Matt speaking as someone who is in the middle of things( being the Kodak man that is) you make some good points and also some digital perceptions that many hold but are not necessarily right. Firstly, " If it a'int broke don't fix it". We love film, it pays my salary and allows me to be around forums like this speaking digital! As you say the quality is there whatever brand you choose and if makes you money it is right for you.
Digital is simply another method of imaging which some like because of it immediacy, and lets be fair many like playing with the kit and getting the latest stuff! However Digital can also lead to bigger and better orders and untold riches. Event imaging which could include receptions are particularly good for a digi cam and a thermal printer ( Kodak 6800 for instance: 202 print cost 50p profit =�10 per print + to people with money there and then!) You cannot do that with film. Also the trend for "book style" albums and the associated on line ordering and printing keeps costs down but timescales are speeded up considerably. The downsides are, as you state, working for hours on stuff the lab used to do and trying to expose so as not to burn out wedding dresses, which is why many jpeg cameras underexpose regularly by about a stop. That is the misconception widely held. You also have the problem of wide angles when doing groups because of the 1.5x or so focal length correction factor caused by APS sized sensors Current pro D SLR cameras such as the Kodak SLR n or c have turned all that around. You have, in the case of trhe Kodak a 14million pixel 35mmm frame sized sensor so your lenses are what they say they are. It is equal at least, to ISO 400 120 format film. More importantly it is designed to work with RAW (unprocessed ) files. raw files capture 12.5 stops of brightness range so you do not loose that highlight detail. Jpegs compress files in a lossy way, that is to say data is removed from where it thinks it can without missing it, it sharpens,saturates colour, alters contrast and then throws away valuable data to end up with a 8 stop range image, and that is why no amount of frigging around in Photoshop can recover detain in an overexposed dress! Furthermore each time you save a jpeg it compresses it even more making it degrade every time.Jpegs were designed only to get images good enough for newspapers, and at a size small enough to wire around. A full res Kodak raw file is at about 15mb in size, only approx 1/3 larger than a full res jpeg. It is a lossless compression being split into image and colour data. The image is NEVER compromised only the colour data is compressed. If shooting jpegs they should be saved as a full res tiff asap to avoid further compression and degradation. But a full res tiff from the SLR will be about 38mb! A lot of storage. Another benefit of saving your images as raws! Many photographers feel, mistakenly in my opinion, that because they shoot a lot of images they can only use jpeg files. No so. As discussed a raw is not necessarily large, but it means peace of mind. You can re expose, sharpen, change the white point, contrast colour balance and even apply one of 19 film type "looks". You can crop, rename, re number and save as a tiff or jpeg in any .icc colour space ( jpegs are always the tiny consumer space sRGB). Using Photodesk,(our program) all the images shot can be selected and batch processed. All those parameters mentioned being dealt with in seconds. This saves time as well as giving the image quality needed. Finally regarding flash and digital. There is TTL and DTTL. TTL flashes are designed to read the light levels from the film plane. Film is less reflective than a sensor so flash exposures will be wrong until you input a correction factor of +/- 1 stop or whatever your kit needs. DTTL flashes will be correct because they are computed to read the reflected levels from a shiney sensor. I hope that has given food for thought! =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
