Dave Stevenson
There are still a few people who claim that digital images can never truly replicate the ‘feel’ of film, but they’re clearly missing a trick…
I went to a press briefing a few years ago. I go to quite a lot of these things: you get to muck around with new hardware, hobnob with PR people whose job it is to be nice to you, and there are almost always free sandwiches. If there aren’t free sandwiches, there’s beer. I think that’s the law.
Anyway, the briefing was for some new compact camera or other. Its chief benefit, spelled out in foot-high letters in a seemingly never-ending PowerPoint presentation, was that it had 7.1 megapixels.
When we’d stopped gurgling like excited schoolchildren (7.1 megapixels! I remember when all this was fields), a voice piped up. ‘How long do you think it will be,’ it asked, ‘before the image quality from digital cameras supersedes film?’
A good question, but one that was five years late. Maybe seven years. Perhaps a full decade. At the moment, I’m reading a terrific book from National Geographic called Through the Lens: Greatest Photographs. Composed mainly of shots taken during the 1990s (it was published in 2003, the most recent shot is from that year), the pictures inside are many things. Some are provocative, some are brash. Some are magnificently colourful subjects and some are high-contrast, black-and-white shots. There are pictures of people, animals and landscapes. It’s a beautiful book, and if there’s a more pleasurable way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon than with a cup of tea and an enormous coffee-table book, I’ve yet to discover it.
However, there’s one thing that it doesn’t have – image quality. It’s not that the pictures on show aren’t fantastic in all kinds of other crucial ways, and partly the sometimes-grainy images are supposed to be that way – Through the Lens is all about real life, after all, not a perfectly lit, thoughtfully composed studio shoot.
But some of the pictures were taken at dusk or dawn, which means they are grainy; while others have been cropped, so the imperfections in the film are magnified. Others are distinctly fluffy around the edges, victims of older autofocus systems.
Your modern DSLR takes far better pictures than the vast majority of 35mm film cameras. I read a blog post the other day by Paul Burwell (you can find it at bit.ly/cWPsUg), lamenting that some people remain nostalgically fixated on a supposed ‘quality’ of film. Precisely what they are talking about is anyone’s guess.
Off the top of my head, I suppose they might be talking about film grain, or perhaps the warm, saturated images produced by Velvia film or cross-processing. However, if you took a picture on Velvia film, that warm, saturated look was pretty much how your end shot was always going to look. Take a modern Raw image and run it through the editor of your choice, and you can turn it black and white, give it any film effect you can think of… you get the idea.
The point is that a modern camera captures a huge excess of detail; using the right tools you can make that detail work for you pretty much however you want it. Capture a perfectly noise-free, slightly underexposed Raw file with almost any DSLR, and what you can produce is limited only by your imagination and willingness to spend hours in a darkened room working on a single image.
Luckily, National Geographic’s example works both ways. It’s true that plenty of the images in Through the Lens fall below the technical standards of today’s cameras, but that doesn’t make the images weaker. Would James Blair’s evocative 1994 image of Russian children sharing a secret have had more impact with punchier colours? Or would Nick Ut’s searing picture of Kim Phúc fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war work better in colour?
In photography, the subject remains the single most important aspect of a shot, followed by composition and sharpness in close succession, then colour, and so on. You can’t save a boring image by editing it to death. The flip side of this is exactly why such a huge number of sub-par photos make their way into the pages of gossip magazines every week: who cares how grainy or badly focused a shot is when it’s of Peter Andre buying a loo roll?
It’s when the two come together that you start to get some properly amazing pictures. Technological advances mean photographers in war zones can return ever-better images, unhampered by working conditions that would have brought photographers of yesteryear to a standstill. More advanced lenses, autofocus and increasingly astronomical resolution all mean a photographer can work wonders with the surplus of data captured in the field. And, of course, the technological advances at the top end of the DSLR market means cameras at the lower end get cheaper, meaning cheap DSLRs are effectively disposable. That means remote camera shots, and borderline insane projects such as William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas’s motorised BeetleCam.
So the idea of film having a distinct and un-reproducible ‘feel’ has been debunked and, with the possible exception of resolution, anything you can do with film can be done with digital and more.
It’s not that I don’t understand the romantic appeal of a roll of film, but my brother got charged a tenner at Jessops recently to develop a black-and-white roll of 35mm, and if he decides later that a frame would look better in colour, he’s stuck with it. I honestly can’t understand why anyone would want to go back.
