Today New York City is quite messy. We're getting hit with quite a bit of rain and it doesn't look like it's going to stop until the weekend. This sort of puts the brakes on plans to practice photography in the morning before work. I do have a B&W lab I want to check out in Chinatown, but it doesn't make sense to go there with just one roll. I suppose I could go out if the rain eases up at lunch...

In any event, Base10 wants to try something. I'd like to take the same normal focal length image on the digital, the Yashica and the Speed Graphic, then scan both the film and contact sheets and compare all of the digital images. Then I'll be the geek carrying three cameras in Forest Park! Who's afraid to look silly for art's sake? I suspect it will prove that film and digital are like apples and oranges--two distinct but equally good things.

We had a discussion at work last night about film being dead. Base10 thinks that may be true for the 35mm consumer market, but thinks medium and large format will keep going strong for another generation at least. I say this for two reasons:

1. Digital sensors will surely get cheaper, but the resulting file sizes will become higher and higher. It's one thing to work with a 2mb jpeg. It is quite another to work with an 800mb RAW image from a scan back. How many images like this can you store and manipulate without workstation-level computer equiptment?

2. Hard drive capacities are beginning to reach a functional limit. Toshiba will soon be producing vertical-bit plattens. While this might increase hard drive capacity four-fold, this looks like the 'brick wall' for this the most commonly used storage technology. Compare this to a 4x5 film image. I can store a thousand images in a three-ring binder. This is the analogue equivalent of 500 gigs if scanned and saved at the highest possible resolution. What's cheaper?

I'm sure that eventually we'll have super-fast super-small, high-capacity digital storage based on some other technology at some point in the future. But if history is repeated, it will start as an immensely expensive technology competing with other expensive technologies only one of which will be adopted by the consumer market causing it to have a rapid price drop. In the meantime, there's still film.

- posted by Base10 @ 11:55 AM