Some people just don’t want to let go the old film stuff even through it is getting more difficult to get the films developed as the number of shops that offer such services dwindles. The purists still believe film offers better image quality and the digital shooters are only as good as their Photoshop skills. Perhaps true… and digital cameras do take away the enjoyable moment when you are handed over the printed photos after a long wait. One can also argue that digital shooters tend to be less skilled because they can often retake the photos if the first one isn’t good without the worries of wasted film, reducing the incentives to develop the rigorous skills needed to nail the shots the first place.
Film is not the only one in danger. There are also dangers for digital shooters. The digital storage media won’t last very long. Flash memory cards are guaranteed to keep the data for no more than 10 years. Hard drives can fail in high rate after as short as 3-5 years of use. The optical media such as CD, DVDs may last anywhere from 20 to 100 years. The other danger is from technology development itself: some technologies and associated media formats can become obsolete very quickly. It will be difficult to find the devices that can read the data from them. Or there will be no software drivers for the computers in the future to read the data from those obsolete devices. So it is essential for digital shooters to continuously invest in new digital storage devices to stay current with the technology development in order to keep the digital photos safe.
Posted in
Miscellaneous on March 16th, 2009.
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Cross processing (xpro) refers to processing film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film (Wikipedia).
Two methods are common: processing color negative films in slide chemicals (“C-41 as E-6″), or processing slide films using the color negative chemicals (“E-6 as C-41″). Due to the characteristics of the films and chemicals, the effects are different. Processing color negative film in slide chemical tends to produce flat tones and muted colors with less red but more green/yellow while processing slide film in in color negative chemicals often produces very contrasty images with blown highlights. In either cases, we’d expect to see wild color shifts that are not quite predictable due to many factors such as film/chemical, exposure, etc, will affect the process.
Simulating the cross processing effect in photo editors are fairly easy using curves adjustments in individual color channels. For photoshop users, this is a nice tutorial on how to do the “C-41 as E-6″ type cross-processing in Adobe Photoshop. For demonstration purposes, I will show you how to do the same adjustments using Nikon Capture NX2. Read More…
Posted in
Tutorials on October 22nd, 2008.
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Over the last four years, the sale of film has been dropping at a rate of 25 to 30 percent each year. In 2006, 204 million rolls were sold, a quarter of the 800 million sold at the peak in 1999.
This New York Times story is quite telling. You can still get film rolls developed at places like Wal-mart or Walgreens, but many smaller shops are shutting down their film processing business. I still have one roll left in my Minolta X-700 that I need to finish. I have less and less incentive to do so since I am enjoying my digital photography so much. 
Posted in
News on October 9th, 2007.
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