Digital cameras

[Huntsman]

In this instance.

Sounds like you have a good plan.

Regards,
Huntsman (still shooting a Nikon F3)

 

[GQgeek]

Originally Posted by Nantucket Red

Having searched in vain for a digital camera that offered both high quality pictures and a satisfying experience, I've now relegated digital to the realm of point-and-shoot and sunk serious money into shooting film with a Leica M system. I'm now averaging a dozen rolls a month with a high rate of keepers.

The local lab transfers my photos to CD at a sufficient resolution to look good online and the negatives can be printed any size. (Of course, I live in a major metropolis full of inveterate shutterbugs.)

It will be a long time before digital will catch up with your Nikon.

Here we go again. Both have pros and cons. From what I've seen of your photography, you made a good choice with the leica. But, there are some seriously good photographs being produced with all sorts of digital cameras.

Life has never been so good for wildlife photographers, for instance. Being able to shoot at high iso, meaning 800 and above, and still retain detail is a godsend for some. With a nikon d3 or d300 you can shoot 1600 without worrying about the impact on your image and even 3200 (on the d3) still looks pretty damned good. This means fast shutter speeds in difficult conditions that would make shooting with film a misery. I used to write-off the importance of really high iso performance, but I found out in the jungle how nice it would have been to have that performance. I'm aware that you can get high iso film, but it's just one more thing to carry and the light changes quickly and often. Being able to instantly switch iso is great.

Digital has a LOT of advantages, but, it's not the only choice. I think that if you ever really gave it a chance (you said you didn't like all the complexities), you'd find out that it good for a bit more than P&S.

 

[Brian SD]

Again with this argument. Instead of getting into the details (going to sound a lot like Andre and AF on analog vs. digital sound), I'll just say that every *real* photographer I've met (AKA not just hobbyists) have told me that there is no quality advantage of film over digital.

 

[Huntsman]

For the hobbyist, I can't help but wonder if the definition of 'quality' does not encompass, or more likely is heavily weighted toward, quality of the experience as much as quality of the result.

~ Huntsman

 

[andrew.cmyk]

Why do you need an image that large? You could easily get away with less DPI as long as the viewer isn't right next to the picture. For instance, billboards are less than 72dpi, but nobody would know that unless they were standing on top of one.

 

[MCsommerreid]

Originally Posted by Brian SD

Again with this argument. Instead of getting into the details (going to sound a lot like Andre and AF on analog vs. digital sound), I'll just say that every *real* photographer I've met (AKA not just hobbyists) have told me that there is no quality advantage of film over digital.

It comes down to the old "Right tool for the right job" to a certain extent. If you're going to do large and high detail landscape photography, for example, film is currently the only cost effective way to go. And once you get really large film is the only way to go, period.

But that's a temporary issue, I believe. With the way camera technology is progressing it wouldn't surprise me if we had 30MP cameras in 3 years priced at what 10mp cameras are now. I remember when 5MP ran something like $1000, now it can be found in quality at $400.

 

[retronotmetro]

Originally Posted by MCsommerreid

Any lens that isn't utter crap should work fine, and for high detail you should always use a tripod. Even with that, though, 35mm for a 50x50 would be pushing it a little unless you had good film, a good lens, a good camera, a good rig, good lighting, good negatives, good enlargers, good paper, and really good development processing.

A larger format film would make a 50x50 or even large a breeze, especially something crazy like 4x5.

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "utter crap" lenses and how picky you are about ultimate IQ. I haven't shot 35mm in a long time, but a few years ago my typical travel set included a Pentax 43/1.9 Limited (IMHO, the best prime Pentax ever made) and a FA 24-90 zoom, which although slow was a very sharp prosumer grade lens that I never personally considered to be "utter crap" (many people considered the 24-90 to have near-FA* IQ at a consumer-level build and price. I could pretty readily tell the difference between shots from my 43 and my 24-90 printed at 8x10, and I would not have wanted to print anything off the 24-90 much larger than 8x10 because of softness in the corners.

 

[Huntsman]

Heck, when I bought my Olympus E-10 (4MP) it was $2k, in '01.

 

[Brian SD]

A motto I was taught in college and always followed in digital photography is that it's not the amount of pixels that matters, its the quality of pixels. There are a lot of factors contributing to that.

Here's a sample of a 1.5" crop of a picture from my library (18mm f/4.5 1/100sec @ ISO 100), BTW this is with no adjustments from ACR, and remember this is about 4x the size on screen it would appear on paper at 300dpi.:

10 MP:

uprezzed to 25 MP:

There's almost no loss in quality. I wish I had taken pictures with my Nikon FM2 (a fantastic camera) to compare so you could see. I think most people would agree that the digital actually looks better, both in print and on screen, if the crop were the same.

My point is that the quality of sensors in the digital cameras these days, combined with Adobe Camera Raw's leaps and bounds, it is no longer required for good prints to come from film instead of a sensor. My photography instructor from my university showed me some huge prints he had done with his Nikon D3 just recently, I couldn't believe how sharp and detailed they were, we're talking around 40x55 or 60 inches. He had been working on a project where they blew up some Walker Evans photos to huge proportions, which were of course, spectacular images in comparison to his studio images (of furniture), but the quality difference was so marginal, the print quality was much more important at that stage (and in the case, when it cost them nearly $3k to print the Walker Evans photo, it was safe to say the print was nicer).

 

[GQgeek]

Originally Posted by Huntsman

Heck, when I bought my Olympus E-10 (4MP) it was $2k, in '01.

I'm glad i didn't buy in back them. Thankfully we're at a point where the technology is extremely good and will advance a little more slowly now (so less temptation to constantly upgrade).

Originally Posted by MCsommerreid

It comes down to the old "Right tool for the right job" to a certain extent. If you're going to do large and high detail landscape photography, for example, film is currently the only cost effective way to go. And once you get really large film is the only way to go, period.

But that's a temporary issue, I believe. With the way camera technology is progressing it wouldn't surprise me if we had 30MP cameras in 3 years priced at what 10mp cameras are now. I remember when 5MP ran something like $1000, now it can be found in quality at $400.

Not in 3 years. The MP race is slowing down. Nikon just released it's new $5,000 pro-level D3 and it only has 12.1MP, which isn't an increase from the D300. The D300 ($1800) added only 2 MP over the D200 and it is 2 years newer. Olympus just released it's pro-level dSLR with 10MP. Canon's new D40 ($1400) is 10MP which isn't much of an increase from their last camera. Their pro-level $5k EOS-1D Mark III is 10MP. Only when you cough-up $8k do you get an increase to 21MP in the form of the 1Ds Mark III.

Camera manufacturers have wisely realized that the average consumer, or even serious hobbyist, has more than enough resolution for the web and good-sized prints. They're now focusing R&D in other areas. Nikon and Olympus gave their AF systems big revamps and made big pushes in the area of high ISO performance. Both the D3 and Mark III are pushing like 10 FPS.

Maybe on the digicam front the race will continue since it's an easy way to say your camera is better than your friends', but i figure they're probably slowing down there too (I don't follow them). Noise is a big problem as you try and force more photosites onto a sensor and the sensors on digicams are tiny. Pushing up the MP count will ruin IQ.

Nikon could have easily put more photosites on their D3 sensor but they made a wise design decision that they would rather have larger photosites and less noise at higher ISOs. The D3 is the new low light king, ousting Canon from an area they have dominated for a long time.

So ya, Hasselbad will be safe from the mainstream for quite some time.

edit: Brian, i haven't played with uprezzing. That's pretty cool. I'll be happy when LR gets its plug-in SDK (probably in version 2).

 

[Nantucket Red]

Brian, could you post the entire photo from which you cropped that?

So far I'm really unimpressed with the sharpness. It's actually a good example of why I prefer film images.

 

[GQgeek]

Originally Posted by Nantucket Red

Brian, could you post the entire photo from which you cropped that?

So far I'm really unimpressed with the sharpness. It's actually a good example of why I prefer film images.

You can't gauge sharpness based on one photo and declare film the victor without knowing anything about the equipment the photo was taken with or the shooting conditions.

 

[Brian SD]

Sure. Here is a different picture from the same day, but where my hand wasn't quite so shaky - again, no adjustments in photoshop except for the default ACR settings, I could sharpen it a lot more but this is the photo in its natural state:

Lens is Nikon 18-200 AF-S VR II (glass is straight from God's spectacles, I swear). Body is Nikon D80 (10mp, 1.5 crop factor). The photo isn't great at all, but the sharpness is not objectionable, especially with no PS adjustments.

 

[Brian SD]

Here's a B&W (duotone colorized to look similar to Leica prints) in case you want to compare with yours and see how they stack up.

 

[Nantucket Red]

Originally Posted by GQgeek

You can't gauge sharpness based on one photo and declare film the victor without knowing anything about the equipment the photo was taken with or the shooting conditions.

Don't get your knickers in a knot. I was just declaring my preference.