Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/07/19
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You've just explained why I haven't bought a digital camera. Or a
scanner. Or a printer.
Rick Dykstra, Australia.
On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 01:07 PM, Peter Klein wrote:
> I've been thinking a lot about the whole issue of film vs. digital.
> And how it plays in our special little niche (or is it backwater?) in
> the photographic world. Here are some of my thoughts--I invite others
> to chime in.
>
> Let's leave the marketplace out of it for a moment. The Defense
> stipulates that most pros have to shoot digital. No choice. Digital
> is good enough for the clients, they want it yesterday, and film
> doesn't happen fast enough. Either digital or film is good enough
> for the snapshooting consumers. They will go the way of most
> convenience and least cost, and wherever the cleverest marketeer leads
> them.
>
> But. . . Those of us who have bought into the whole Leica subculture
> have different desires than the masses, or the pros. A lot of Leica
> people are into getting the best quality possible. "Good enough"
> isn't good enough. Some of us want transparencies we can blow up to
> gargantuan proportions and still see detail. Some of us want to probe
> the fleeting dance of human interaction with a fleet-footed camera,
> and plumb the dimmest locales with a bright, clear eye. Some of us
> feel a connection to the golden age of photoreportage, where film
> grain, shallow depth of field and the optical defects of wide-open
> lenses are part of the asthetic, and we are one with the basic
> controls of camera. Leica cameras and lenses are beautifully suited
> to these tasks.
>
> Digital is a funny beast. It is *very* different from Leica M
> photography. All those old jokes about programming a VCR apply.
> Instead of three controls right under your fingers, you've got
> hundreds of parameters arranged into menus. Instead of controlling
> the camera based on experience, you are programming a computer to
> (hopefully) make the camera do what you would do yourself if you were
> in control.
>
> If you set things up correctly beforehand, you can shoot much faster
> than you could with the manual Leica. But the dance of humanity is
> often more complex than the parameters you set up. By the time you
> re-select the active focusing zone or change the metering from matrix
> to spot, the moment is gone.
>
> Then there is the fact that silver halide molecules are smaller than
> man-made sensors. Their "grid" is random, not fixed, and more
> forgiving. It takes a lot of sensors and processing power, memory and
> disk space to equal what those molecules can do. You can change film
> much more easily than change your sensor. That Bayer pattern sensor
> is feeding software that guesstimates detail that may or may not be
> there. But within the bounds of those fixed sensors, parameter
> tweaking can give you flexibility not dreamed of a few years ago.
>
> Digital is a great learning tool. Instant results, instant feedback,
> instant gratification. It's also a trap--the lure of yet another
> software tool, yet another set of parameter tweaks, and you spend more
> time messing with bits and bytes than seeing and taking photographs.
>
> Digital *looks* very different than film. Film shooters are used to
> images that have a toe and a shoulder. Digital hits zero or 255 and
> splat! That's it. You can't dodge it out or burn it in because it
> just isn't there. Then there's the Megapixel madness. Not all
> megapixels are created equal. The shots Phong took of his family with
> the 3-megapixel D30 run rings around my little Coolpix 990, with the
> same 3 megapixels. Noise, dynamic range, sensor interpolation,
> sharpening, compression. All that stuff is part of the black box.
> You think you've got it down, then you tweak one little parameter and
> everything changes.
>
> Sometimes the results are exquisite. But sometimes the results look
> like crap, and they get published anyway because digital is new, and
> new is supposedly better. See the Lake County article in the June
> 2003 National Geographic for side-by-side examples of the best and
> worst of digital.
>
> Digital is now in an exciting explosion of growth. In a way it's like
> the 1920s and 30s, with software and sensor alchemy substituting for
> chemistry. But to get the most out of it, you have to buy a new
> camera every year. Expensive.
>
> The bottom line for me is that digital is something I want to know
> about and play with. But right now it's more about the process than
> it is about seeing and taking pictures. And there is something about
> it that seems at odds with the whole "decisive moment" philosophy of
> photography. There's too much "stuff" between me and those
> fast-moving people.
>
> And then again, this past weekend I took and posted more pictures in a
> day with the Coolpix than I ever did with film. A few shots were
> decent, and they were fun to take. Then I looked closely and saw the
> noise and the looming limits of 3 megapixel resolution. And I found
> myself in the throes of megapixel envy and technological turpitude.
>
> Hmm, I thought, the Olympus C-5050 prices are dropping. There might
> be an improved Lumix Lika Leica out soon. B.D. gets great results
> with his E-20. I've seen superb pictures from that funny-shaped Sony
> F-717. Used D30s are getting really cheap, and people ditching D60s
> for the 10D. I've got a little angel on one shoulder telling me to
> shoot with the Leica, and a little devil on my other shoulder urging
> me to get deeper into digital. I'm being seduced. I sort of like it,
> and I sort of don't.
>
> --Peter Klein
> Seattle, WA
>
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