[Leica] Re: squabbling over digitial vs. film

[Mitch Alland <malland@xsmail.com>]

Doug Herr wrote:

> The endless squabbling over digital vs. film  seems pointless to me.

Absolutely. Think of the situation of the motion picture industry where 
currently film and digital work together: from a friend who works in 
post-production I learned recently that movies are photographed on film 
and then the film is scanned on very expensive high-speed scanners and 
the post-production people use high-powered, specialized, 
Photoshop-like software to do thinks like color balance (and other 
types of "magic"), and then the digital version of the movie is 
"burned" onto film again and the film is printed in many copies for 
distribution. This is because, with current technology, capturing on 
film and projecting film apparently gives the best visual image and the 
intermediate digital processing enhances that quality.

On the other hand the best movie that I've seen for a long time is Eric 
Rohmer's  "L'anglaise et le duc" (The Enghlishwoman and the Duke) which 
was shot with a digital video  camera (and transferred to film for 
distrbution). This movie takes place during the French revolution and 
was shot digitally because Rohmer used water-color paintings as the 
"backdrops" for Parisian outdoor scenes. In other words, the actors 
were filmed digitally and then, for all the outdoor scenes, were 
digitally placed against the backdrop of the water-color paintings that 
are painted in the style of paintings of the period. This is absolutely 
brilliant because our knowledge of how Paris looked like comes from 
paintings of the period -- so that this artifice looks very genuine in 
terms of giving the feeling of the period. The alternative of course 
would have been either to build old-style streets on a sound stage or 
to go to old sections of Paris and clear the streets of anything 
modern. Although this movie doesn't have the resolution and clarity of 
movies made the other way (as described in the previous paragraph, this 
doesn't matter because not only is Rohmer's digital solution brilliand 
but it's like magic: the film is beautiful because of the water-color 
painting backdrops which create their own reality, and it is a reality 
which is very appropriate for this movie. The resolution and clarity, 
as Doug Herr states, are  "good enough" .

The same thing goes for still photography. For my taste, I think that 
the color pictures I take with my M6 on film and then scan on the 
Imacon FlexTight scanner and print on the Epson 7600 printer are better 
in color gamut and saturation than either C-prints or Ilfachrome. I 
think the best of them can rival dye-transfer prints. Basically, I 
think that these type of ink-jet prints have surpassed the quality of 
lab prints.

For b&w I use the ImagePrint RIP on the 7600 which produces spot-on 
neutral prints with the possibility of subtle "toning", say, for 
selenium-type tone. While I get a longer tonal range and sometimes 
better gradation than a b&w silver print (sometimes similar to a 
platinum print), I cannot match the richness of the blacks that you can 
see in, for example, a print by Ralph Gibson such as that of his nudes 
that were exhibited in Paris last Fall. So what Doug Herr states is 
still true, and you should use what you like, keeping in mind that film 
will be available for a long time to come.

I don't want to get into shooting with a digital camera versus shooting 
with the M6 because I don't have any experience with the former and 
like the latter. So do what you like as long it's "good enough."

- --Mitch/Bangkok

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html