

The cardboard box that democratized photography - nols
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30530268

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xenophonf
"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.)

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billybofh
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 ;-)

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xenophonf
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.

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chiph
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.

