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Photojournalistas.com |
| Jan-Feb, 2006 |
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Page 3
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Slow Progression:
My Slow Transition From Film Cameras To Digital Cameras...And Why It's Taking So Long. By Lee K. Marriner |
The photo that I had in mind required me to wait until the player was leaning over the table to make his shot, facing somewhat away from the windows. Because I wanted to get the big windows in the picture, and because I wanted his face to be only partially lit for moodier looking photo, I exposed for the highlights on his face. I did this by using a handheld light meter to check the light coming from the widows over the area where I expected his face would be. I then set my camera’s shutter speed and aperture manually, which is what I do anyway 99% of the time, and then underexposed a bit so the high lights would not be bright. This meant much of the scene would be underexposed. This is where the extra dynamic range of the negative film made a big difference. A couple of days later I compared the digital camera shots to those shots I had scanned into my computer from the negative film: I was blown away by the difference. Most obvious was that detail in the windows, like tree branches and the pane framing, showed up in the photos from negative film. These same details were blown out in the digital camera photos. On the other end of the spectrum, there was lots of detail in the shadow areas of images from the negatives, and even more was brought out with some light dodging in Photoshop. Unfortunately the detail in the shadows wasn’t nearly as good in the images from the digital camera, and little more than more noise could be obtained by light dodging. In short, I was able to get the photo that I envisioned because of the wider range of light that negative film can record. In this case I was better off doing a shoot with film rather than digital. There are a number or other reasons that I like my Nikon F5 better than any digital camera out there. First of all my F5s were paid for long ago and I see no radical improvements in the Nikon F6 film camera that would make me want to run out and buy one. If there are improvements in film technology or a new film I wish to try, I just put it in the camera after paying anywhere between $3.00 to $10.00 for a roll, depending upon the film. Upgrading to a new digital camera costs a lot more than that. I also like the bigger viewfinder image that the F5 has. It is much smaller in the viewfinder of a Nikon digital camera. After shooting for a week with digital cameras, then going back to film cameras, it feels like I’ve gone from looking at a TV screen to a movie screen. Perhaps the biggest annoyance in working with digital, other than the more limited dynamic range, is the effect that it has upon my lenses.  Most Nikon digital SLRs have a DX size chip in them, which is about 24mm wide. This effects how my lenses work. Lenses for 35mm cameras are designed to project onto a 35mm frame of film. The DX chip is in same place that the film would be, but because it is smaller is does not record as much of projected image as a 35mm frame of film would. The effect of this is that you have an image that is cropped by the chip. My favorite lens is the Nikon 17-35 f/2.8 AF-S wide angle zoom, which was designed for 35mm film cameras. When used on a DX format digital, it becomes roughly a 25-52. Why is this? It’s because using a smaller chip is like cropping down your image by roughly 1/3 (dimensionally they are the same shape, but film is wider and taller than the DX chip), which means your wide angle lens is no longer as wide. Canon has come out with a couple of full frame pro digital cameras, but they’re most popular pro models have 1.3x multiplication factor. I’m glad to see Canon going in the direction of full frame, and hope that this puts pressure upon Nikon to do the same. |
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