The Death of Film

[davidedric]

Warning – long rambling post follows!

I was musing on what film has given us. For the first time, we could know what the world and its people were really like. Whether it be the great and the good (Oliver Cromwell may have asked to be painted “warts and all”, but I doubt many others did), to the conditions that my forebears experienced in the streets of England’s northern industrial towns. It brought us the beauty of landscapes we could never see, and the horrors of war that we hoped never to experience. We learned how a horse gallops, and could peer into the far reaches of the galaxy. In short it documented 150 years of our history.

It may not be dead, it will probably exist in some form for a long time yet, but its great days are surely behind it.

I never did any darkroom work (except for scientific photography), though when we moved into our current house it did have a darkroom set up by the previous owner. I think I prefer Lightroom!

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. It was always possible to adjust images, whether it was Victorian children magicking fairies, or Soviet leaders removing the out of favour from the top of Lenin’s mausoleum. Still that was distinctly small beer compared to image manipulation, for good or ill, that digital gives us. Countering that, though, the explosion of consumer digital in camera phones now makes it much, much harder for authorities to construct and maintain their versions of events. From the Arab Spring to demonstrations in London, we get images that we just would not have seen before.

So whilst I do regret the demise of film, and those intrepid pioneers who lugged their gear up mountains, we move on. (Mind you, I have a nephew who’s done several tours of duty as a photo journalist in Iraq and Afghanistan – and digital or no, it’s not exactly a stroll in the park.)

I enthusiastically embrace digital, and all the opportunities it brings, as I can see any hour of the day on CiC.

[gaijin]

Oliver Cromwell's warts and all tell us as much about the man and the period as the portraits of the Virgin Queen tell us about her's. Seeing people as they really were is certainly of some interest, but naive realism is seldom very interesting, is it? I'd like to be able to hear them speak!

The analogue/digital question is of no interest whatsoever, surely - it's just technology after all - it's what you do with it that's important.

In Greenwich's National Maritime Museum there's an Anselm Adams exhibition, at Somerset House an exhibition entitled Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, at the Imperial War Museum you can see photographs taken by Cecil Beaton during the war, and the National Portrait Gallery is showing photos competing for some portrait prize and hosting an exhibition of Man Ray portraits early next year. It's not about technology, it's about talent.

[AB26]

Well my child, those were the days we had a telephone, music was recorded on tape, no television, computers were as big as a building, children played outside and men were gentlemen and women were ladies - the good old days. We still had cameras using film, and .........................

Technology and development - Good or Bad?

What are you going to tell your grand children?

RIP

[Glenn NK]

Well my child, those were the days we had a telephone, music was recorded on tape, no television, computers were as big as a building, children played outside and men were gentlemen and women were ladies - the good old days. We still had cameras using film, and .........................

Technology and development - Good or Bad?

What are you going to tell your grand children?

RIP

My nine year old granddaughter likes using my 30D; she doesn't have a clue about focal length, crop factor, f/stop, ISO and shutter speed, but (other than holding the camera a little off level) she has an eye for composition and creativity.

I think she will make me a better photographer - the old "through the eyes of a child" adage.

Glenn

[oleleclos]

About 80% of my pictures are on film, and I have only recently converted 100% to digital, and only because Nikon came out with the camera I had been waiting for (the D800).

That said, I don't lament the demise of film. Agreed, I've had many magical moments with film and paper, and I do think a photographer who will never see a picture slowly develop in front of his or her eyes will be missing something.

On the other hand I love digital, and especially now that it can do anything film can do, in terms of both resolution and dynamic range. The D800 more than matches my scanned 5x4" negatives and far outperforms medium format film. All without lengthy and expensive processing, and with much better control over the end result.

As for archiving, I think we're a little bit too full of ourselves and the importance of our time. I'm sure enough good stuff will survive one way or t'other to give the future an idea of what life was like in 2012. I think the last thing future historians and curators need is for every single of the billions of images we produce to survivie.

[binsurf]

It's not just about historians and curators, it's also about family. We use photos now from years back to see what our ancestors looked like and what they did. Photos are the shell casings of the time bullet.

[jcuknz]

While some of my colour negatives are fadeing my black and white negatives are great when I copied some of them to digital recently for convienience.
I think there are so many photographs being taken these days it is good to know, or hope, that they will die a natural death and not be cluttering up the world in fifty or a hundred years time. A pity, I assume, they cannot be recycled like paper can.

The power drain of the cloud systems, ever getting larger and larger, is a horrible thought for a planet with finite resources.

Human beings are such silly creatures as we want our efforts to remain for ever.

[wmoore]

Film is not dead. Ilford is still making black and white film for enthusiasts. Many street photographers still use film. It's a niche market but it will survive. IMHO.

[captivating]

I am sad at lots of old ways passing. Those that went before me and went out and shot photos all day then had to come home and spend hours in a darkroom developing, well, they sure couldn't take chances like I do with a digital. They had to "know" their settings, lighting etc. Otherwise waste a whole lot of money and time when 9 out of 10 photos are either set wrong or blurry, whatever. I have great respect for "the old ways" and the people that learned to use them. As much as I love pointing and shooting, uploading, PP stuff etc., I know where I stand in the grand scheme of real photography, at the very "tip" of the iceberg of learning.

Thanks for the "read". We ought to have a thread just on pictures taken years ago using real film and developed in darkrooms denise

[captivating]

I hope you are right! This is great to hear denise