Why Scanned Film vs Digital Camera?

[BWColor]

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I understand using film and a wet darkroom, but something that I don’t understand is digitizing a film image.  Why not find a digital camera to your liking?  I was considering reactivating my Nikon Coolscan 9000ED and Jobos.  I have a dozen great film cameras, but drifted to digital years ago.  Recently, I considered going back to film, but I could no longer justify calling scanned film anything but another form of digital photography.  In fact a very expensive and time intensive form of digital photography.  I decided to sell all of my digital equipment and find a Monochrom and a separate color digital camera that provided me with images that were to my liking.  So, why they hybrid process?

[jaapv]

You are right that scanning a negative opens up all digital options, and for that reason it is a hybrid process, but the film provides a "sensor" that renders differently, creating a look that many people like, mainly because their eyes were trained on it from youth. I agree with you, if you want a print from film to look 100% like a print from fil, there is no other option than to go fully analog and chemical.

[Tom R]

1 hour ago, BWColor said:

I understand using film and a wet darkroom, but something that I don’t understand is digitizing a film image.  Why not find a digital camera to your liking?  I was considering reactivating my Nikon Coolscan 9000ED and Jobos.  I have a dozen great film cameras, but drifted to digital years ago.  Recently, I considered going back to film, but I could no longer justify calling scanned film anything but another form of digital photography.  In fact a very expensive and time intensive form of digital photography.  I decided to sell all of my digital equipment and find a Monochrom and a separate color digital camera that provided me with images that were to my liking.  So, why they hybrid process?

Why I employ a hybrid process.

Because (1) Fewer and fewer people are interested in purchasing or owning physical silver gelatin prints; and (2) I’m interested the act and the process of creating images with film and asking how these images differ from images produced from digital capture and manipulation (excluding photograms or other methods for creating images).

Some topics I have been considering:

• In general, images created by film cameras are counterfactual, meaning they have (had)  a correspondence with objects situated in actual time and space: had the subject of the photograph been “different” at the time the shutter was fired, it would appear different on the negative. Digital images can easily be created by algorithms and may have no necessary connection with objects in real world. (DeepLearning models can already approximate this.) Does this change human “reality”? 
• Certain compositional practices, such as in-camera multiple-exposure to create aleatoric images, are more naturally accomplished with film. Are truly aleatoric images possible in the digital image creation process? And, can we identify other aesthetic practices that do not translate naturally between the analogue and digital workflows.
• The film process produces physical artifacts and these differ from “virtual” images. For one, digital captures require complex algorithms in order to be translated into images that are visible to human beings. Additional algorithms, of varying complexity, are then frequently employed in the typical post-processing phase(s): Each layer of algorithmic complexity contributes to the resulting images’ “uncertainty.” With a film negative, we can inspect the image first-hand. But as more images are created and/or refined by algorithms, by what criteria are they verifiable? 
• As millions of images are created daily (and an increasing number of these are created by algorithms), can or will human beings still create photographs that are identifiably “human?"

Yeah … I’m retired so I have the time to do this; but, I also enjoy the process and feel that I make better compositions as a result of asking these kinds of questions when evaluating “digital” contact sheets.

[BWColor]

I appreciate your explanation and I ask because I’m an old man at a crossroads.  I just sold a dozen digital cameras and as many lenses to finance a new camera, the M11 Monochrom and a few lenses.  This camera completely changed my thoughts of reviving my B&W film workflow.  It has infused a new interest in photography and secondarily piqued my interest in travel.  I then decided to attempt to infuse some interest in color and with this I now need to sell most, if not all of my film cameras, or some cameras and a car.  Either way, I promised my wife that I would maintain money neutral hobbies.  I’ve found a real hesitation in selling film cameras and I’m not sure why this is.  Selling a car is without emotional attachment.  Given the real barriers to shooting film these days, I wonder if I’m just attached to the cameras themselves, because I can’t make sense of this and I’m not sufficiently motivated to setup my Jobos and Nikon Coolscan 9000ED.  My darkroom days are buried in the long distant past.  So, I’m curious why others are attracted to this hybrid workflow.

[spydrxx]

My attraction to hybrid is simply, I had thousands of negatives from years of shooting. and I wanted to easily store and retrieve them (they were in boxes, sleeves, envelopes), many others had been destroyed years earlier in a flood, and I wanted to preserve them and enjoy the pictures, occasionally sharing with others...such as on this forum. It was prohibitive to have the negatives all printed, and I had a scanner which IMHO didn't do the job, so I decided to try the camera approach, which worked fine. Most of my photography these days is digital, but I still have film in the freezer and some very good film cameras...my darkroom is down to just developing b&w, no more printing. Some of my relatives want prints from the old negatives, so digitizing them is both expedient and economical. I think I have plenty of company in this respect. Also my printing company only accepts digital input, no negatives, so again digitizing makes sense when I have something on film from earlier times or a day of shooting film again.

[Pieter12]

I don’t scan film, I wet print it. Nothing else looks the same.

[Viv]

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I tried very hard with film scanning.

I never achieved results that satisfied me and considered the time involved to be excessive.

So I no longer do it, having sold my wonderful Zeiss Ikon film rangefinder camera.

Nowadays, my workflow is digital shooting with very minimal post-processing.

I admire and respect those who persist with film scanning.

[250swb]

8 hours ago, BWColor said:

So, why they hybrid process?

The internet has given photographers the ability to show their work like never before, so the 'hybrid' process is about communication. It is also about having 'your cake and eat it' where you get the best medium in film and a convenient method of having it appear on your computer for post processing, posting, or printing without having to maintain a darkroom. But it also doesn't mean you can't have a darkroom as well and this is always useful to claim superiority over others in discussions. And to be honest I think it's good for the soul and intellect to have to do a bit of work along the way giving plenty of opportunities to be self critical and perhaps edit your work harder. There are only 36 on a roll and only three or four will make the edit if luck is with you, and that is how to set your own quality control. Digital photography has made a great contribution to the world, and it's made taking photographs easy, but should easy ever be a justification if the look of film is more appealing? Best take up tiddly-winks and forget about photography if a bit of work makes you break into a sweat because if you can't be bothered with your own photographs why should anybody else be bothered to look at them?

Edited August 11, 2024 by 250swb

[Anbaric]

Some people just like their film cameras or the process of shooting film and don't have access to a darkroom. Or they shoot colour, where doing your own darkroom work has always been a minority pursuit. Even before digital cameras became mainstream, colour shooters often had a hybrid workflow whether they realised it or not. The last generation of minilabs, like the Fuji Frontier from 1996, scan your negatives, allowing digital colour and exposure correction before printing on to conventional light-sensitive paper with a laser enlarger. If you've had colour machine prints any time in the last quarter century or so, they have probably been made by this hybrid process. But liking the process isn't the only reason why some people shoot film. If you start with film, the result looks different, even if your output is a digital image on a screen. You can see the grain and the texture. That applies to movies shot on film too. One of the nice things about Blu-ray and the other high resolution digital formats is that you can see when you are watching a film.

Shooting film doesn't have to be time-consuming, though you won't get instant results. You can have your negatives (or slides) developed and scanned commercially, adjust the images in your favourite editor just as you would do when shooting purely digital, and get printing done in the normal way. If you want silver prints, there are plenty of services using digital minilabs or professional digital enlargers like the Lambda or the LightJet that will give you this output from your edited files. And working in this way gives you much more control over the output than you'd have by getting a commercial service to print directly from your negatives, where someone else is making the decisions about cropping, contrast, and exposure. But there's no denying that hybrid is more expensive than pure digital. Film itself, especially colour film, is pricey, and commercial developing and scanning services (if you use them) aren't cheap. The question is whether the difference in results you get from hybrid is worth the extra expense to you. Many people will prefer the cleaner look of digital even if all else is equal. But some value the look and texture of film, which you can still see in hybrid output.

[DreiPunkte]

1 hour ago, 250swb said:

the 'hybrid' process is about communication

That pins it.

When it comes to small pictures, and here we are talking about 35mm,
a hybrid workflow is a good way to have a big audience. It is a little
like the small prints in the film-times to show around handholded.
When the picture left the hand and reaches a wall a real silverprint
is the only way to go. Btw when you take your picture for your darkroom workflow
you shoot your picture for the hole process until the picture ends up on the wall.
All other things to say about using hybrit workflows ends up in the allknown neverending story.

Ok I mostly use large format.
In my opinion, pictures ultimately belong on walls and not on screens or in hands.

Edited August 11, 2024 by DreiPunkte

[TomB_tx]

10 hours ago, BWColor said:

Given the real barriers to shooting film these days, I wonder if I’m just attached to the cameras themselves, because I can’t make sense of this

As a mechanical engineer who grew up when "high-tech" referred to great mechanical devices. I collect film cameras as examples of "functional art" in themselves, and try to keep them in best working condition.. 

Also, regarding darkroom work and print making as the desired "end" of photography: many of us used to dismiss color negative film and mainly shot slide film, sent it off to Kodak and only used the slides for projected "slide shows." There's something about the luminance of projected slides that has a magical effect on viewers. At my college the Leica rep came to campus and conducted a Leica Slide Show to promote equipment.

My dad always used a Stereo Realist slide camera, where you either passed around a viewer, or projected with a stereo projector viewed with polarized glasses. I will still occasionally pull out his archive of slides and project them to show family and friends.

These "workflows" are no less photography than darkroom work. 

[hansvons]

12 hours ago, BWColor said:

I understand using film and a wet darkroom, but something that I don’t understand is digitizing a film image.  Why not find a digital camera to your liking?

Hollywood has increasingly embraced film negative as the acquisition format in recent years despite the unprecedented triumph of digital sensors. But it's a hybrid process (filming on negative and scanning the footage for further post-production) that was established in the 1990s and was the usual way of film production for about 15 years. Then digital cine cameras entered the market and, at some point, totally overran film. However, directors like Spielberg or Tarantino never made the switch and stayed with shooting on film. Others came back to film, and now it's many directors' favourite way of shooting cinema flicks. 

There are many reasons why film is often favoured over digital. The pleasing colours, especially skin tones, and the uncontested roll-off in the whites are just a few. The film's grain provides an unparalleled texture that adds to its credibility and gives the eye something to hold onto, even if the picture is out of focus. But it's not just about aesthetics. Shooting on film requires a level of discipline that is akin to hunting rather than gathering. The camera cannot roll indefinitely, which forces you to think more about what you do. The result is less but better footage.

All of that can be transferred to still photography. 

[Bobonli]

Film has a look that is unique. I've shot film on an off for over 35 years (afraid to do the math to get exact number) and I've shot digital since when they became affordable in the DSLR format. They look different to me, and so I shoot both. For B&W film, I develop it at home and occasionally go to a community darkroom to print. Printing is the cats pajamas but it involves a train ride and booking time in the lab. I can scan that roll of film at home and use it for 'lower level' stuff like Instagram, Flicker etc or even run it though a printer.  Here's something mind-boggling: sometimes I can the film image and then send it to my phone and print it from an Instax printer to be able to hand it to someone as a gift. Film still looks different from the digital file that started life on a sensor versus a piece of celluloid. And don't get me started on larger format film. 

Either way, analog or digital, you're spending money. It's either going to be on a camera, computer, hard drive space (all digital); or film,  chemicals, time (print only); or film, chemicals, time, scanner, hard drive space (hybrid). 

And it's okay to love the process of photographing (going out with that favorite camera and exploring) more so than creating the final image. I love my cameras as tools and as history. In the last 3 years I've bought a few really old film cameras, a TLR my M4-P and a 4x5. I just like using the tools. I'm not a master craftsman, I just like swinging a different hammer from time to time. Sometimes that hammer has film; other times, it has a digital sensor. I just bought an M11, first new digital camera purchase in many, many years. My family can't understand why I bought another example of a camera I already have. They don't understand that the M11 and M4-P are completely different hammers

[DreiPunkte]

4 minutes ago, hansvons said:

Hollywood has increasingly embraced film negative as the acquisition format in recent years despite the unprecedented triumph of digital sensors. But it's a hybrid process (filming on negative and scanning the footage for further post-production) that was established in the 1990s and was the usual way of film production for about 15 years.

In the 90s I had a short excursion into the moving image world and was lucky enough to work as a Cineon, the kodak post system, operator.
You are right, but the hybrid workflow in the movie world was primarily used for special FX. Cineon opens the wold of cinema to layers, mapping and masking.
Very interesting in this way ist the workflow in these times.
- The 35mm filmcopy of a scene was scanned frame by frame to 4K single pictures with the Genesis Scanner
- Than this huge amount of numered pictures were imported to the Cineon System and the work starts.
-When your work was done, you send the rendered single picture to a movie camera which was controled by the systhem
 and shoot picture for picture from a monitor screen back to real 35mm Film and this pice was developt and then
 the bosses judges the work.

That was FX way in the 90th. Harddrives filled rooms and you need nearly a factory to develop and copy the reels.

[TomB_tx]

A lot of my treasured family history is documented on tintype or Daguerreotype from the 1800s. Both are basically the Out-of-Camera plates or negative - the most direct link to the subject. I'd like to experiment with one or the other sometime.

[Doug A]

9 hours ago, Pieter12 said:

I don’t scan film, I wet print it. Nothing else looks the same.

I agree that nothing else looks the same. Despite my best efforts in the darkroom back in the day, my new inkjet prints of camera scanned B&W negatives are far and away better than my old silver gelatin prints from the same negatives. 😀

[Pieter12]

1 hour ago, Doug A said:

I agree that nothing else looks the same. Despite my best efforts in the darkroom back in the day, my new inkjet prints of camera scanned B&W negatives are far and away better than my old silver gelatin prints from the same negatives. 😀

Sorry to learn that. My darkroom prints are much more pleasing and rich than anything I can get from a decent inkjet printer. Maybe something more high-end than my R3000 would produce better results, but the act of having made the print with my own hands and judgement in the darkroom is much more satisfying to me.

[pedaes]

30 minutes ago, Pieter12 said:

own hands and judgement

There is a fair bit of 'own hands and judgements' in getting a good digital print also. Just different.

The wet print and digital print are not in competition - go with what you prefer.

[DreiPunkte]

It goes a little away from the start.
I've noticed that digital printers complain about their technical equipmet,
while chemical printers get headaches because of their technical capabilities.

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[Einst_Stein]

First of all, they are different: full digital vs. full analog vs. hybrid. This alone is enough toi justify any of them.

Second, if you ever sophisticated darkroom tricks,such as dodging, burning, silver masking, hybrid local constrast/global contrast/micro contraste control, etc. etc., even full analog is different from other full analog. The difference could be much more than full digital vs. any analog. So pursuing so called "full analog" does not have much real meaning.  

Third, maybe only me, is the fun of playing with film in the camera as well as in the darkroom. Sometimes it has to do with a particular camera. for example, I can't get the same satisfaction of shooting 4X5 cameras, or Fujifil GX680. Shooting Hasselblad SWC with 6x6 full scope film is another.  

I tend to think full digital vs.full anlog vs. hybrid is like oil painting vs. water color vs pencil. Yes, more digital is clearly more convenience for a lot of people, but that is all, and only.