Just a Thought...

No Fear

How often do you see something cool, and take a picture of it? How often does it resurface 60 years later? Yep, this picture is another from the set of pictures my grandparents took around 1949. I think it is quite telling how no one thought it strange to take a camera to a pool back in the day, but now it’s an international crime.

No doubt this gentleman was showing off for the ladies. No matter how strong you are, you can only hold a pose like that for so long. Without all the modern gadgetry of today, my grandma was able to take this picture quickly enough. When photographing people you do have to be ready. The camera was loaded, and probably set for a reasonable exposure given the time of day. All that was needed was to cock the shutter (if it wasn’t a press type shutter that was self cocking) and release it. Advance the film and be ready for the next one.

Is there anything that could have done better? Absolutely, but what’s done is done. I think in this instant age where everything is done for you, the effort to retry is so little that people tend not to be as critical as they should be before pulling the trigger. The really good picture is lost in a sea of mediocre pictures, and will likely never see the light of paper.

Quite frankly, quantity is the enemy of excellence. I’ve taken literally thousands of pictures, and more than half of them are really good—some excellent. However, the pain of going through them all will likely cause them to never really get any special treatment. Wall space is more precious than album space, which is in turn more precious than hard drive space or negative storage space. While I publish far fewer pictures and take far fewer pictures now, the ones I do take are on average better than when I took several at a time. This fact doesn’t change whether I shoot digital or film.

Don’t be afraid not to take a picture if you can’t make it special. Have you ever taken a picture of something you thought was amazing, but after you took the picture it looked so-so? I know I have. Have you ever taken a step to either side or gotten lower or higher to reveal on film (or digital frame) what you were experiencing? Do your walkabout quickly to get in position if you can. A mediocre picture of a spectacular event is is more frustrating to me than not having the right picture of the event. I’ve not taken pictures because the moment passed before I found the right position—but I’ve also learned from that experience. I can better anticipate the right perspective now.

Don’t be afraid to make your own decisions about what you like and don’t like. There’s lots of opinions and guidelines about what makes a good picture. However, if you don’t like a picture that follows the rules then you don’t like it. Break the rules and make something you do like. That’s when you develop your own style.

Don’t be afraid to try something different. Whether it’s going old school or new school, you can only grow by incorporating new tools or processes. Just make sure you don’t try too much too quickly. Introduce yourself one bit at a time to the new stuff. Build on what you’ve learned so far and go a step further. Don’t spend thousands of dollars on equipment you’ll never get around to using. As you add to your equipment, learn to use the new stuff properly before you get the next thing.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to enjoy what you do. If all you are doing is worrying about how to make your equipment pay for itself with jobs then it’s only a matter of time before you get burned out. Find something that you enjoy, that relaxes you, and don’t worry about trying to make it pay for itself. Just have fun.

I’m not going to argue about quality, process, etc. It’s just a pure look at the cost of film vs. the cost of digital. Let’s be honest, there are some real gear junkies out there so we aren’t going to talk about the people who change their camera every week for half of a megapixel more resolution. We’re going to talk about real people and real situations. So first off there are certain costs that are the same. Your lenses and your flash units are not likely to be any different with film vs. digital at any format size. Medium and large format cameras where the shutter is in the lens use a standard cable release for remote operation. Small format cameras like to get you to spend more money for the same thing so a remote for your film camera may not work for your digital camera. What’s worse is that a remote for one model of a company’s camera won’t necessarily work with a different model of the same company’s camera. It’s still a constant expense, so go figure.

OK, so now that we got that out of the way, what’s different about digital vs. film (other than the fact that one is digital and the other is film)? First off, the cost of the sensor for a digital camera is very high in comparison to the “sensor” for a film camera. One is several hundred (or thousand depending on format) dollars, and the other is less than $10. That’s right, film is a light sensitive material, hens it is a film camera’s sensor. The big difference of course, is that you can only use film once and you can use a digital sensor several times. That’s the rub. Your up front costs are going to be higher with digital, but over a given time your consumable costs will overtake that initial investment. That’s a fact no matter how you slice it. Digital also has consumables in the form of compact flash cards and hard drives. They are convenient in that they can store large amounts of photos, but dangerous because if the device fails you lose everything. That’s why you need more than one, and to back them up on other drives. With film, the negative is your storage device and it requires physical damage to lose pictures.

Small format cameras are a little worse than medium and large format cameras in the sense that you have to replace the entire camera when you upgrade. Medium and large format cameras have changeable backs where you can use the same camera for both film and digital, depending on the client and your budget. By the way, a digital back for a medium format camera is several thousand dollars. You can purchase several small format digital SLR cameras for the same price. For the sake of argument, let’s keep things in the realm of the small format SLR cameras.

A used small format film camera can be had for $25-$400 depending on the model you buy (consumer/pro, age, etc.). You can buy a small format digital camera for about $500-$900 depending on the model you buy. Add to that a compact flash card for $20-$50 depending on the size and speed you buy. So just how many rolls of film will it take to overtake the initial plunge? Again, it depends on what kind of film you use. Slide film is near $10 a roll, but if you do black and white film is around $3 a roll. The price of lab development also varies based on the lab and the type of film. Slide film can cost near $10 a roll to develop at a pro shop, regular color film can cost about $4 a roll at a pro shop or $1.50 a roll at Target. If you develop black and white film yourself it will cost you pennies a roll—definitely worth it. So you can see that the answer depends on a lot of different things.

Let’s say you are the extravagant type and you shoot Fuji Astia 100. It costs $5 a roll, but to get it developed unmounted it costs $6 a roll (mounted is $10). That’s $11 a roll. Now, let’s say you also you skimped on the body knowing you were going to upgrade to digital later. So that’s $25 for a cheap used camera. Slide film is typically very low grain and very rich colors. To produce equivalent pictures you’ll need a nice digital. Let’s go for the $900 model (roughly what I paid for my used Canon 30D). The difference between the $925 (camera and compact flash card) digital and the $25 film camera is $900, so it would take roughly 82 rolls (just under 3000 pictures) to hit the break even point where the up front cost of digital equals the same cost in film.

Now, let’s say you are shooting sporting events and you need to take several pictures in a row quickly. You’ll need a better film body so your up front cost is something like $400 for a used top of the line model (roughly what I paid for my used Canon 1N). You’ll also need high ISO film if you are shooting indoors, which means you are working with normal color negative film. You have a choice between Fuji Press 800 for $3.50 a roll or Fuji Pro-Z 800 for $5.50 a roll. Developing costs for a pro shop is about $4 without prints. Let’s call it an even $8 for simple math. Using the same digital camera from the last example, your difference is only $525. You can shoot 65 rolls (2300 pictures) before you hit the break even point. In sports photography that number comes up really quick. Digital is a clear winner here.

For the aspiring fine art photographer, black and white is king. You’ll want the nicest camera you can afford because you want to enjoy the process, but you are now shooting black and white film and developing it yourself. Fomapan 100 (a very nice film) is about $3 a roll, and to develop it yourself costs about $0.50 or cheaper a roll depending on the chemicals you use. That’s $3.50 total per roll, and for the sake of argument we will compare the same two cameras in our last example. You will have to shoot 150 rolls of film (5400 pictures) before you break even. Since this style of photography is slower paced, your digital gear might need an upgrade before you reach that mark. The film gear will be just fine for years to come. My personal belief is that film renders a better black and white image than you can get from digital. That’s my opinion, and you can take it for what it’s worth. If we took the cheapy film camera and the expensive digital camera the difference is even more drastic at 257 rolls (9252 pictures).

For the casual shooter, film provides a great starting point as you get your equipment together. For the more prolific types of photography such as sports and event photography, digital is a clear winner. It will pay for itself rather quickly. For the fine art photographer, you can’t go wrong with film. There is no real demand on quantity of pictures, and the archival quality of film has been proven based on history rather than simulated projections. There are plenty of other reasons to choose film, but those are all personal choices. The truth is that digital cameras (not the cheap point and shoot variety) cost a lot more in the initial investment, and film has a continual cost you need to incur as you take pictures. Eventually, digital will become cheaper as long as you don’t keep upgrading your body. I use both, personally.

I’ve been playing with the Adobe Lightroom tool lately, mainly because I have a lot of pictures to manage. When it comes to sports photography, you end up taking hundreds of pictures a game. Even with 6 fps you get close to that critical moment, but many times just a bit off. A typical high school basketball season lasts for three months with roughly two games a week, rarely with a night off. Some of you are doing the math right now, let me save you some time: the season isn’t over yet and I have 1,872 pictures. That’s a lot to go through. I thought that in order to help me out I needed a system to weed out the not quite good enough and get a top 10 for each game, and then from there further refine to the top however many I decide. That task proved ridiculous when I used Photoshop Elements, but to be fair it really wasn’t designed for the purpose.

I’m happy to report that Adobe Lightroom is a very powerful and useful tool for your digital photography needs. I really don’t need a full Photoshop package, and at $650 US it’s a little out of reach anyways. Lightroom is a more manageable $299 US, which is still on the expensive side but it does everything I need—including the light touch ups I do for color correction and cropping. Aperture is equally powerful from what I hear, and based on whatever you get comfortable with first you tend to like. O’Reilly sponsored a week long review of an Aperture user learning and using Lightroom and vice versa. The result is both authors had legitimate reasons for their preferences, and neither was wanting to switch… Even though they gave the other app mad props and even recognized when things were done better. Bottom line is that whatever fits the way you do things, that’s what you want. Both have free 30 day evaluations, so take advantage of it and properly decide.

The main point wasn’t a comparison of Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements, or Picassa. The point was whether the claims of digital camera salesmen hold up. It also affects how we design user interfaces, but more on that later. The salesman will tell you how digital provides “instant feedback”, “lots more room than a roll of film”, “you can always fix it later”, etc. Sure, my DSLR provides instant feedback but I find that annoying, so I turn that feature off. I have to concentrate on what’s going on around me, not the toy in my hand. I need to be ready for a fast break, a drive to the basket, a beautiful no-look pass. I’ll miss it if I’m constantly distracted by that screen shining off of my cheekbone. Sure, it’s convenient to not have to change rolls in the middle of a game, but I tend to take too many pictures—most of which are good, but not great. I found that when I was using film I would budget 36 pictures per quarter (one roll per quarter), and that worked. Of course, scanning them to manage them was a pain. Now I have anywhere between 175 to 300 pictures in a game. I’m more wasteful instead of better. Of course, fixing it later is a major pain. I’d rather get it right, or at least really close at the time I take the picture.

Lastly, we have to really think about what the purpose of photography is. It’s to have pictures. You know these images on hard paper with a nice finish… I find that when you have 90% of the pictures you take never see paper, you have to wonder if you really need to manage the pictures. If it really wasn’t memorable, then why hold on to it? I’m sure you can tell me many reasons why, but these are legitimate questions you have to answer. The big one, of course, is what is the purpose of what I’m doing? Why is it that I have so many pictures to manage, but there’s no actual picture? Who’s going to look at these and actually enjoy them? People only have so much attention span, so a top 20 might be the limit of someone’s attention span for a slide show.

The bottom line is that better disciplines make you a better photographer, not better gadgets. If you can’t appreciate what a feature can do for you, you don’t need it. Far too much attention has been placed on the gadgets on not on helping someone do what they really want to do. If the idea is to focus on photography, then get out of the user’s way and let them do what they want to do—and no more.

In the analog world, the focus has always been on the hard picture. If you have to print the pictures yourself, you’ll be a lot more conservative about what you believe is worth taking. There’s a fair amount of work involved in getting a good print. It’s rewarding work, but work nonetheless. People have discovered that they are more drastic with their adjustments in the analog world than they are in the digital world, and the picture is better for it. I think a large part of that has to do with the delayed feedback. As we make changes in the digital world, we see every little thing and intermediate step immediately, and the more drastic changes scare us, so we don’t complete what we were originally thinking. In the analog world, you make the changes and prepare everything you need at once without seeing it appear in front of you. When you develop the print, you are pretty happy with the work you did. In a way, the instant feedback hurts more than it helps.