I am not a big fan of film, not because I don't think that the quality is good but because it is expensive and time consuming to process. Unfortunately, I don't have a dark room to develop my own film and quite frankly, I don't think I ever would. I am a product of the digital age and with my instant gratification obsession, don't see film being a regular part of my photography. My apologies to all of the purists out there. I do agree that film produces a level of detail that my current 12.3 MP digital SLR can't. However, I will say that the development of images either via film or digitally is where alot of the art lays in my style of photography and when I take/send my film to be processed, a large degree of control over the final product is lost. With digital, I can do my own development. This is not to say that you can't post process scanned images from film negatives but if you are going to go to all of this trouble what's the point?
The images in the attached gallery were post processed from scanned film images developed at a local 1hr photo lab. Yes, I know that the best quality processing would not occur at a 1 hr lab but unless you are footing the bill for the processing - shhhhhhh!
The reason for these shots was to see how my photographic skills were coming along - composition, exposure etc. Well, the results weren't as bad as I had thought. I had to work hard on the digital files to get them to look decent but over all they didn't suck too bad. The prints were terrible! The use of the pop-up flash on the Minolta Maxxum 5 I used over exposed most of the images but that was reasonably easy to fix in PS. I have a shoot coming up and will probably take the film camera along just to see how the images compare to the digital images on the Nikon. I have to give it up to the pioneers of photography who shot on film exclusively and to the techies who were able to make digital a reality. Why? I don't think that I would be into photography to this degree, if at all, if I had to shoot on film alone. From film camera use I can appreciate the patience one must possess in order to choose the right shot at the right moment. I need more of that in my approach. Shot selection is important - however, I would rather delete an unwanted or unnecessary image than miss a great shot because I wanted to conserve film. Give me my 8GB SDCH card please!
