For my professional work, I am a dedicated digital user, and would not go back to shooting film for my day to day operations if I could at all avoid it. The speed of digital photography is just so important to my workflow. The control I can exert at the jobsite using a digital camera is amazing, the added report with the clients who can see the images immediately, and hold a finished product, in a wide variety of output media, same day... is worth the initial start up costs to convert.
The appearance of an emerging digital bias in photography has perhaps led to the demise of several popular films, such as Kodak's Plus-X. However, some of the newer films being introduced in to the market are truly amazing. Case in point, Fuji's Fujicolor NP type negative films which have incorporated a forth color layer. These films are able to produce a color image that reproduces mixed lighting accurately, including fluorescent light, without additional filtration.
How long have Architectural and Interior photographers been waiting for a film like that...
I often feel like a Dr. Jekle - Mr. Hyde photographer because as passionate about digital photography in the workplace I may be, there is another side of my photography too. This is the side of me that packs up a view camera to foray into the wooded wilderness or concrete jungles in search of images on a personal level.
I guess my point is that the two realms of photography, digital and traditional, are both valid, each possessing unique qualities in their own right. On the surface both of these realms of photography appear to be very similar to each other, but when you begin to work using both media side by side and compare them against one another you find that digital Vs traditional photography don't really share all that much in common except perhaps a camera and the tools for making an exposure.
While digital photography may appear to be more pedestrian, and have a more tradesman like quality to it, especially for commercial work, It does have many limitations. Long exposures are problematic, because the digital camera's CCDs begin to generate visible noise across the frame. Storage of data files can rapidly fill a hard drive. Few people outside of digital photography realize how much time is spent preparing a file for printing or the web after it has been removed from the camera. I often spend just as much time working on an important digital image in the computer as I spend printing a traditional photograph in the darkroom.
I may take far fewer images traditionally using film these days than I do digitally, however, those images shot on film tend to have more meaning to me, more than even the digital images that get published. For me it's more than just a change of media, it's almost a mantra that I have learned over the years. Film is comfortable, like an old friend, there is still nervous anticipation that comes during development. The magic of the emergence of an image in the developing tray just can not be matched by the back and forth sing-song of the print heads of an inkjet printer.
I have a foot in both worlds, digital and traditional, and though they overlap at times, for me each remains for the most part separate.
My Commonly Used Digital Equipment and Software:
- Nikon D1x and D1 digital cameras (Nikon D2x with wireless image transfer begining in March 2005)
- Sigma 14mm (21mm)
- 17-35mm Nikkor (25-50mm)
- 35-85mm Nikkor (50-125mm)
- 80-200mm Nikkor (120-300mm)
- Nikon SB-24/25/26/28dx/800 Flashes
- Dell 1.6ghz PC
- 512 megabytes RAM
- 750 gigabytes hard drive Space
- CD-R drive and CD drive
- 2 21" flat screen graphics monitors
- Sony VAIO Laptop with WA 17" Screen
- Minolta Dimage Scan/Multi Pro film scanner
- Epson 1620 Expression graphic arts scanner
- Epson 2200 Printers
- Hp 2500CM, and HP2600 Professional inkjet printers
- Colorspan 50" wide format inkjet printer
- Adobe Photoshop CS for image adjustment
- Nikon Veiw and Capture for Proof Printing and Nikon NEF file conversion
- Adobe InDesign for page layout
- Adobe Illustrator for vector based graphics
- FotoStation Pro for image database management and Workflow
- Macromedia Homesite for HTML code editing
- Macromedia Dreamweaver for FTP and website management
- Macromedia Fireworks for web graphics and JAVA
- Adobe ImageReady for web graphics and JAVA
|
