Film or Digital
This New year I tried out a digital camera for the first time, and I must admit I was very impressed by the versatility of such a small camera. A friend who was with me on Hogmanay - New Years night had bought a small digital camera just before Christmas, and it was given a trial run by me on New Years night along with my SLR film cameras.
I have always used film myself and stand by it for its clarity, and you of course have the proof that the photographs that have been taken are yours by being left with a negative, so it is very hard for anyone else to claim ownership or copyright as long as they have the negatives.
Mike Sarapuk, a long standing friend of mine who has helped me over the years by building my computers along with rebuilding them when required was good enough to let me try out his small digital camera on New Years night. The photographs that I took are in the Hogmanay - New Year 2005 into 2006 section. A very small number of them.
Every photograph on this site is taken by film - apart from some video images which are marked as such. Film is something that I have always stood by, but it's a medium that sadly may become a specialist type of format in the future as more and more people turn over to digital cameras, thus giving everyone the chance to take photographs that work out a lot cheaper than film.
The technology has been here for over eleven years, but the price was prohibitive for most people until now. The price of the average digital camera has plummeted making it a more viable option for most people. And no doubt they will become even better as time moves on. They've even brought out digital cameras that can take video pictures which is great with the speed and advancement of electronics.
The ability for people running websites are great in the fact that they can take the digital image and put it on the Internet or send it too their relations anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, whereas film will always take longer no matter how good the image is.
I have spoken to a number of photographers from the media over the years who have used digital for a fair amount of time, and I have always asked the same question. Digital too me is a bit like video and with the advance of digital photography are we going to lose a skill where people have to work with light and setting the camera right as you would do on a film camera? Most people have agreed that a certain amount of skill is being lost and that the digital camera can make some people lazy. But it is the medium that is required for the media in today's electronics age.
I feel that some time soon I will go over to digital, but even that tends to be fraught with difficulties, such as what is a good camera and what is a bad one. This is because the market is flooded with all types of digital cameras. And the variation in price can be very confusing as companies race too get their cameras rated as the best on the market. And does size really matter now given that mobile phones have been reduced from brick size to some that are so small my fingers are too big for them.
But what the mobile phone can do now is almost unimaginable from when they first came out. Who would of thought that mobile phone could take photographs, video and log on to the Internet years ago? But they advance to a point where you say where are they going to go next? And can they go any further with the technology?
The digital camera is going through that sort of metamorphosis just now as they advance and get better with the amount of development that's being put into them now. It is a large market making a lot money because of the reduction in price making them affordable to almost everyone.
I just hope the people that are using digital now back up a copy of their photographs so that they don't lose them. Each photograph tells a story, but it's also the history of our times by the types of cars on the road and the types of clothes people of the era were wearing such as fashion.
I now feel that the digital revolution is with us, but with me there will always be room for one film camera in my bag.
Written by Andrew Murphy 5 January 2006
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