@syg00

I have a very good high quality digital camera. Still doesn't touch real film for certain applications. While I agree that digital is much simpler to make sure 'you got the shot', there is a lot missing when compared to the old film days, and that includes the anticipation when you develop the film. The only film I ever developed myself was B&W but I always had a boatload of fun developing the film and making the prints, now a mostly lost art.

I liken it to fishing with a pole or dropping a stick of dynamite overboard. Both yield fish, the former takes patients, skill and time, the later will yield faster results with a lot of waste. Granted it is not physical waste.

@Jeebizz
I think gnashley is complaining about the comfort of using the manual focus for the digital cameras, yeah they exist but they are not nearly as comfortable or substantial as my old 35mm film camera lenses.

There is no such thing as lossless JPEG. I (now) shoot both raw and finest JPEG I can concurrently - onto separate cards. Burns up storage ...

Once I was on the north shore of Hawaii when it roared - happened to be just driving by with a 500 mm lens and a tripod. Sat there for hours. Got home, and got the rolls developed - several were shot at the wrong ISO ...
When digital came, I jumped. I don't want to screw up like that and not know it again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

-edit

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000

if you don't understand the importance of kodakchrome then maybe you should go learn about it
plenty of people still use film
Astrophotography is one area that slide film was widely used in

@floppywhopper -good point about astrophotography that demonstrates something important. Many objects in the sky at night are too dim to be seen with the naked eye. In order to photograph them, a single negative may be exposed over many nights until enough light accumulates to finally see the object.

Working with film is kinda mystical and many of the possible effects are not directly possible with digital capture -I mean you could take advantages of the qualities of the film itself to create effects or suppress parts of the image *directly* on film. Of course, being able to do the same sort of thing during the printing process made even more possible. While the same things are possible using digital manipulation, I find the effects less subtle and less satisfying.

The death of Kodachrome is particularly poignant since a great majority of the images which shaped out view of *everything* in the 20th century were made using it. Almost everything we consider 'reality' was shown to us using Kodachrome.

Ms initial work in photography was doing photo-composition using Kodalith and then I went on to working with 35mm SLR's. Once I had a black and white female cat who had 5 kittens, each in a different tone of gray. I named them 'Kodalith and the grayscale'! My guess is that *very* few new photographers know what a grayscale is -much less how to use it...

JPEG has always been predicated on the notion that the human eye can't differentiate subtle changes - so toss that data out.
If these so-called lossless formats then claim not to lose any further data in the compression, they sure as hell don't meet my definition of lossless. If they truly are lossless, but burn extra CPU cycles and require codecs, why the hell would I bother ?. That's what raw is for.

As for astro, I'd be *mightly* surprised if all those telescopes aren't backed by CCDs these days. Count the photons as well as record them.

Film may still have it's niches, but the (populace of the) world has voted with its feet.

Yes, probably the new astro-images are taken with digital devices, but what devices they must be! The sad things is that I cab do the same sort of trick with any old manual 35mm camera -but where's the digicam that lets me do that?

Ans since we're mostly Linux users around here, where does the vote of the populace come in? Should we all just use a Windows phone as camera and upload our pics directly to the cloud -maybe with some auto-adjusting by some cloud-based image editor? After all, monitors only display at ~100dpi, right?

There used to be a photo displayed in the main station of the New York underground which was ober 100 feet long. Taken (of course) using Kodachrome, there was still *no* visible grain in the print, even at that magnification! I've never made any prints using even a tenth of that magnification, but I used to make lots of poster-sized prints. Only in the last couple of years are digicams available that give the resolution needed to work with such large prints without being grainy.

I don't get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZpaNJqF4po

Paul Simon - Kodachrome

"I don't get it." If we here were so compelled by the will of the populace, well, we wouldn't be here -we'd be posting to BSOD.com or WindowsQuestions.com.

Same issues
* Both film and digital require long exposures, minutes even hours
* Quite often ( for both again ) the photo is shot in BW through a series of specific colour filters and then the BW images are combined to form a colour composite
* BW for both gives much higher resolution

floppy

For those interested comparing or just looking at astro-photos
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/astro/exhibit.html
http://www.spacew.com/gallery/index.php

and David Malin has an excellent site
http://www.aao.gov.au/images/general/malin.html

floppy

What does that have to do with film photography?

Absolutely nothing, it is a terrible analogy.

Greetings,

I see (lamentably) both sides of these arguments.

I remember spending hours in the darkroom working on B/W and color films to get the image I wanted; Doing the exposure-timer wheels, adjusting and re-adjusting the different color levels, etc. And, when you got the exact image you wanted, you had a major sense of accomplishment.

Many people have pointed out that working with film to such a level was an art form. That level of film was not for the average Joe who just wanted the prints of the pictures taken at Junior's birthday party. Photography like that was for those who were trying to capture more than just an event or a moment in time. They were trying to convey more with their image than just the mere existence of the subject that was in frame. They were creating something; a feeling, an attitude, a story from the photo they made.

And, in the same time-period that I was working on photography in the darkroom, I'd go home and work and play with images & graphics on my Commodore 64. Having seen it from that perspective, I knew then that *eventually* film was going to go the way of the Edsel. (Just like my C64, for that matter. hehe) But, at that time, the digital graphics capabilities and quality was primitive in comparison to what you could do with photography. No one would even want a portrait from a C64, then or now! But, it helped lay the groundwork for today's digital imaging and graphics.

Graphics are headed digital, just like sound did before. You can fight the change, but it's a losing battle. The same way that sound went from tube amps to solid-state circuits, so are graphics going from celluloid to digital. Sure, you can *still* buy a tube-based amplifier for your electric guitar, and you will spend a small fortune on it. Will the sound quality be better? For those who have the ear to tell, arguably yes. You can also try to stay in the legacy format for photography, and for the time being, you will be spending more and more to stay there. And, as it continues to get phased out, it might behoove those intending to stay as long as they can to get a silver-reclamation system to try to offset some of the costs. (In fact, that was one of the key reasons that a client of ours was fighting his photo lab going digital; It was going to cut some of his income as he was the one doing the silver-reclamation for his lab.)

And, for those that really think that their skills in the darkroom for image prep are going to become just anachronistic rituals, you may want to take a look at Encore's original documentary called “Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible”. There is a major section that discusses where ILM was going through their conversion from real special effects to digital visual effects (e.g. going from stop-motion film on hand-crafted models to creating complete sequences from computer graphics). Many of their own people had issues with making the transition, but once they got everyone working in the digital realm, ILM created things that could have never been done on film previously. So, that attention to detail and eye for imaging are still valuable in this digital world. The only time you don't have anything to contribute is if *you* say you have nothing to contribute.

And, if you don't like the look of the image you are working on? Remember, you can always GIMP it. Hehe

HTH.