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Digital STINKS (1 Viewer)

Tony J Case

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Originally Posted by Sam Posten If you choose a crappy jpeg preset for the type of work you are shooting then NO WONDER you like the lab prints better. Even the best jpeg preset won't hold up to a well done raw conversion.

Actually that first digital one was a straight RAW shot, straight from the camera and converted via photoshop to JPG. The film one wasn't handled by the lab either, beyond basic developing - it was a straight scan from my Epson V500. Now there was probably some tweaking here and there as the settings interpreted the information one way or another - but that was me doing my level best to keep things Straight Out Of Camera.


Personally, I think the tweaked digital looks a little too fake (and that's not counting that it looks too clean, too . . . well, digital). The saturation looks too strong, it didn't look that powerful (not quite the right word, but it'll have to do) in real life.


And I thought of one other reason I prefer film? Permanence. Take a peek at this slideshow: http://www.time.com/time/audioslide/0,32187,1920419,00.html - slides from the great depression that look like they were shot yesterday. Can we honestly say that .jpg files will be a viable format in 75 years? Hell, will it still be viable in 20? Hard drive crashes? Remote Servers go down? Flicker goes out of business? Big deal - I still have the original negatives and slides sitting on my shelf. All it costs me is some work to rescan all my material.
 

Sam Posten

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Even negatives are vulnerable, just ask the scores of 'togs who had their negatives stored in the safety deposit boxes of the WTC.... (not making light of the loss of life there, just that 'this too shall pass' is true of everything)


Anyway SOOC Raw files converted in photoshop are flat for a reason!

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/u-raw-files.shtml


Again on the fake versus reality pick your poison. I personally think Kodachrome looks fake too, tooooo saturated. But once you shoot on your film of choice that stock's characteristics are baked in and changing them requires serious darkroom attention. If the shot I modified looks fake to you because of the choices I made then minor tweaks can tone that down. But to gripe about the look of film versus digital by taking the least amount of personal direction possible on the two resulting images seems truly disingenuous..
 

nolesrule

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And what settings did you use for your digital shot? Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's automatic. If you're going to play with your settings on film, you need to do the same for digital.


My professional photographer buddy switched to digital years ago, and he tells me that if you know your equipment well, the differences become negligible. Of course, for him even the cheap cameras are 5 figures.



About those slides, just make slides from the digital images. They'll last. Problem solved. And if you are worried about losing the digital files, then you aren't taking proper backup precautions.


Unless you are keeping your negatives and slides in a fireproof/weatherproof safe, you are taking no more precaution against loss than someone who doesn't back up their hard drive.


And JPEG's been around quite awhile in technology terms. The group began in 1986, with first publication in 1992. It's been an ISO/IEC standard since 1994. It's integrated into almost anything that views or edits image and video files. The odds of it becoming obsoleted into disappearing entirely anytime soon are slim. The media it's being stored on long-term is the bigger issue, but that's what backup transfers are for.
 

Tony J Case

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Well, the bank vaults of the World Trade Center is kind of strawmanish. No media - analog, digital or cruciforms carved onto a stone tablet - is going to survive a catastrophic failure of bilibilcal proportions like that. And of course if you go far enough out, eventually all matter will succumb to the ravages of time. Entropy always wins in the end. But if I take a box of slides and CD and leave them on the same shelf for a hundred years, the slides will be viewable. The CD will probably have fallen prey to CD rot and faded dyes (and that's not considering if we'll even have CD drives by then and if we'd even have the right file format to read them).


Case in point, recently I've been scanning a whole bunch of old film for my mom that was shot back in the 40's and 50's - and despite them sitting untouched and forgotten in the damp, dusty basement under less than ideal conditions for some 60 years, the photos still look pretty good. Somehow I have doubts that a box of CDs, stored under the same conditions, would anything close to resembling usable in 2074.
 

nolesrule

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I'm talking about a "common" house fire, not worldwide catastrophe. When the big one hits, old photos will be the least of our worries.


The trick against obsolescence of media is to always maintain a live, stable backup. For the time being that means redundant magnetic hard drives, one backup at home for quick archiving, and another offsite as a failsafe. There was a discussion about just this issue on slashdot yesterday.


But failing to protect slides and negatives by just leaving them on the shelf is just as bad as a single hard drive failure with no backup. No, it's worse, because floods or fire will cause permanent unrecoverable damage, but you can recover data from all but the most physically damaged drives for under $1000 if it's worth that much to you. Heck, NASA was able to salvage hard drives from Columbia.
 

Ed Moxley

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John, I feel your pain.

I used to use a Nikon F2, back in the 70s. I've had a lot of photography courses in school, along with a lot of darkroom work. I miss using a darkroom. I miss the smell of the chemicals, and all the different processes you could use, for whatever effect you were trying for. My major in school was photography. The instructor and I had a falling out. I quit school, and was out over a year, with two quarters left to go. I went back to finish, and while I was gone the school dropped photography as a major. I finished with my degree in commercial art. After school, I did portraits for about a year, using a 70mm camera. It got so boring, I couldn't stand it anymore.


Not staying in photography for all these years, I've forgotten most of what I knew of the technical stuff. So, when I bought my new Nikon digital SLR, I found out that I'm kinda lost. Digital is a good bit different, even though a lot has stayed the same (as was mentioned before about lighting and such). One aspect I like is that you don't waste a lot of film anymore, with bad shots taken, Just delete from camera, and keep on shooting. So, I'm taking a night time digital photography class at the local community college, starting Monday night. I'm hoping to refresh what I knew, and learn a lot of new stuff about digital. My wife has been a graphic artist for 30+ years, so she has used Photoshop and other programs (Illustrator, InDesign, etc.) for that long, or since they came out, whichever came first. She's very good with Photoshop. So, when I need help in the digital darkroom, I'm covered there. I saw a whole darkroom setup for sale on Craig's List the other day. If I had somewhere to set it up, I'd have bought it. Our bathroom is too small.


Kodak has killed Kodachrome film now. I don't know how much longer you'll be able to buy B&W film either. I don't know for sure, but I'd say the chemicals are probably getting harder to come by too. Is photo paper still plentiful?

I hope you find a way to make digital more fun for yourself.
 

DaveF

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Stumbled across this thread and skimmed the first couple posts (from 2006). Tell you this: Kodak here in Rochester deeply wishes there had been no transition to digital. Caught them flatfooted and they've never recovered. Digital without a doubt is the best thing to have happened for the family and enthusiasts, like me, my wife, my mom. My wife takes far more photos, far more affordable. And she's reviewing them within hours, not days. and I'm taking all sorts of trivial snapshots now that my phone has a capable camera. As for photos longevity: thus a concern. I don't miss losing 1 in 10 rolls of film to airport X-ray machines. But now I gave to worry about hard drive crashes. Prints no longer glue themselves together, but I nonlonger gave prints. And I've just found a bunch of slides, 10 - 40 yrs old; a fifth are faded beyond recovery, but most are still there about to be sent out for digital scanning. Will my digital photos be findable, viewable in 40 years?
 

Tony J Case

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Originally Posted by DaveF

Digital without a doubt is the best thing to have happened for the family and enthusiasts, like me, my wife, my mom. My wife takes far more photos, far more affordable. And she's reviewing them within hours, not days. and I'm taking all sorts of trivial snapshots now that my phone has a capable camera.


The problem I've found with the sharp uptick of photos and the ability to fire off a hundred without batting an eye is the signal to noise ratio goes WAY up. Take this example - just this yesterday, I was in a View and Comment on My Photostream group over on flicker, commenting on someone who had something of upwards of 10K photos (no, really). If it drifted in front of her lens, she shot it and posted it straight away.60% of it was mediocre, 30% was just crap and 6% (and that's being generous) was pretty good and the remaining 4% was actually legitimately good photography. But after slogging through a hundred baby photos (more or less the same photo, just from a slightly different angle or zoom), I was numb to the good stuff. I had just given up caring by that point and my comments were pretty generic "nice shot" or "Looks like you had fun" so I could get the hell outta there.


When you have a hundred pictures where one would do, people are less likely to look at any of them.


Another aspect of constantly shooting and shooting is that - well, you take a picture to capture a memory, but if you spend all your time taking the picture, you aren't really there. When I was in Paris a couple years ago, touring the Louvre, I of course stopped to see the Mona Lisa - the 800 pound gorilla of the exhibit. It's on the far side of a room a couple hundred feet long, filled with a hundred people packed in like sardines. Every single one of them - to the man - didn't bother to actually LOOK at the painting, they were all too busy getting a picture of the painting to actually enjoy it. They'd crane their necks, snap a picture, chimp a little bit, snap another one and then scurry on to their next destination.

After that visit, I noticed it everywhere in Paris - shoot, chimp, move on. It was actually kind of eye opening.
 

Patrick Sun

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I couldn't believe the thousands of photos one guy on a social networking site (initials F and B) took on at a 3-day weekend convention recently. Not only did he boast that he took 10,000 photos (mostly in rapid-fire mode) that weekend, but it looks like he also posted most of them, and we're talking 30+ photos within a minute window. It didn't matter if the photos were out-of-focused or not color corrected, or cropped properly, if people he knew were in the shot, he was posting it. It was both creepy and ridiculous. I know I take and post a lot of photos, but I try to keep it within 2-4 photos of a similar pose/situation (not 200), and then move on. I also try to keep the number of photos uploaded down with selective editing of the digital mountain of photos so as to not do what the other guy does. But I know I still post too many photos, but I'm actively trying to improve in the editing stage. This coming from a guy with almost 32,000 photos in his Flickr photostream...
 

mattCR

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Well, let's be honest.. one of the best things about analog photos is that they had a real world cost, so people didn't take a bunch of BS crap photos of nothing - they took what they were doing a lot more seriously. An artist can make any medium look good because they put in the effort. What you have in your example is where making something cheap and easy just entices it to be abused.. hey, can I talk to you about the new $99 HTIB at Walmart?
Originally Posted by Patrick Sun

I couldn't believe the thousands of photos one guy on a social networking site (initials F and B) took on at a 3-day weekend convention recently. Not only did he boast that he took 10,000 photos (mostly in rapid-fire mode) that weekend, but it looks like he also posted most of them, and we're talking 30+ photos within a minute window. It didn't matter if the photos were out-of-focused or not color corrected, or cropped properly, if people he knew were in the shot, he was posting it. It was both creepy and ridiculous. I know I take and post a lot of photos, but I try to keep it within 2-4 photos of a similar pose/situation (not 200), and then move on. I also try to keep the number of photos uploaded down with selective editing of the digital mountain of photos so as to not do what the other guy does. But I know I still post too many photos, but I'm actively trying to improve in the editing stage. This coming from a guy with almost 32,000 photos in his Flickr photostream...
 

DaveF

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Originally Posted by Tony J Case

The problem I've found with the sharp uptick of photos and the ability to fire off a hundred without batting an eye is the signal to noise ratio goes WAY up. Take this example - just this yesterday, I was in a View and Comment on My Photostream group over on flicker, commenting on someone who had something of upwards of 10K photos (no, really). If it drifted in front of her lens, she shot it and posted it straight away.60% of it was mediocre, 30% was just crap and 6% (and that's being generous) was pretty good and the remaining 4% was actually legitimately good photography. But after slogging through a hundred baby photos (more or less the same photo, just from a slightly different angle or zoom), I was numb to the good stuff. I had just given up caring by that point and my comments were pretty generic "nice shot" or "Looks like you had fun" so I could get the hell outta there.


When you have a hundred pictures where one would do, people are less likely to look at any of them.



Originally Posted by Patrick Sun

I couldn't believe the thousands of photos one guy on a social networking site (initials F and B) took on at a 3-day weekend convention recently. Not only did he boast that he took 10,000 photos (mostly in rapid-fire mode) that weekend, but it looks like he also posted most of them, and we're talking 30+ photos within a minute window. It didn't matter if the photos were out-of-focused or not color corrected, or cropped properly, if people he knew were in the shot, he was posting it. It was both creepy and ridiculous.



It's not digital photography that's caused the problem, it's the internet you're mad at. If there wasn't Facebook and FTP and global distribution, you wouldn't have to put up with these people's 10,000 photos. Keep digital cameras, but revert to analog communication. When the real cost was mailing a $10 shoebox of photos or a $0.40 envelope of five photos, people really thought long and hard about what they shared :)
 

Patrick Sun

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When it was film, I thought long and hard about what I snapped a photo of back then. Just the developing costs for 15-20 rolls of film was a lot to spend on photography back in the day.
 

DaveF

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Your problem is not with digital photography. It's with people having too little self restraint and too much digital distribution.
 

Patrick Sun

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But the costs of getting into digital photography has lowered the bar for entry and ongoing pursuits, flattening the photography landscape, littering it with those of such ilk. If it was still "film" only, it's a different story today. But, I'll take the bad with the good of digital photography.
 

Tony J Case

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Originally Posted by DaveF

It's not digital photography that's caused the problem, it's the internet you're mad at. If there wasn't Facebook and FTP and global distribution, you wouldn't have to put up with these people's 10,000 photos. Keep digital cameras, but revert to analog communication. When the real cost was mailing a $10 shoebox of photos or a $0.40 envelope of five photos, people really thought long and hard about what they shared :)

While the ease of digital distribution is one factor of Photo Spam, you cant deny that the digital medium certainly enables that spam. If there was a real world cost (or hell, even just the real world restraint of "You only have 36 shots on that roll"), there would be more self restraint. I know that when I did digital, 200 shots on a road trip would be a slow day, and I'd be lucky if 10 of them were any good.


If I ever go back to digital, I'm going to shoot like I only have a 2mb card, picking and choosing my shots instead of the spray and pray method.
 

Paul D G

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Originally Posted by DaveF

Your problem is not with digital photography. It's with people having too little self restraint and too much digital distribution.


I agree with Dave. I'm not sure why the hatred is towards digital photography and not the poster.


When do a session with my kids I wind up taking 60 photos or so. Usually they're screwing around and not behaving and eventually I get mad and we quit. Then I look at the photos. Invariably there will be three or four that are stunning, capturing a perfect moment in time: one laughing hysterically while the other poses angelically (because he just poked the other trying to ruin the shot), etc. I'd never get stuff like that if I just took one or two pictures and ended it. Do I post them all? No. Only the best one or two get shared.


I agree, tho, that there's nothing worse than someone sending you a picture of their kids in Halloween costumes and it winds up being 80 snaps that could have been pared down to five.


As far as preservation - I have all my photos in yearly folders, with quarterly subfolders. I have them all packed in WinRar archives with Par redundancy on archival quality DVD-Rs. The key is to look for discs manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.


http://www.supermediastore.com/product/u/jvc-taiyo-yuden-archival-grade-gold-lacquer-16x-dvd-r-media-25-pack


I really should set up a weekly backup of my digital photo folders but for right now they are on their own hard drive so the wear is minimal on the drive.
 

Scott Merryfield

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Originally Posted by DaveF

Your problem is not with digital photography. It's with people having too little self restraint and too much digital distribution.


I agree with Dave, too. Since switching from film to digital, I do shoot a lot more exposures when we travel -- trying different compositions and exposures, plus I'll snap a lot more shots of wildlife hoping to capture that "perfect moment". Since there is no cost for film or developing, I take advantage of the situation. However, when we get home, I sort through all the photos and will end up only processing and posting a small percentage of the exposures. This takes time and discipline, though.


That's where the average digital "non-photographer" falls short -- they just snap away and do not take the time to sort the few gems from the piles of crap. And some people do not even know which photos are gems and which are crap -- my neighbor falls into this category. I dread looking at her photos from a trip. It's just hundreds of really bad snap shots.
 

Patrick Sun

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Maybe going digital is like winning the lottery, where the money (or ability to snap photos without a conscience) doesn't change you, but just hyper-extends and reveals your character traits to excess. Heh.
 

DaveF

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Could be. :)


I've noodled on your and Tony's issues with e.g. Flickr...I just don't have any context with people uploading 10,000 photos to say Facebook or HTF, totally pounding and borking the online discussions and normal culture.
 

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