Not really, photography was temporarily destroyed with the rise of digital. Everything that happened between the early 2000s to about mid 2010s was a step back compared to film in term of resolution and dynamic range. Even back in the 50s we had pretty good film and lenses already.
I shot this on a 1955 leica m3 with the lens it came out of the factory with on a fairly low quality consumer film: https://i.imgur.com/3VKMtra.jpg
I think a very good case can be made for the Nikon D3 outperforming film in every practical way in 2007, but it is striking that people have such a misapprehension of the resolution of 35mm film. Especially slow films like these.
Plus, most of the lens recipes that dominated the middle 20th century (and certainly dominated in compact cameras until the 1990s) were established by the start of WWII. The main difference between then and, say, 1980, is coatings for colour photography and flare reduction.
it is striking that people have such a misapprehension of the resolution of 35mm film
I agree with you. I've recently become a film nut, but I agree that modern high-end digital outperforms film hands down. That said, film is still great but a lot of people still think very poorly of it.
My suspicion is that in the time before digital and everyone shot on film, most people were just really bad at taking photos ~ people used 35mm point-and-shoot, disposable cameras, 110 cameras, and similar. The general population weren't photographers and weren't using film to it's full potential - as a result, they got tons and tons of bad photos. Modern digital cameras (including those in phones) have great auto features for proper exposure, etc... and it's easy to delete bad photos (out of focus, too dark, etc...). I'm inclined to believe that most people's poor opinion of film is conflating the medium (film vs digital) with the camera experience (manual & confusing vs automagic).
There was recently a post here on HN about how the internet killed bad photos [1]. I made a similar comment at the time [2].
Right. Most people's experience of film is cheap film, micro formats like 110 and disc film, fast film they needed for poor quality or disposable cameras, etc.
Then collectively our cultural experience of black and white film in particular is of photojournalism, and popular culture's long-term obsession with the allure of the grainy photo; grain suggests interpretations like "immediate", "thrilling", "illicit", "secretive", or "exposé", so it becomes the dominant experience of a film photograph.
These things add up to people not really understanding what film is capable of.
(edited because I mangled my argument with grammar)
My impression is that automatic exposure has also gotten a lot better, although it's been a long time since I've done film. Cameras have also gotten a lot better at shooting in low light.
Yep. Digital cameras allow the opportunity to use the entire sensor to analyse the scene for metering.
In DSLRs the metering improvement is largely due to high-res pattern/matrix metering (simplified scene recognition with a few hundred or a thousand metering cells in a grid).
These metering modes were also in the final run of great consumer film SLRs.But I suppose compared to the sales of digital cameras, relatively few people experienced this in the film era; film compact cameras were largely using centre-weighted metering cells, and many people incorrectly perceived SLR cameras as "difficult".
Read up about Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, if you want your mind blown. A Russian inventor hired by the Czar to photo-document the Empire, he worked 30 - 40 years before the photos in the article above. He developed a system of mirrors and filters to take three B&W photographs simultaneously in the red, green and blue spectrums.
Originally, displaying them was only possible with a projector that super-imposed the three images. But computer processing allows the reconstruction of his photographs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Rgb-comp... (That is Alim Khan, direct descendant of Genghis Khan, last of the Mongol rulers. Is your head spinning yet?)
Yep. And I think people don't have a really good grasp of how little lens resolution really improved for almost 50 years. Many of the great lens recipes were a decade or more old by this point.
Plus, many 35mm films were quite high-resolution even then; the downside was they were all very slow. This form of Kodachrome was ASA 10 or 12 or something like that.
I currently have a roll of ISO 25 loaded in my camera right now (Rollei RPX 25) :-) I grew up shooting on film and preferred 400 over 800 speed film because of the film grain at 800 ~ the fact that my mirrorless can go up to 25600 and still look okay just blows my mind.
Kodachrome. They give us those nice bright colors. They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world's a sunny day. I got a Nikon camera. I love to take a photograph. Too bad mama took my Kodachrome away. ~ I'm sad that I'll never actually get to shoot on it.
I shot a couple of rolls of K64; I'm sad that I never shot any K25.
That said my real "I wish I had..." are:
- I never printed anything with classic Centennial/Kentmere POP paper, and now nobody makes the stuff.
- I never shot any Agfa Scala (though Adox have brought something similar back)
I bought a darkroom enlarger to use the base + column as a copy stand, and I realised at that point that I would have to do some of my own printing, even just once, or I'd always feel that I'd missed out. Those few prints are among the most significant objects I own. And now I _know_ I will do it again.
Mirrorless is my day-to-day photography experience, though, with all sorts of adapted lens experiments.
I like the cut of your jib. A friend of mine just moved out of state and had to clear out his garage. He was giving stuff away and I sadly had to pass on the opportunity to get a nice enlarger for free -- I just don't have the space for a full blown dark room. The best I can do currently is develop negatives and throw them on my flatbed. Though, I'm eyeballing Ilford's Popup Darktoom kit. [1] I did some of my own prints in high school years ago, and it's a wonderful feeling.
Yes -- that popup darkroom is a design that was originally sold by Nova Darkroom in the UK, I think, about 15 years ago. It appears to be pretty good and I'm really impressed that Ilford have kept the price down. It's good to see it still around.
Edit: it's not, actually -- it's a little simpler than the Nova tent which is still in production:
