Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/04/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:15 AM 4/27/02 -0700, you wrote: George, >Now that's a lot of Leicas. And all replaced by a single digital camera? I >bought a Canon G2 last fall. And while it has it's place I'm not ready to >sell my Leicas (though I considered it for a time). After a sustantial >fling the G2 has sat idle. I'm back to film. For me digital replaces 35mm >color neg film only and focal lengths of 35 and wider. Everyone is going >digital. But, compared to Leicas and conventional cameras, digital shutter >lag is unbearable. Depends on the subject matter, I suppose. > >DaveR Dave - Wait till you try the Leica Digilux 1 before you give up on digital ;-) I have the Panasonic version and there is no shutter lag. I'm using it for assignments right now and have been very pleased with the results. Here is what someone on the NPPA list said about switching to digital (quoted with his permission) - sorry for the length but it expresses perfectly how I've been feeling lately! Film? How retro! Next thing you know you'll be wearing love beads and bell bottoms to work. :) After shooting digital exclusively for 1 year now, that analogy almost works for me. I bought a Canon 15mm fisheye in December and, over a 6-week period managed to finish off a roll of film just for kicks (in many cases when using the fisheye on my D30 the distortion is barely noticeable and I wanted to see what it looked like on film). I finally got around to processing the film 2 weeks later and finally scanned it 3 weeks after that (only because I was tired of staring at the negatives). It seemed like such a major chore to cut & sleeve that roll (and find a marker and label that sleeve). Then I had to actually dig out my light box, find a place to plug it in (tough to do when you have 20 plugs fighting for 18 sockets as it is), locate my grease pencil (I finally found it next to Jimmy Hoffa's remains in the attic), dig out that large chunk of glass that looks like Colonel Klink's monocle on steroids, risk blindness by sticking it in my eye, risk a severe back spasm by bending over, and then, after all that, either make educated guesses as to which version of the NY City skyline might have more interesting minute detail or just give up and scan them all. Then, after all that, I still had to preview, make fine adjustments, prescan and scan just to end up with an image I had to crop and dust so it equals a D30 image right out of the camera and I could edit it. Wow! I was ready for a nap after all that exhausting work. All kidding aside, I have grown to dread film as much as doing my taxes (when is the tax deadline this year? I hate that it changes every year. Wait a minute, isn't Easter the date that moves every year? That means taxes were due... oooops!) Not the quality of film of course. Just all the extras I have to deal with. In other words: Time & Money! I bought my D30 one year ago last week and, according to the camera's counter, I shot 137,437 pictures in one year (I'm nothing if not prolific - maybe I should start a stock agency). That's 3818 rolls of 36-exposure film. At an avg. of $6.27 a roll for film & processing I would have spent $23, 939. (And I actually agonized for weeks over whether or not to spend $3,000 for a D30! Hey, I never claimed to be particularly bright!) That doesn't take into account any expenses for negative sleeves, binders (and, at that rate of shooting, a warehouse to hold the negs), gas to get the film processed, negative scanner wear & tear (anyone need a Nikon LS-2000?), etc. But, much more important than money is the immense amount of precious time digital has saved me. That's time I can share with my child and my wife (who would think a digital camera could save a marriage. Thank goodness it can because, at my wife's suggestion, I tried putting a wedding gown on my 21" monitor and it did nothing for me - the white lace lingerie was another story all together...) I often spent 50 hours or more a week cutting, sleeving, scanning pictures so I could print contact sheets for clients and then dodging, burning, color correcting and cleaning dust spots & scratches on the pictures they bought. I wish I could say this was a bit of an exaggeration but 50 hours was frequently a gross understatement. That's why I dread even picking up a roll of film. I had gone from being a photographer to being a factory. I was a one-man production line who got to shoot pictures once in a while. Digital is the greatest thing that ever happened to me (photography-wise) in a time/money sense but it has many, many other advantages. The biggest might be not having that nagging "I can't afford the film cost" always hanging over your head. Digital has killed that oppressive restriction on my creativity. I can try anything now. If I want to fling the camera in the air and remotely trigger the shutter just to see what happens, there's no reason not to (other than dropping the camera). I haven't done that (I just thought of it now) but you get the gist. You can try anything that you once wouldn't have "wasted film on." You can get some great stuff on occasion but mostly it is an amazing learning tool (with instant feedback). I've learned more in one year of shooting digital than all my prior years of shooting combined. All that having been said, there's still a lot to love about film. I guess we are just going through a trial separation.:) Tina Manley, ASMP http://www.tinamanley.com images available from: http://www.pdiphotos.com http://www.mira.com http://www.agpix.com http://www.newscom.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html