Photographer hostility?

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Vincent Oliver

I too have come across many old F**ts who should have hung up their cameras many years ago, the phrases I hear are; you can't beat film - Tri-X, get into a darkroom and learn about real photography, etc. The trouble is that many of these guys can't adapt to change and see their market under threat. My own view is, technology is here to stay, embrace it or go under.

On a whim a couple of months ago I bought myself a used Canon EOS-1V (the last & best 35mm camera Canon ever made or ever will make) & shot a couple of rolls of FP4. I was shocked to discover just how soft the images were in comparison to a 22 megapixel digital image from a 5D3. It's ten years or so since I shot any film & I had even forgotten quite how small 35mm negatives are. No wonder the old school wedding photographers always used a medium format camera for the posed group shots. It's still arguable whether 35mm film is better than digital for video but there is no contest when it comes to stills.

[Vincent Oliver]

One of the things that has changed is how we view our images. In the film days we may have used a X4 or X8 loupe to look at negs or slides. Today we look at images at 100% magnification in Photoshop (or other application) and we are looking more critically at everything. A while back I printed a few Nikon D1 images (2.7mp files) on A2 media and I found myself looking at the image rather than the resolution. Maybe some people are becoming led by technology and forgetting about the end result. The A2 prints looked fine to me, maybe I couldn't see all the hairs on a fly's leg, but there was enough quality in the image.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Nice to hear that you bought a EOS 1V. That was my last camera before I shifted to digital.

The 35mm negative/slide size is of course same as the 5D series or 1D X. The difference is more in the ISOs. Most of the time I used ISO 100 or ISO 50 velvia slides. Now with my 1D Mark IV, I use insane ISOs. So there has to be a difference in sharpness due to the higher shutter speed in the DSLRs.

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

On a whim a couple of months ago I bought myself a used Canon EOS-1V (the last & best 35mm camera Canon ever made or ever will make) & shot a couple of rolls of FP4. I was shocked to discover just how soft the images were in comparison to a 22 megapixel digital image from a 5D3. It's ten years or so since I shot any film & I had even forgotten quite how small 35mm negatives are. No wonder the old school wedding photographers always used a medium format camera for the posed group shots. It's still arguable whether 35mm film is better than digital for video but there is no contest when it comes to stills.