but any competent worker can do with digital files anything you can do with film as long as the capture file size is sufficient to match a given film size.

I'm still waiting for a digital capture to compete with my scanned 6x9 cm slides shot on Provia 100F.

And I'm still waiting for a digital capture to compete with my 35mm slide shot on Provia 100F with Zeiss lenses.

As long as you are limited to magazine printing (A4 or legal size), digital might fit your needs, but as soon as you will leave this boundary and start printing 50x75 cm, 60x90 cm or even 120x180 cm you'll be in deep trouble with the lousy resolution of digital capture. Even worse, the depth or 3D effect a good lense produces is lost with digital capture.

I mean @ 6x9 we are talking about a 130 megapixel image - what about your tiny blocky digital images? How close do you think you'll come without 'upsampling', 'resampling' or any other shabby way loosing sharpness and quality?

Competent worker? You mean picture makers, that means they make the pictures in PS, they don't take the pictures. There is a big difference:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/digital-to-analog.shtml

And since we are talking about photography and not data processing:

http://www.vividlight.com/articles/1513.htm

For quick and dirty images digital is sufficient. For real photographs nothing can beat film until today, tomorrow or the next 5 years to come.

Don't think digital. Think molecular. A stellar experience.

Jens,

I do this for a living and I do it very well. And I mix 4x5, 6x9 scanned film and DSLR capture every week in commercial shoots and in exhibits. I know the limitations. I am simply trying to breakthrough this mythology about the inadequacies of digital like the idea that digital files have a different look than film. It is simply not true.


I mean @ 6x9 we are talking about a 130 megapixel image - what about your tiny blocky digital images? How close do you think you'll come without 'upsampling', 'resampling' or any other shabby way loosing sharpness and quality?

I wan't comparing 4x5 or 6x9 this to a DSLR image in terms of resolution, compare it to the file from Betterlight back at that resolution and you have a comparison. Please read what I said. You are arguing a point I did not make.

Kirk,

I understand your point, but I've never used a digital back. The reason is simple: when and where I shoot 6x9, I can't go with a laptop. In most cases I'm hiking 3 or 4 hours through nature, where water is more vital than a laptop. Besides that I love to have totally battery independent and reliable mechanical cameras like the Fujis. Even in urban areas I'd prefer to use film because the storage is easier - I'll always have an original, even without a computer. I know the film will still look great in 20 years. But data on a DVD or HD? Even if so, who can guarantee there will be a device or software to read the data? In IT 4 years are an eternity, 20 years will be 5 times eternity.

Last but not least I just like to keep things simple. This might be a very personal point of view.

My comments were not intended to start a film vs digital divide; I simply expressed an appreciation for a trait I felt film has over digital.

If you don't agree, so be it, but I still maintain the difference.

Lets shoot...

I am agree with Kirk here on this one,
Daily I am printing from raw digital capture , and from scanned film.
I appreciate the arguments re, cost, usability in the field, and learning curves.But side by side comparisons tell me that digital capture is very good in the right hands.But so is a good scan of film.
When I first answered with my post I said digital capture. I was relating to my day to day experiences working on the Lambda in PS.
Film has a more cumberson workflow than digital capture, and the print manipulations on a raw file seem to be easier done. The dust busting aspect alone is timeconsuming and very boring after your scan.
Therefore my vote for digital capture , ease of use and comparable quality.
With that said, I only shoot film, black and white and colour, for a lot of the reasons others here posted. For example I use a Noblex for colour and I use a Fuji 6x9 for a solarized long term project.
It could be argued that stitching would be great for my panoramic scenes, but once again why bother when I am really happy with the original film >scan >print workflow I already have. There is no need to change.
So here I sit on both sides of the fence *happily*
At Silver Conference John Sexton brought up a very good point. Film is the ultimate in storage, and this transfering of digital data over long periods of time*unpredictablity and work* is one of my hesitanceys to buy a digital camera.
Second as Kirk points out or alludes to. What great archetectual photographer is not using a large format camera with swings tilts and shifts.
Until the digital backs are able to work on existing equipment *large format* without a lot of hassel and exhorborant costs I would stay with film for these sorts of applications.
I have heard people say that the larger sensors are not coming, I don't believe it. I think that every great camera that we own today will at some point have and adaptor back for digital capture. It is a manufactures dream come true, 20 years of slow improvement with the photographers paying for each new and better gizmo.
Sorry for the long winded pontification on this subject and I to am not arguing one is better than the other. *I swing both ways on this issue*

My comments were not intended to start a film vs digital divide; I simply expressed an appreciation for a trait I felt film has over digital.

If you don't agree, so be it, but I still maintain the difference.

Lets shoot...

For myself, I am most interested in the best tool for the particular job. Sometimes that is LF film sometimes it is DSLR.

In some ways I miss the simplicity of the old days when we simply shot the best transparency we could, got them processed, edited the exposures and delivered them and moved on to the next job. Then I spent most of my time shooting. Now I spend more hours scanning or processing files than I do shooting. I have more control, but the price is high. The profession is really changing and I am not sure I like it, but there is no turning back.

Now I spend more hours scanning or processing files than I do shooting. I have more control, but the price is high. The profession is really changing and I am not sure I like it, but there is no turning back.

That is about where I am. For many years I insisted on printing my LF and ULF negatives directly form in-camera negatives. I reasoned that since my job as chair of a large academic department at the university kept me behind the computer 4-6 hours every day writing reports and evaluations of one kind or another it would be insane to extend that behaviour to my hobby. But I was very impressed by the work some of my friends, Sam Wang for examiple, were doing with image manipulation on the computer.

Things changed and I returned to full-time teaching for the last five years of my academic career. So I thought, now is the time to throw myself into digital photograhy.

Now I spend huge amounts of time staring at the computer, processing images, or watching the printer do its thing. I am making great prints, with wonderful control, but sometimes I sure miss the old ways when it was mostly about getting out into nature with the camera to blow the stink off.

But I am still 100% with film capture, though most of the film gets scanned and treated as digital.

Sandy King

Like Kirk and Sandy, I spend huge amounts of time scanning and working with the scanned images and, yes, I get better results than I could ahve gotten a decade ago in the darkroom. Nonetheless, the real joy, whether on assignment for a client or doing personal work, is still standing behind the camera with my head under the darkcloth. After spending days and days and days working with existing negatives getting ready for a group show while I waited and waited for the snow and rain to stop, I finally got out to shoot all day Saturday and a bit yesterday too. Time left, I was in a different world. For me, under the darkcloth is where it all starts and where most of the enjoyment comes.