Digital BW, The Print

Tyler Boley wrote:


> I have to say, I don't think there is any debate at all, and I have a
> 1DS. Maybe the mk2 blurs the difference a bit more, but right now I
> prefer film.

I think the operative word here is "prefer" - there are two different 
media being spoken of here. I find they have some superficial 
similarities....

I prefer film for many applications, and digital for many others. But 
I've been using a wide range of digital cameras, including three Canon 
SLRs and several digital backs. I've definitely had enough use of the 
gear at this point to identify what works for me for different shooting 
circumstances. Whether or not I'm doing B&W output is rarely a 
determinant in the decision about what camera to use. All of that said,


> Even for 35, I may prefer the film grain to this
> cottage cheese.

> Digital has brought in so many new photography enthusiates (that's
> good) that I wonder how many people making some of these comparisions
> have even had that much experience with film, and getting the most out
> of it.

I wonder exactly the opposite. I get many experienced film users in my 
workshops who have high-end digital SLRs who don't know how to expose 
for digital. They don't know their camera's sensor is linear. Once they 
are told, they can't figure out that this means the brightest stop 
consumes half the ADUs. Sometimes they have a hard time understanding 
what "linear" means. They wonder why they get a so-called "purple 
fringe" on very contrasty boundaries. They attribute this and many other 
image problems to "blooming," but they cannot explain the physical 
mechanism of blooming, and they persist in a belief that it occurs in 
images that have no clipped pixels once they are told. They believe 
their fuzzy results are caused by crappy lenses and don't know what an 
antialiasing filter is. They think Unsharp Mask is the best way to 
sharpen their images. Many think in-camera jpeg is all you ever need. 
They don't know what "lossy compression" means. Bayer mosaic is a 
foreign concept, as is demosaicing. Many think that each pixel in the 
resulting image is from four extremely tiny photosites, such that an 8 
megapixel file was made by a camera with 32 mega-photosites (others 
think an 8 megapixel camera produces a 2 megapixel image). They make 
extreme adjustment layers to apply to their digital images which are 
equal-opportunity ruiners of film scans, then criticize the new medium 
for their poor results. They think the use of smoothing tools like Noise 
Ninja (etc) is entirely optional when shooting at ISO 800. They don't 
know the difference between a device-specific profile and a color space. 
Etc.

Now, ignorance is the original state of everyone. I'm not trying to 
brand these people stupid or say that non-willful ignorance is a moral 
issue. I'm just saying that this is a pretty standard list of 
misconceptions and mistakes that very experienced film users - many of 
whom I deeply respect - make when turning to digital cameras. 
Presumably, these people are really smart, because they are taking a 
workshop to overcome these misconceptions. But they still have the 
misconceptions. And when someone who prefers film lets fly with a 
strange criticism like "cottage cheese," it makes me wonder how much 
experience they really have with digital, and whether they are really 
knowledgeable enough to make a reasonable judgment about the medium.

With words like "cottage cheese" being used to describe your 1Ds images, 
it is no wonder to me that you prefer the look of film. The cottage 
cheese makers in our workshops are the ones who don't know how to 
expose, and/or who apply adjustments to their images that they would 
never attempt with film scans, and/or who don't bother with noise 
reduction in challenging images. That's what is happening when we see 
cottage cheese - 100% of the time.

Lest in your fashionable cynicism you accuse me of evil and nefarious 
profit-making by trading on my expertise, I should mention my workshops 
are done for no charge to participants and no payment to me, under the 
auspices of the Eagle River Camera Club. Of course then you can say 
people get what they pay for, but some people will never be happy.

--
Jeff Medkeff
Eagle River, Alaska