FWIW I have made my living from photography for the last 30+ years and
have made hundreds of thousands of exposures all over the world.
Except for the time I dropped my 40mm Distagon from a height of about
12 feet and watched it split into a number of pieces and the time that
a technician at Pro Camera put the same (repaired) lens back together
incorrectly after a clean-lube-adjust I HAVE NEVER HAD A FILM CAMERA
OR LENS FAIL in the field - ever! My now useless very low mileage
Nikon digital camera committed suicide while resting in my camera bag
on the living room floor.
As for the "quality" attributed to digital - not so fast. I recently
had the opportunity to do a side by side exposure test using digital
and film. Like most of the digital camera images, that I've seen, the
highlights were clipped in the digital images and lacked the smooth
highlight gradation shown by the film. It seems that there is less
than 1/6th of a stop difference between blown out highlights and
detail with the digital. Indeed you can often tell if a digital
camera was used to make an image just by looking at the highlights -
digital does not handle subtle gradations in highlights nearly as well
as film. Also, having "pulled" and "pushed" many hundreds of sheets
and rolls of E6 I have never found it all that difficult; indeed it's
just like shooting "normal" if you've tested your film. As for the
cost of digital...yipes; but then I suppose that's why the big
corporations are pushing it so hard.
-greg schmitz
Received on 05/25/06-08:39:59 PM Z
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