How things have changed

[ancient_mariner]

I am a member of a FaceBook group of local photographers. There is one member who posts images which have been HDR'd to within an inch of their lives, run over by the steam roller of subtlety and thrown down the well of bad taste.

These images have the most saturated colours and most visible edge haloes of any HDR images I have ever seen, yet these images get more "wow - great image" and "this is amazing" type of comments than any others in the group.

I'm sure most of them would look terrible if printed - even at a small size.


Steve.

That had me chuckling, and yes, I see a lot of that too on Facebook. I like the FB photography groups because you get a constant stream of stuff to think about, but those just slide under the radar these days without even clicking to enlarge.

Remember getting my first proper digital compact camera (as opposed to a VGA CMOS piece of junk) taking some test pictures and then being really disappointed. IIRC it was about 1.2mp, and they were soft & full of noise. Realistically 5-8mp would be about right for most non-photographers & online-only people to use, which is pretty much where they are with many phonecams.

 

[LeeRatters]

^^^^ Made me laugh too Each to their own

I prefer to get things as best I can in camera but yes I use LR to edit my images. I've known people take 50 sunset photos of the same pier while I sit back & set up waiting for the light/time & I'll happily come away with 2-3 shots which I really like & I'm proud of.

 

[jojo90]

I think it's great that there is a tool for each job that you want to do as a photographer. I've just returned from 18 months travelling SE Asia, doing that on film would have seen me carting round 100s of canisters, risking loss if I had to post them home, and having a hard time figuring out where to buy new rolls in Nakhon Nowhere. In a very compact shoulder bag I could cary E-M5 + 5 primes, X100S, GoPro, Gorilla Pod, & a darkroom/library (good quality android tablet with images backed up to the cloud overnight).

Towards the end of the trip I started to miss film but couldn't find a reasonably priced camera. Being in the land of cute kitsch I picked up an Instax Mini 90, Instax 210, and went happily off shooting with these for a while. Great to have a change and the images have a totally different feel to the OM-D & X100S. Picked up an APSC Ricoh GR as an aside.

Now I'm back in the UK and have less time & more storage space I'm back shooting 120 TLR & a few 35mm cameras. Personally I'm liking film a lot more, it's always a surprise to get back the film & I've never really printed digital files so having something I can hold in my hand is ace! Metering with a Sekonic is already giving me much better exposures on digital as well. It makes you think about something we often ignore with the wiz-bang digital jobbies.

The other great thing about film for me is I can pick up a really good mint 35mm SLR, or 120 TLR for less than £50 or £100 respectively. These things won't lose their value like my digital stuff will. They've largely lost it all already! The closest I can get to the Olympus OM 35mm SLR (size wise) is a outrageously priced Sony FF camera and ridiculously priced lenses. 120 6x6 gives you something that costs crazy money in Digital (and from what I can gather the digital backs are crop sensors anyway).

What's winning film for me at the moment tho is the simplicity of it all. Shutter speed, ISO (set once), Aperture, and shoot. It took me about 10 minutes to set up my OM-D to shoot the missus in the bedroom tonight (couldn't find a couple of arcane setting in the menus). I can't get any of my digital gear simplified to the film level. Maybe I'll pick up a Leica next .

Digital is great as it accelerates your learning curve dramatically (however not always in the best way).

I'm just happy we have both!

 

[ancient_mariner]

Stunning.
Awesome.
Fab.
Wonderful.
Etc.

Fuzzy, out of focus with nuclear-green glowing foliage and halos around everything with a hint of contrast. A beautiful image, carefully crafted with delicate tones, exciting composition and a subject so lovely you could weep - 4 likes.

 

[abbandon]

Whoever told you that is just being silly.

Lets just say I don't generally give their opinion much wieght.

The highest resolution digitail I have is 24MP I don't print these larger than A3+ the 10X8 get printed up to 40" (really must cough up for some 44" paper some when) and could easilly go larger if I chose to scan them at a higher rsolution but then Tiff only supports 4Gb and you find yourself messing with 9Gb PSB files and it all starts to get a bit silly.

I've tried selling my soul with photoshop once or twice, two years ago I took a couple of bluebell shots mostly I get things reasonably exposed but one was a good couple of stops under the other a couple over the under exposed one by the time you had done dirty things with shadows / highlights I couldn't live with the noise the over exposed one needed the colours messed with and it all went to hell. While these were definetly in pushing your luck land people rarely seem to want to except that post processing will degrade image quality.

From the film side of things these days I am often suprised when people shoot daylight film in mixed lighting or inside under artificail and wonder why it comes out looking funny or just work on the assumption that they can correct things in post - you haven't exposed the film with regard to its spectral sensitivity and you will degrade your image trying to rescue it but then no one seems to want to use cc filters any more.

A bit of a more obscure example is center ND filters on LF ultra wide angles, Schneider now do digitail center filter plug ins for photoshop free with the lens now as center filters are mostly 200+ and lose you two stops it might seem an atractive proposition however you are not going to get the best exposure on film and their will be consequences if you are critical.

Standards having fallen does seem to be a comon theme certainly seen many examples on LF info where you have proffessional photographers using 5x4 for their own work but small format digitail for their comercail clients but because no one has the budget otherwise and it is "good enough".