Digital BW, The Print

Steve Kale writes:

> And I would also think about "speed" in a broader sense.  The image doesn't
> have to be time sensitive (like a sensational news story) for "speed" to be
> a factor.  Take my fashion photography situation again.  One can see the
> power of digital in a professional shoot when the photographer and creative
> director can rough work images in real time.

Some fashion photographers have abandoned digital for that reason.  When
the image is immediately available, they find that art directors and
models constantly want to stop and look at and critique the images, and
the shoot never gets finished.  So they go back to film to force
everyone to wait.

Another objection some photographers and photo editors have to digital
is that there is a tendency to shoot anything and then "fix it" with
Photoshop.  Of course, this can be a problem with scanned film as well.

In any case, you're still talking about speed.

> You simply can't do that with Polaroid and film.

Sure you can.  Polaroids provide instant images, too.

> It's not necessarily because the image has to be in the
> magazine tomorrow that matters.  (The last 20 fashion shoots I worked on
> were all shot digitally with PhaseOne backs.)

It's all about speed, although there might be a certain snobbishness to
it as well.  After all, editors and art directors long insisted on MF
even though they couldn't possibly reproduce MF quality in a magazine,
just out of snobbishness.  Now they want digital because digital is more
cool than MF.  Never mind that digital doesn't provide the MF quality
that they used to insist that they had to have.  Hmm.

> My bet is development of 35mm film cameras and 35mm film has
> largely ended already - in stark contrast to the advancement of their
> digital counterparts.

That makes it pretty hard to explain the new Nikon F6, doesn't it?

> The only way film will continue to be made is if there are
> enough people prepared to pay a big enough price for it to be worthwhile.

There are.  And it doesn't cost that much to make film.  Film can even
be produced nearly as a cottage industry.