Thoughts on camera features.

[v3rlon]

Well, nothing like shooting a wedding and wanting to be sure you aren't stuck winding film at "kiss the bride" to teach you to shoot shots that count.

The whole concept of 'I only have 5 rolls of film (or 1!!!)' teaches you to make shots count. The digital world of 75 down. 1300 to go before I have to switch cards, and it doesn't cost me $4 each roll to develop and get a contact sheet makes for a very different mindset (spray and pray, to be precise).

Film, for all its advantages, cannot instantly go from 25 ISO Kodak Ektar to 6400 ISO Fujifilm at the touch of a button (or even automatically for you).

Sheesh, can you imagine burning 6 or 10 fps with film? Even if you got a good 39 exposures off that 36 roll, its 3.9 seconds and done. With dual 128GB cards, people are shooting insane numbers.

On the other hand, it sure makes it a lot easier to teach a few pointers to a spouse.

 

[Apple fanboy]

I see this thread has deteriorated into another film vs digital learning debate.

Not all of us who started shooting with digital DSLR's shoot in auto, or spray and prey.

I here this a lot from old timers. It's one of the things I dislike most about photography. The snobbery of 'well in my day we only had 36 shots so we are better photographers now'. We can't all learn the same way. As technology moves on, it does get easier. Is that a bad thing? No. Personally I shoot in manual 90% of the time. But for guys starting out, not having to worry about if they have the right roll of film in means they can concentrate on the things that matter more in a picture, like composition and lighting etc.
I learnt to drive in a car with four gears and a manual choke. Does that mean everybody learning to drive today should do the same? No. Times move on, and so does the way people learn. It's called progress.
There, rant over!

 

[v3rlon]

Apologies. I should have re read that before posting. There is truth to what I said, but there is the other side too:
Missed shots because you were saving for later, or you didn't realize someone blinked without the instant feedback (or did but couldn't spare another shot), the cost of processing, cost of printing all the ones for sharing, no way to do extended sequences like time lapse shots, digital post processing, UNDO (can you imagine trying to undo a real bleach bypass?), inability or at least impracticality of experimenting, film batches not matching, crummy processing, scratched negatives, airport X-rays or heat or time ruining film, and lots of other things that could go wrong, no EXIF data (does ANYONE miss logbooks?)

Cameras are much better now. Digital makes it much easier to practice, and practice will make better photographers for those trying to learn.

It is REALLY easy to get in the mindset of "take the shot, delete later" and I am not sure that's a bad thing, but sometimes there is the feeling of "an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of exposures trying to create art" sort of thing.

I can still buy film and process it, but I do not. I believe digital is better for what I Like to do. It IS different learning with film though. Is it better? In some ways for some people, sure, but the opposite is also true.

 

[MacCruiskeen]

Sheesh, can you imagine burning 6 or 10 fps with film? Even if you got a good 39 exposures off that 36 roll, its 3.9 seconds and done. With dual 128GB cards, people are shooting insane numbers.

Yes, those numbers are insane. Actually, motordrives could reach those speeds in the 1970s pretty easily, and some cameras could take special high-capacity film backs (i.e., 250+ shots). I mean, at some point, if you really just want vast numbers of high-speed photos, why not just shoot video and be done with it?

The real problem is I can't really imagine wanting to have such numbers of photos. Photo editing is drudgery. I find having to spend a lot of time in Photoshop to be pretty tedious. I spend enough time looking at the computer as it is. I don't really need to find ways to do more of it.

 

[v3rlon]

Drudgery to you is a hobby to someone else, I guess #