The reason you don't find these discussions on the web is because very few painters are dweebs and nerds like digital equipment geeks. If you are hanging out in a loft getting high with your fellow artist friends you will get heated exchanges about different paints, the benefits of grinding your own pigments, oil vs. acrylics, synthetic vs. sable brushes and all the rest... trust me, I have spent much more of my life as a painter than as photographer... just the inner geek in me brings me here...
And actually, for painters, it isn't so much the work that matters, but who you know.
>>You'd be hard pressed to find a community of painters that waste much time or bandwidth talking about brushes or paint. Among painters, it's the work that matters, not how a particular brand of cadmium red makes a painting pop, or how a camel hair brush is superior to a synthetic...
mh2000 wrote:
I already told you, go to a gallery or museum... or even Borders book store and look at high quality photo books... if you can't see the difference between classic film images and current digital images... then you are a hopeless clod... if you see the differences and don't think it matters, that is fine... everyone responds to subtle properties differently... and if you prefer digital, that is fine too...
enjoy your journey!
so you are telling me that 5D file looks like film and not as digital as 5D2?
I don't care what Susan Sontag says... she also says that lenses are penis symbols! (How am I supposed to feel good shooting my little 50's?)
gdanmitchell wrote:
I'll paraphrase here, but Susan Sontag refers to this when she points out that photography has to answer to the competing demands that it be useful as a means of beautification and of creating evidence.
mh2000 wrote:
I don't care what Susan Sontag says... she also says that lenses are penis symbols! (How am I supposed to feel good shooting my little 50's?)
Surely by now you should have noticed that it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it
After all, there are quite a few FMers who covet "modest" lenses like the EF 50/1.0L or the ZE 21/2.8. But Sontag would still say it's di*k measuring all the same. So rest assured you can still feel good about your little 50. Besides, some people might say owning a 400/2.8 is just "compensating for inadequacies elsewhere."
The whole feminist theory of phallic symbolism really has more to do with the propensity of males to use various proxies to compare themselves against other men because human males in modern society generally don't walk around with their manhood on full display. Their sexual fitness, therefore, is to be judged on the basis of substitute symbols, be it an expensive camera lens or a sports car. It is an economic and sociological expression of the evolutionary biology of sexual dimorphism.
And judging from the way some FMers talk about their lenses...I'd say Sontag is more right than wrong on this one.
that in either high quality print media or a traditional print the differences between film and digital are evident. Most of us have seen iconic images at this level of print quality and have responded to the images being aware of the inherent properties of the media used. If you have only seen iconic images on the web, you may not be aware of the subtle differences between film and digital...
I've never said there was no difference between film and digital. I have said that aside from resolution, the difference between the 5D2 and the 5D1 is insignificant compared to the differences between any number of film processes.
You said that you could not think of any iconic digital images. I said that most of the venues that elevated earlier photographic images to "iconic" status--primarily printing media--are now gone or greatly diminished.
I would assert that museum display alone cannot raise an image to "iconic" status. That takes mass exposure, and nothing today matches the exposure still photography got during the golden age of magazines when photographs were highly favored and magazine cycle times were slow enough to allow a particular image to remain for some time in the public consciousness before being replaced by the next.
veroman wrote:
And — while not quite at the same level of simplicity — most if not all of the great photography schools I know of start their students off with manual focus film-based gear and classes, including darkroom technique. Some of these schools (and I'm talking college level) don't get into digital terrain until the junior year.
But fewer and fewer are holding out for this. (One reason that many did is that the faculty are often so invested in the older media that they were not yet ready to teach effectively with the newer technologies. And their equipment lockers, which cannot be replaced at a moments notice, were filled with film gear - and they had darkrooms. That has largely but not completely changed now.)
mh2000 wrote:
I already told you, go to a gallery or museum... or even Borders book store and look at high quality photo books... if you can't see the difference between classic film images and current digital images... then you are a hopeless clod... if you see the differences and don't think it matters, that is fine... everyone responds to subtle properties differently... and if you prefer digital, that is fine too...
I go to galleries regularly, and not just photo sales galleries. I do read books and subscribe to periodicals on photography. I learned chemical photography many years ago and today I use digital technologies.
You can see "the difference" but being able to "see a difference" is not the same as noting that one is plainly better than the other. I can see the difference between a banana and an orange, but that doesn't prove that a banana is better than an orange or that an orange is better than a banana.
Or maybe I'm just a "hopeless clod..." ;-)
mh2000 wrote:
I don't care what Susan Sontag says... she also says that lenses are penis symbols! (How am I supposed to feel good shooting my little 50's?)
I read On Photography once (since I am a photographer as well as artist)... found it entertaining and worthy of some thought... I am no expert either way on Sontag though...
lordarka wrote:
This is a beautiful summation of this phenomenon... one I believe may be unique to photography. I have encountered few other groups of "artists" engaging in such asinine "debates."
Though I agree with some of the statements in your post, I cannot agree on this being beautiful for the simple reason that rather than trying to negate the arguments, it insults the people making the arguments. Maybe I'm too nice for these forums, , but I don't really like insulting people.
I think it's obvious that in a community of artists, saying someone doesn't possess any creativity is very insulting. You may feel that way, but personally I'd prefer to see the actual subject at hand being proven to be pointless, a waste of time, impossible to resolve, whatever, rather than sum it up with an attack on the posters.
well, if you can see the difference then it leads to the fact that you will most likely *prefer* one fruit to the other (maybe you hate oranges!)... that does not mean that one is *better* than the other, simply that given the choice of the two that you prefer one... we are still in a universe where film is an option and film images are still being shown all over the place... people often prefer one over the other... or maybe prefer one over the other for different uses...
I said that if you could not see any difference between film and digital images that you were probably a "hopeless clod," not that you were a hopeless clod if you chose one over the other... big difference... for b&w images *I* prefer film, for color images *I* prefer digital... I mostly show b&w photographs... most people going to galleries prefer buying b&w film images (I know, I just sold one at a show last night, and the buyer hesitated for a moment while asking, "this is a 'real' photograph, right?" I said it was shot with film in a classic Leica RF... he was happy. I didn't tell him I had scanned the negative and printed it on a HP printer though...)
>>You can see "the difference" but being able to "see a difference" is not the same as noting that one is plainly better than the other. I can see the difference between a banana and an orange, but that doesn't prove that a banana is better than an orange or that an orange is better than a banana.
personally, I think it is fine for universities to teach maybe one traditional b&w film class still... more than that should probably be elective IMO... kind of like historic alt processes... a university degree is not supposed to be a trade school certificate only... the complete history is important to understand photography in a whole context...
slightly back on topic, a friend and I had a print-off a while back comparing b&w film prints to b&w 5D prints... the 5D prints definitely looked "digital" compared to similar film prints (scanned film, same Epson printer)... I prefered the film images, he the 5D images... both of us discussed the differences and since it was not in an online forum like this there was no argument, we found the differences interesting and we respected why each had their own preference.
mh2000 wrote:
I read On Photography once (since I am a photographer as well as artist)... found it entertaining and worthy of some thought... I am no expert either way on Sontag though...
A few comments. I've read it a few times and while I don't agree with everything she writes, it is an insightful and compelling book that takes more than a single reading. As I sit here I'm recalling quite a few things from the book but not a single point about "she also says that lenses are penis symbols!"
"Entertaining" seems like an odd description for this book.
michael49 wrote:
4 pages and not one side by side comparison (unless I missed it)? That leads me to believe its a bunch of BS.
well you know how it is on FM someone bitches about their 35L not being sharp enough,front or back focuses but refuses to post a pic...
or the so tiresome never ending debate on pixel density vs ISO arrrrggghh.
btw I still shoot film...why? because I like P-H-O-T-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y
I'll have to dig it out and find the section... maybe it was in another essay written by her that I read in a separate collection around the same time... or maybe I'm just full of it... it's been a few year, but I'm pretty sure there was also comparison of cameras and weapon too... because I remembered taking issue with the implied conclusion that a penis is a weapon (even if they do kinda look like bullets or missiles)...
gdanmitchell wrote:
A few comments. I've read it a few times and while I don't agree with everything she writes, it is an insightful and compelling book that takes more than a single reading. As I sit here I'm recalling quite a few things from the book but not a single point about "she also says that lenses are penis symbols!"
"Entertaining" seems like an odd description for this book.
veroman wrote:
Maybe something like these three? (All photographed with Fuji Super CCD cameras)
- Steve
I like the way scenes with large dynamic range are handled by those cameras. They don't look HDR processed, and they don't look like SOOC from a DSLR. They look like well processed digital images to me, and that is good.
With careful exposure and curve tweaking, it is possible to emulate that look with either the 5D or 5DII.
alundeb wrote:
I like the way scenes with large dynamic range are handled by those cameras. They don't look HDR processed, and they don't look like SOOC from a DSLR. They look like well processed digital images to me, and that is good. With careful exposure and curve tweaking, it is possible to emulate that look with either the 5D or 5DII.
I've tried many times to emulate the look of files from the Fuji CCD sensor (S2 and S5 cameras) with my Nikons and Canons. I've not been successful. The Super CCD sensor design is unique. The files have a proprietary character. One photographer considers the S2/S3/S5 cameras "the missing link between digital and film." I agree. If Fuji were to make a true 12MP camera with the same sensor design as in the S2/S3/S5, I'd purchase it in a heartbeat.
