[Leica] Digital vs. film cost

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

I also had (have) a colour meter, along with all the requisite filters. The 
main problem is that as lighting of interiors, especially commercial ones, 
became more complex with incandescents, flourescents of various shades, 
halogen of varying types, HDI and other types plus daylight, there was often 
no 'best' filtration; there was only preference for one shade or another. 
When there was only incandescent and daylight, as in older residences, one 
could balance everything by using flash or blue photolamps in fixtures, or 
taking the shots at dusk. With complex lighting that just wasn't possible.

Magazines often demanded chromes, and I would shoot them. Then they would 
complain about the price, and I would lay out the reasons. Since (especially 
later) the chromes were scanned anyway, using chromes was of benefit only 
for the art directors and layout people. So it wasn't hard to convince the 
people hiring photographers that there was a benefit to using colour neg, 
especially the four layer stuff that started coming out in the 80's.

The slightly lower resolution of colour neg was really a non-issue when 
using large format.




On 2011-07-19, at 5:58 AM, George Lottermoser wrote:

> 
> On Jul 19, 2011, at 1:57 AM, Henning Wulff wrote:
> 
>> And sometimes I had to do a ring around with filtration for indoor 
>> architectural work with mixed lighting, which multiplied that times 9.
> 
> Also why I didn't think twice about investing $1K into a color temperature 
> meter, with strobe attachment. Which could then save me a whole lot of 
> film testing.
> 
>> That's why I also shot colour neg as soon as it started to do a good job. 
>> Fine tuning of colour and exposure could be done in the lab; shooting 
>> time decreased to 1/2 or 1/3 and material costs dropped to 5-10%.
> 
> Oh so true. We transferred our head aches to our custom lab BFF (best 
> friend forever)
> 
> ;~)
> 
> And when digital began "closing down" the custom labs
> we were quite literally left with no choice.
> 
> Regards,
> George Lottermoser 
> george at imagist.com



Henning Wulff
henningw at archiphoto.com