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I keep all my negatives because they're the physical artifacts of the experience, but they're really blown out of the water by slide film positives. Instead of

• esafak 2y ago
  That's not an accurate belief. Every film has an engineered characteristic curve; a different look. Which wouldn't happen if they were faithful. The same thing is true of "raw" digital files; manipulation by the engineers is involved, even if the photographer does nothing.
  • armadsen 2y ago
    You’re right of course, which is why Fuji sells both Provia and Velvia. However the slide is still the image. It’s not a perfect reproduction of the scene in front of the lens, but there’s no subjective choices to be made during printing and/or scanning to invert it. Stick it in front of a light and you can see the image with the naked eye just as it exists on the film. I think that’s what OP was getting at.
    • npteljes 2y ago
      >there’s no subjective choices to be made during printing and/or scanning Same could be said about a simple smartphone photo, but they hardly hold the same respect. I personally get the same feeling, but as hard as I try to define where the "honest analog" ends and the "manipulated uninteresting lies" begins, the more blurry it becomes. At the end of the day, there is no honest representation at all, as many people manipulated the analogue photos as well.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • jiehong 2y ago
    In the end, we still make pictures for our eyes that are more sensitive to green. Most bird would probably think our pictures are quite unfaithful of what they see, and most bees would argue that the pictures of the flowers we take always clearly lack the UV patterns found on so many flower petals. So it’s subjective all the way through the stack (Down to the brain’s interpretation of the signals)
• npteljes 2y ago
  What I appreciate in film is that with the development of technology, we can extract more information out of it, retroactively. This is a big contrast to digital media, where the information is coded as-is, and with increasing accuracy, we can only hope for a more reliable reading of the same thing. For one thing, film's analogue information density enables us to have 4k or even higher renders of the original footage, instead of relying on the versions rendered for their then-current time.
  • jiehong 2y ago
    Except CGI, which were often rendered to a specific resolution but transferred to film. Restoration efforts or remasters then have to redo those effects, and often the source of the effects were lost because never archived and shared. Also, some restoration of old black and white films with AI upscaling try to counteract bad early films or films that degraded.
    • npteljes 2y ago
      Indeed, all post-processing will need to be done again, and sometimes they do a questionable job, like in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So there is a lot of challenges with a remaster. Still, the possibility to extract more information is there, which is a plus for film. With AI, I feel the opposite. I like it that it's fun, but I dislike it that AI creates new information. What's again exciting for me is the possibility of extracting information from a moving picture from movements, and over time. I think these two angles are currently under-utilized, but hold much potential, once we discover more techniques and throw more processing power over the problem.
  • lambdaone 2y ago
    The same thing will likely be true of raw files, as we get better (and probably machine-learning based) algorithms for decoding those into standard image formats. I wonder what fraction of projects currently preserve their raw files?
    • ethbr1 2y ago
• throw46365 2y ago
  It’s more perfect than digital. Consider this about the original slide: it was physically there with the photographer when the photograph was taken. It is stained with the chemically-captured energy of the actual light that bounced off the subject, in a form that you can visualise with your naked eye. If that is not perfect I don’t know what is. (Yeah, the dynamic range sucks compared to digital. But then some digital cameras suck compared to others)
  • surfingdino 2y ago
    Slides have three-dimensional form and feel, because light doesn't just pass through the layers of emulsion, it bounces inside. This is also what made dye-transfer prints look so good. Sadly, that print technology is no more.
    • throw46365 2y ago
      I shoot digital, and only black and white film, these days. (I need to build a darkroom so I can print again) But the thing that really hooked me deep into photography was 6x6 transparencies from a Rolleicord. Velvia, incident light meter, sunny day, job done. Downvotes on my earlier comment suggest that people haven't had this experience: no matter how great, practical and useful digital is, there is something mesmerising and emotional about a great transparency. These days I get my visceral buzz from assembling my own simple lenses.
      • surfingdino 2y ago
        Try 8x10 transparencies. You will be hooked.
        • throw46365 2y ago
          One day... building a 4x5 is next.
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  It's in this digital age, where I seem to have an infinite roll of film, that I have come to appreciate not the look necessarily of analog but the scarcity of those photos. I have medium format cameras, a few 35mm, and I take them with me from time to time when on trips for example. There is certainly much more care per shot since I have so few (especially with the medium format that has only 12 shots per roll). For better or worse, the anticipation, waiting for the film to be processed, is something of course not shared with digital. And further I linger over the photos more afterward because of how precious they are. And when you capture a "happy accident" — perhaps an interesting, artistic looking light flare in the right place, the film shot becomes even more precious.
• strogonoff 2y ago
  “Honest-to-god image” isn’t. All perception is subjective.