{"id":1036,"date":"2010-03-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jorj.org:4433\/?p=1036"},"modified":"2010-03-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T00:00:00","slug":"88th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/?p=1036","title":{"rendered":"88th"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"88th\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shot on Ilford HP5, EI 800, at the Jim Thorpe St. Patty’s Day parade. I’ll have a few more shots of these guys. The insignia on this guy’s backpack really struck me as powerful in B&W – they even offered to turn around and pose, and I turned ’em down.<\/p>\n

But back to my quick comment yesterday: I’ve been contemplating the question “Is film ‘better’ than digital?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since I started shooting film, I hear this a lot. “Film is so much
\nbetter than digital!” says the die-hard film addict that I ran in to
\non the street. I believe there are ways in which that’s true. Medium
\nand large format negatives yield exceptionally high resolution, for
\nexample. But random film nut guy’s reasoning is the one that I hear
\nthe most often: “more thought goes in to shooting film, and
\nconcentrating on it means you get better pictures.” At that point I
\nstart nodding and making general agreement noises, but I’m not
\nactively continuing the conversation. I don’t generally buy it, but
\nI’ve never had any information to back up my gut instinct. Now that
\nI’m pretty deep in to film, I wondered if it was true and, like any
\nscience-minded individual would do, I compiled some statistics on my
\nshots to help me understand the arguments.<\/p>\n

My “hit rate” for digital is usually around 10% – one of every ten
\nshots I take is one that I like enough to post-process. My digital
\nshots in Jim Thorpe this year are right on the money: 10.1% (495 shots
\ntaken, 50 that I’ll finish processing).<\/p>\n

On the film side of the camp, I shot 7 rolls of 120 (85 frames). Of
\nthem, my first-round picks are way up: I’m processing 35 of them
\n(41.7%). You might read that as “I’m four times more likely to take a
\ngood shot with film as digital.” So the “common wisdom” of “with
\ndigital you take more crappy shots because you spend less time
\nfocusing on what you’re doing” sounds plausible.<\/p>\n

I spent some time thinking about this after generating my
\nstatistics (those train rides home from work are great thinking
\ntime). It occurred to me that there’s a flip side. In the digital
\nworld, I average four exposures for every shot that I see (leaning on
\nthe shutter release). In Jim Thorpe, I count 130 individual scenes
\nover 495 shots. It’s not because I’m lazy and don’t want to take the
\ntime to compose the shot. I do it because I can<\/strong>, and
\nbecause it improves the likelihood of having successfully
\ngotten the shot that I visualized<\/strong>. I don’t have to worry (as
\nmuch) about models that blinked at the wrong moment or whatever other
\ntrivial nuance I might have missed during the shooting; at my leisure,
\nI can go back and pick through the three or four and see if there are
\nany substantial differences between them that might make or break the
\nshot. Or, I can see some candid shot underway, start shooting it while
\nI pull the camera up, and find out in post whether or not I “got it”
\nin the dozen shots I fired off. Sometimes this yields really
\nfascinating blown exposures that I like<\/strong> for artistic
\nreasons. Allowing yourself to make mistakes adds to the creative
\nprocess!<\/p>\n

The only reason I don’t do the same with film is that I
\ncan’t<\/strong>. (And this is probably a good reason for me to
\nnever shoot 35mm with a motor drive advance – I’d spend too much time,
\nor too much money, developing…)<\/p>\n

In the digital case, this means that I’ve got 3-4x as many
\n“keepers” than what I actually process, because they’re identical (or
\nnearly identical). Filtering out the dups from the Jim Thorpe set
\nbrings me back to a hit rate of… 38.5% (50 of 130).<\/p>\n

So: yes, my shooting style is different with digital than it is
\nwith film. I take more “chances” with digital, and my film shots are
\nperhaps a little bit “safer”. But the next time some old fart tries to
\ntell me that “you shoot better pictures with film because you worked
\nharder to compose the shot,” I can tell him that, at least for me, his
\nargument doesn’t hold water. I shoot<\/strong> a similar percentage of
\ngood shots with either film or digital.<\/p>\n

And now<\/strong> I’ll get off your lawn.<\/p>\n

Other perspectives and thoughts on the similarities and differences between shooting Film and Digital are, of course, welcome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shot on Ilford HP5, EI 800, at the Jim Thorpe St. Patty’s Day parade. I’ll have a few more shots of these guys. The insignia on this guy’s backpack really struck me as powerful in B&W – they even offered to turn around and pose, and I turned ’em down.<\/p>\n

But back to my quick comment yesterday: I’ve been contemplating the question “Is film ‘better’ than digital?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since I started shooting film, I hear this a lot. “Film is so much
\nbetter than digital!” says the die …[more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2172,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[60,59,58,51],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-diacord","tag-diacordg","tag-film","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.k8s.jorj.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}