freetime101 wrote: Snopchenko wrote:
Frankly, the results are not surprising but I wonder whether the opinion was similarly unanimous ten years ago?
I get the impression that high output photographers (weddings, photo journalists etc) took up digital almost immediately and never looked back (on average) but landscape, fine art and "slower" disciplines hung on to it a bit longer.
I'm not surprised that pretty much all film users are only doing so for fun or personal work rather than professional. I am however, surprised that there is not a single vote for "important" film use so far - I wonder if this would be the same 5, 10 and 15 years ago?
Regarding your first point, I think you are right, at least about many of what we might call "high end" landscape photographers. The process that a friend of mine went through is perhaps illustrative. He had long been a large format film photographer who had gravitated toward beautiful color work. The first part of his transition was to begin scanning his film so that he could make separations for dye-transfer printing, a process at which he was regarded as being a master.
He eventually became interested in the emerging medium format backs that would be used on old film medium format bodies, and he began running tests comparing their output with what he could produce with scanned 4x5 film. At first he found that the digital systems were quite good but that his film was still better. But he kept checking and testing as the backs evolved, and he eventually came to the conclusion that these (relatively large and absurdly expensive) backs had gotten to the point that their output at least equalled that of 4x5 film.
He moved to digital backs at that point, using things up to the 80MP Phase One system which uses a much larger sensor than the currently popular mini-MF 33mm x 44mm systems. These were not easy to manage in the field — they are big and heavy, suffer from limited battery life, don't work well at high ISO — but the image quality is excellent.
A few years later he had the opportunity to lead several weeks of workshops in Antarctica. He was faced with serious weight limits that would make the use of his medium format gear problematic. He began to test full frame DSLR systems, eventually settling on the Nikon D800e and D810. Photographing with him, I noticed that he still preferred his MF system, but that he was using the smaller Nikon system more often, especially when gear weight and bulk were issues. His testing continued, and in one memorable test he dropped a bunch of prints on a table and asked a group of us to look and tell him what we noticed. They were all very good, though not quite identical, but we couldn't find a consistent difference in what were the equivalent of 30" x 40" prints. Only then did he tell us that half were from the 80MP Phase One back and half from the D810.
More recently his Phase One back, always a somewhat temperamental beast, more or less died. Faced with the costs of replacing it, he got his hands on the Pentax 645z and tested the output from that system. Finding it to produce beautiful quality at 30" x 40" sizes he replaced the Phase One back with this smaller and much less expensive system.
At the same time, other landscape photographers I know who come from more or less the same "school," have adopted digital with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Quite a few made the switch much earlier, perhaps back around the time that 20MP full frame sensors became available Others were slower. Some moved partially to digital while still carrying their LF and/or MF film gear for a few shots. One friend continued to use MF film up until a year ago, but has also now switched. Another continues to use black and white LF film.
The trend is pretty clear, though.
Dan
Dec 20, 2016 at 01:35 PM
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