSLRs surpassed it nearly two decades ago in nearly every technical capacity; micro 4/3rds / APS-C surpassed full-frame 35MM as well quite a while ago. Film has terrible dynamic range, resolution isn't very good except for expensive and low-sensitivity film...and usable ISO levels for natural light have terrible resolution. Forget about trying to shoot indoors unless you have some sort of lighting equipment, and that's a whole entire level of additional complexity. If you're an experienced photographer who wants an extra challenge from film, fine. But stop telling beginners film is superior. It is not, in any way/shape/form. It has not been for two decades.

ghaff 3y ago
High ISO is one of the most under-appreciated benefits of digital. B&W film topped out at 400 (Tri-X and HP5) which could be pushed to about 1600 though it started to show both significant grain and loss of shadow detail at that point. Color slide films were really suboptimal once you got above 100. Even my somewhat older digital cameras can easily handle around 3200 or so without much noise.
dietrichepp 3y ago
> This is a bunch of retro-grouch reverse-snobbism hogwash. The advice isn’t bullshit, but neither is it some technique that will “improve your photography significantly.” People who draw will do all sorts of weird exercises to develop their skills. This includes targeted practice, and yes, digital artists will sometimes practice with pen and paper. I see that practice as being kindred with the photographers who shoot on film as an exercise. Mostly, it just encourages you to spend more effort visualizing the end result before you press the shutter release on your camera. It’s not some powerful technique to unlock your skills, but neither is it snake oil or hogwash. It’s easy to get stuck in habits, and one of the habits you can get into in photography is to just take a ton of pictures, hoping that one of them will look good. Maybe you just keep taking pictures and making adjustments until you get the right picture. Spending some time with film just forces you to break the habit. It would be nice if you could just tell somebody to slow down and think about what they’re doing, but we’ve got these messy human brains which don’t always follow our instructions as well as we’d like. > Even the most serious, dedicated, methodical beginner will find it all exhausting unless they're practically autistic. We used to teach film photography to ordinary high school students, maybe age 15 or so. I don’t think our current generation of high school students is substantially different. > Film has terrible dynamic range… This depends on the type of film you use. B&W film has phenomenal dynamic range. Color negative film has excellent dynamic range. Color positive film has narrow dynamic range. If you shoot slides, you have to be damn precise with your shots. B&W negatives are very forgiving as long as you don’t underexpose them too much†. The dynamic range of B&W film is probably higher than the capacity of your lens to produce a high-contrast image. If you took pictures pointing your camera into a laser beam, or pointing into the sun, your picture would get overwhelmed by flare. †Likewise, digital is very forgiving as long as you don’t overexpose.