The cardboard box that democratized photography | Hacker News Reader

The cardboard box that democratized photography

bbc.com

41 pointsnols7 comments

"Digital will never compare with the warmth of film."

I love photography and chemistry both, and I admit to being a rank amateur when it comes to Serious Picture Taking, but... "warmth of film"? It's very poetic, but does the article's author live in the real world? At least for my use cases, digital cameras are so vastly superior to their film equivalents on the merits that the only way to make film sound like it might come anywhere close to the convenience and capability of digital requires nostalgic appeals like the one above, which is fine, I guess, as long as people recognize this as a purely subjective feeling. God knows that the reason I ran OpenVMS on DEC kit at home for so long was for the nostalgia of logging into the same kind of system my dad used in his career - those old boxes had no practical value, that's for sure. And I'll bet you any money that 50 years from now, our grandkids will be writing articles claiming that some far-futuristic lightfield holography do-thingy (that's so obviously superior to classic digital cameras as to have wiped them off the market over the previous 20 years) will never have the warmth of the 10-megapixel CCD cameras their parents grew up with. (Hell, there will probably be arguments on the future's photophile forums where hipsters argue about the warm, rich picture quality imparted by gold-plated SD cards.)

I do quite a lot of what could be considered artistic photography, had exhibitions, been published etc - and I find film is just more beautiful than digital. A poetic point possibly, but when I'm making a piece of visual art that's kind of what I'm after. Digital is certainly a lot more convenient and a lot quicker, but when I want to really capture a special image I'll always do it on film.

I started out on digital but now work more and more with film. There's just "something" about a film image compared to the same shot done digitally which I can't explain. Though a friend who is an optics&laser specialist and does a lot of astronomy photography going back many years suggested that your eyes can perceive the crystal/"organic" structure of a film print and prefers it to a clean ordered digital one. No idea if that's true - but I liked the idea ;-)

If that's the case, you should expect your preference to vanish once pixel density gets well below the threshold of human perception.

Artwork is as much about the process as the finished work itself. Let's say we both create a picture of a tree - same tree, same composition, same lighting, same everything - only I snap a picture using my phone's 15-MP camera and you create a realistic watercolor (a la Eric Christensen). It's pretty fair to say that your watercolor would be way more awesome a piece of artwork, and way more deserving of recognition, than my digital picture. That said, like anything digital photography can involve a _lot_ of hard, creative labor resulting in spectacular pieces of art. I have no qualms with artists and critics falling in love with a particular medium. I really loved the story behind the Brownie! Think of all the history and art and humanity and emotion those cameras have captured over the last one hundred-plus years! But the story's author looking down on digital because it's digital and thus "cold" or "unfeeling" or "mechanistic" or whatever is just snobbery at best (or worse, Monster Cables-level crackpottery). Both film and digital can be great, both can be loved, both can host great artworks without either taking anything away from the other.

I think the search for why film is "better" is sniffing up the wrong tree. I think in many mediums, "worse" can actually be preferable. For example, there's been many times when I've heard a song over a crappy phone speaker or off in the distance and think it sounds great, but when I hear the full-fidelity version loses that rough quality.

I think film is much the same way, even digital scans or film hold something a bit better than digital in many ways. The trend in digital photography is often as much to introduce imprecision in color, focus, etc. in order to make it appear more film-like.

So I guess the "warmth" is really a result of all those small errors being introduced (many of them human) that digital photography works very hard to eliminate.

Take a look at this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDtWxURLlPk (Kids react to old cameras). Take it with a grain of salt, but it amazed me how those kids had no idea what it was and that they were so disappointed by a lot of facts behind those old cameras.

My parents still have a No.2 Brownie. It's no longer in shape to actually take photos, but it was used for years and years by the grandparents in their travels. Lots of family history all around the world were recorded with them.

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