Part 2 of 5, I hope to answer that question and examine why.
Ok so why does that matter today in this world of digital imaging, I got my asking. What reason or lesson can i get from knowing what I do from years and years of exposing film vs exposing a digital camera? Let’s see if I can come up with the answer.
Photographers had their favorite film that you went to most the time for a particular subject or location.
Your favorite. A few reasons might be because the skin tone would always look fantastic. The shadow details were exactly where you want it to be. The highlights would hold for the way you lit the subject. Just a few. Shooting with high power strobes gave me many lens opening choices, since I can vary the power and intensity of the strobes to match the shooting situations. Capturing fast action such as pours or wanting complete depth of focus. Everything in focus from front to back. Bury the lens, as we called it, shutting down the lens to its smallest aperture F:64 or F:128 to get the great depth of field possible.
Definitely more choices of film then what is available today. Most of the color films are no longer made available, and the majority of print film is black and white. B&H Photo in NYC list 29 Black and white film and only 5 color sheet films.
RELIGION IN THE DARK
You know, I miss it. I mean, truly, there was a unique experience of loading the film holder religiously every morning before a shoot. You would have 40 film holders load all forty with two sheets of film in a pitch black closet we called the film room or the all lights out in the darkroom to load the film up. Everything you did was done in complete darkness, and your hands were your eyes.
Shooting a great deal of film to get one shot was a standard practice when working with a decent size film budget. Today, you shoot a many variations of one thing because it’s so simple to do that with digital cameras.
Before opening my own studio/business I worked under many top leading commercial photographer’s. I got to see how they managed film budgets and deliver the project on time and within the estimated project budget. Whether I was awarded a crazy budget or a very tight budget, the largest expense most of those times, unlike today, was the Polaroid/Film/Processing expenses. Today, those are called… Conversion and digital retouching time and again part project budget.
