Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/11/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>Last week, I saw Dirck Halstead on TV. He said that he believes that for >working pros, we are in the last days of using film. If so, the F5 could very >well be Nikon's last pro-level film-based camera they produce. Any thoughts? Dirck is a good photographer, but he's way too invested in this idea to be unbiased about it. He is wrong about pros not using film in a couple years, there are going to be film users for many years. Even in the high end of photojournalism. (Magazines and big papers). The price of digital cameras didn't go down with the latest pro camera introduced. It went up. By about $3,000. Kodak can't make them fast enough, because Canon has limited their allotment of EOS1n bodies. At least that's what my Kodak rep. says. Guess the film version is selling to capacity, eh? Dirck also would be telling people that remaining a still photographer in the future is also the wrong thing to do. That the only successful folks out there are going to be what he calls "platypus" photographers. One who uses video and still cameras. The problem with that idea is Murphy's Law of the platypus will be that whatever the subject, the photographer will be holding the wrong camera at that very moment. It will be at least 4 or 5 years before a digital video camera will be good enough to pull stills for newspaper quality. Maybe longer. That's only a guess by folks who want it to be true. A good example of how digital at this point would be failed is the funeral of a police officer we photographed a couple weeks ago. We ran several six and five column photos. The one on page A1 was six columns and well over a third the depth of the newspaper. In other words, it was enormous! The only digital camera that could have handled that size is a scanning one, like the Leica S1 that takes exposures of a minute and longer. But you don't get good candid photos at exposure time. And nobody knows when a still camera will be out that is digital and has that kind of image quality. I doubt there will be any improvement in such imaging chips for at least 3 or 4 years now. The best today can almost match 400 ISO film at 8x10. Bigger than that and it starts falling apart. That's 4-5 inches narrower than a six column photo. Film will be with us as a part of our job here at our newspaper even after the photographers have gone digital for most of their work. There are times when film is superior, and as long as camera systems allow for both, I bet film still has a good long life. - -- Eric Welch St. Joseph, MO http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch On one hand, I'm indecisive; but on the other, I'm not.