The Siren Call of Digital is a Scream

[Agent M10]

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A few days ago I received a driver's license for a joy ride with a Leica M8.2. Frankly, I wasn't looking for a digital ride, but the flyer had my camera store's name on it. This afternoon I walked my photographic DMV and asked for the keys to the 8.2. In no time at all I was fitted with a 35 cron, UV/IR filter, a vulcanite cover, a sweet black Billingham bag, and an all-too-cool black dot.

 

As the sun was going down, I headed for the zoo. I figured that an M8.2 and domesticated wildlife might make for a good test of the new fangled framelines and cropped sensor. I also brought along my M7 and 50 Lux just for good measure.

 

I made it to Madagascar in the city and got a first good look at the M8.2. While it is surely a Leica, it ain't no M7. It's larger, rounder, lighter, and hollower. Compared to the M8.2, my M7 is Fort Knox. But, I've got to admit that the little black dot makes up for all of that.

 

Being a film guy, I began taking photographs (wait, I should say "images") of the none-too-wild critters. As I got used to shooting, frankly, I wondered what all the fuss has been about the M8. Yes, it is a little different to think that the 35 is actually a 47 or so. Yes, the shutter sound is louder than the M7. Yes, there is no rewind crank to leverage your thumb on. But, so what? I thought it might take me about a week and a half of shooting to get used to the differences and they really wouldn't be a big deal at all.

 

As I made my way through the birds and the giraffes and the elephants and such, I really began to like the camera. The viewfinder is clear without the additional framelines and I didn't have to take the viewfinder from my eye to crank any film.

 

During my time at the zoo, I shot my M7 with Kodachrome side-by-side with the M8.2 to compare the results, but now I know that I don't need to.

 

Below are two shots taken with the M8.2 - one of a gorilla and one of my son:

 

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Both of these photographs (images) were taken in very, very low light. The gorilla was taken at 1/8 at 160 and my son's image was taken at 1/15th at 320. I had trouble focusing the viewfinder patch for each picture.

 

My trouble with these images is that they do not accurately reflect the lighting characteristics of the scenes. It seems as if the sensor has boosted the overall lighting (and minimized the contrast) in both of these low light scenes (compare the D3's low-light performance in this post). My son's photograph particularly fails to show the highlights vis-a-vis the shadows present (you'd almost think that I set up some kind of lighting for this shot).

 

For my own photography, I'm more keen on the presence and contrast of available light than I am on resolution and arguments about sharpness. Consequently, while driving the M8.2 was a lot of fun, I'll be turning in the keys tomorrow.

 

Below is a recent Tri-X photograph that had less lighting contrast at the scene than my son's.

 

[Marquinius]

Peter,

 

Must be a gas to get to joy ride a brand new M8.2 (would not complain about getting same same with newest Canon or Nikon ).

 

Just a question: did you go into setup and check you were shooting in RAW (DNG)? Because if you shot in Jpeg, all bets are off And if you shot in DNG, you will be aware that "developing" (digital post processing) can change contrast, depth, saturation, whatnot enormously.

 

Note: perhaps you're THE expert on digital ... I'll put my foot in my mouth then and bug off.

 

Marco

[TimF]

Well of course, the Nikon's metering systems are rather more complex than those of the M8 (to put it mildly!). I'd say the picture of your son is simply overexposed.

 

I took the liberty of downloading it and playing in iPhoto (couldn't be bothered opening PS or anything). Some adjustments to exposure (-1.3 stops), a small boost to contrast, and a couple of other minor tweaks results in this very rough & ready version

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[alw]

All digitals "gather" more light than is seen to the eye. At first, I found that very convenient, but have now gone back to film.

[Agent M10]

Marco - Yep, it was cool to get the M8.2 certificate. Besides a couple of snapshots with my wife's D-Lux 3, I've never handled a digital camera and looked forward to comparing the M8.2 to my M7 and MP - both in handling and photographic results. I had read lots of articles comparing the M8 to other digital cameras, but rarely have I read anything comparing the light gathering properties of digital as compared to film (except for iso limits).

 

With regarding to handling, ease of use, etc., I think the M8 is pretty cool machinery. My shop had D3s, etc. out for loan and it is a monster. Leica has done a superb job in creating a competitive tool in the size and weight of the M8. The 35 cron with the cropped sensor makes it even smaller than a film M for 50mm (or 47).

 

The shots were taken in DNG (put in JPEG for the web). I'm certainly not an expert in digital. I'm well aware of the manipulations that can be done post-process, but all of that is secondary in my mind.

 

Tim - I appreciate your PP, but it still doesn't accurately reflect the light of the scene (and no offense to your work, but it's not my taste). My son was sitting two feet in front of a 42 inch HDTV with very dim overhead lighting in the rest of the room. My film photographs demonstrate the HDTV's directional light on my son's face - the M8's did not. Same for the gorilla (although he didn't have a HDTV). His image shows more sunlight, so to speak, than the zebras' who were out in the sun.

 

alw is right and that is that the light gathering properties of sensors and software are quite different from a latent film emulsion (there should be a lot more articles and comparisons on this). For certain photographs, the differences might not translate into differences in the ultimate image. For others, however, it appears that the differences would be substantial.

 

From my little test drive, I see that the difference between digital photography and film photography doesn't just extend to grain (according to most articles), but also to the light gathering properties of each system (which, in turn, also affects the photographic eye). While many photographers may be able to stretch the boundaries of digital and get whiz-bang results, I find myself now more firmly in the film camp (and happy about it - long live the M7).

 

And just one note - My son's photograph (or even the gorilla's for that matter) demonstrates, at least to me (not speaking for anyone else), why so many digital photographs seem to have the same kind of lighting.

[osscat]

Well, not every one gets on with digital first off, especially when one knows the outcome from film so instinctively.

 

The set up of the digital camera requires as much fine tuning as exposure v development and iso ratings.

 

Often the file collects a great deal of data which needs interpreting in order to achieve the desired (expected) outcome.

 

Stuff like white balance and saturation are similar issues but whereas with film one has one outcome per film/filter used digital can be interpreted in many ways.

 

I made a number of adjustments to the file of your boy which seems to achieve a great deal more than the one you posted. Plus a duotone type conversion.

 

Don't give up on digital - do some more test runs and have the files put through an image processing application before you go back to film altogether.

 

Osscat

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[NZDavid]

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Gorillas always will always tend to be overexposed. As will black cats in coal cellars.

 

But I like the original pic of your son.

 

<"developing" (digital post processing) can change contrast, depth, saturation, whatnot enormously.>

 

Yes, it does. And therein lies a crucial difference with digital. Photographers (image-makers) are happy to spend hours fiddling with computer settings. OTOH, with film, or at least slide film, you end up with the final image. Which may or may not be a good thing.

[Agent M10]

osscat -

 

Having 2 M8.2s married to a 35 cron and some other lens would have eased my life a great deal. I could shoot away and then upload everything into Lightroom without having to decide on film, buy film, process film, scan it, and then dust it. Frankly, I was thinking about all of those possibilities as I put the drive kit together.

 

As NZDavid writes, the picture of my son is nice, but compared to even some M7 shots taken at iHop a couple weeks ago, it is sterile.

 

Like I said, the M8.2 is a slick piece of equipment for those photographers who are able to shoot digital and make it work. I'm glad that I got to test drive so I could see the differences between digital capture and film first-hand with Leicas. (I'm looking forward to comparing gorilla pics when my K64 comes back.)

 

Thankfully, Kodak says that film sales are up this year and it is a very sustainable business.

[Photoskeptic]

All digitals "gather" more light than is seen to the eye. At first, I found that very convenient, but have now gone back to film.

 

I've had pretty much the same experience. Still have the M8, but it hasn't seen the light of day in months. I'll probably sell it and buy another M film body.

[Guest noah_addis]

There's nothing wrong with shooting film, I prefer it actually though it's not really feasible for the work I do. But there are some things you need to understand about digital before dismissing it.

 

Film responds to light in a nonlinear fashion. If you're at all familiar with film, you know each film has a unique response curve. The curve has a toe and shoulder that explains how the film records detail at the brightness extremes. Digital, however, has a linear response. Digital also captures quite a large tonal range. Digital images out of the camera often look flat but can easily be made to look more like film if that is the desired result.

 

While it's true that with slide film your original exposure can be seen as the final product, with color neg or black and white few would argue that many post processing decisions are made. I know of no photographers who print their negatives straight without thinking about color, contrast, filtration, etc.

 

The same is true with digital. I spend very little time on post, and when I shoot I already know what I will end up doing to the file, but clearly I don't just take the in-camera jpg files and present them as a final product.

 

All I really do is use the curves box in photoshop to steepen the curve and add a shoulder and toe to the image, which increases midtone contrast while holding shadow and highlight detail. The one difference is that if I expose properly and don't blow the highlights, with digital I can retain as much shadow detail as I like, much more than with film. Out of the camera, there is often too much shadow detail and the images look flat, as you described.

 

With the M8 I find I have to do very little post processing if shot correctly. For color I always do a custom WB, and of course always use manual exposure and check the histogram, which is a great tool.

 

I don't quite see the value of your example images as they were under different light. The tri-x image actually looks flat to me on my calibrated monitor, and the pic of your son shows a poor white balance and difficult mixed light for any film or digital camera. The tri-x image appears to have been shot under a vastly different lighting situation, so any comparison between the two is a waste of time. I'd like to see the original unretouched kodachrome slide of your son shot by the light of the hdtv.

 

The zoo pic appears to have been shot through glass and seems very flat, though I'm sure the .dng file could be made to come very close to your kodachrome image in a matter of seconds by someone who knows photoshop or c1.

 

I'm not trying to change your mind, if you like film by all means stick with it, but it's simply not correct to think that the images you've posted are all the M8 or other digital camera are capable of.

 

I haven't shot a single roll of film since I bought my M8 in May, and I couldn't be happier.

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[Agent M10]

I didn't write the thread with the intention of doing one of those film v. digital quality debates. I also didn't write the thread to vent about some kind of inherent limitations of the M8 or another digital camera.

 

As alw and Photoskeptic have both witnessed, the light gathering properties of digital sensors (and their respective software) are quite different from film and that affects the photographer's approach to light and subject.

 

While osscat and TimF did some admirable PP work with my son's photograph (pretty much what you described in your post), the issue I had with the M8 is the original "negative." As I wrote earlier, the M8 has rendered the initial image with much more light and less contrast than was originally present in the scene. I experienced the same with my wife's D-Lux 3 in the past, but had chalked that up to it being a consumer digital.

 

Frankly, I don't understand the attitude that photographers are supposed to bow down to some digital-camera god and confess blasphemy when they speak of any merit to film vis-a-vis. I wonder if acoustic guitar players have had to do that kind of thing.

[Guest noah_addis]

As I said I prefer film and I'm not debating about the quality of film vs. digital. In your initial post you mentioned that you had hoped more people would discus the differences between the two, which is what I had intended to do. If my post sounded anti-film in any way, I apologize. But it's not helpful to photographers out there who may be reading this for you to spend a day with a digital camera, post some poorly processed photographs, compare the bad color files to a black and white image shot under different light, and say that digital doesn't work.

 

...the issue I had with the M8 is the original "negative." As I wrote earlier, the M8 has rendered the initial image with much more light and less contrast than was originally present in the scene....

 

The photo of your son looks overexposed, and the white balance is off. If you want it to look like unfiltered chrome film, you should probably shoot on the cloudy or daylight wb setting. Auto will try to balance the blue light from the tv with the other ambient light, and the result is both sources are off and it's a mess.

 

I'd like to see how the film version looked of your son at the tv for a valid comparison, though I hope you shot it at exactly the same instant, as the brightness of tv screens can vary by a few stops depending on what's on the screen at the moment.

 

The raw file from the camera contains a ton of info, and if you include it all you'll often end up with a flat and ugly photograph. So in that way you could say that digital 'captures much more light'. In fact it's capturing more tonal range, which some people find helpful. You can always increase contrast and throw away some of the excess tonal range if you wish, and many photographers do. On the other hand, if your original file (or slide) has too much contrast and has clipped highlights and shadows, you can't reduce that contrast nor increase meaningful tonal range.

 

One great thing about transparency film, is that you don't have to do post processing work (until you want to print or scan them, of course.) and the photographs have a texture and feeling that is very special. I love tri-x and wet prints for the grain and texture, which can't be duplicated with digital no matter what kind of software filters you have. But there is a ton of post processing involved with black and white, but it's time spent in the dark, which I much prefer to sitting behind a computer.

[osscat]

I am with Noah here.

 

I spent the best part of the last 40 years working with TriX - there is nothing like it for rendering the reportage/documentary images I like to produce - my only problem in the recent past has been the lack of a suitable fibre based paper to match the Kodak Bromesko / Royal Bromesco prints I made before they discontinued these excellent papers.

 

I had to produce a neg that I could print to the quality I demanded using the equipment I felt at ease with. There was a great deal of trial and error in reaching the exact method of exposure to match the best method of development so I could reach the optimum print quality on the grade of paper I preferred.

 

Much the same process has been applied to my digital work - it has taken time and experimentation to learn how to expose the file in order to be able to process it to my desired print quality.

 

This is definitely not Film v Digital - my joy now is that I can produce a print to the standard I want and make exact copies whenever I want without splashing about in a darkroom getting a series of dis-similar ones.

 

 

Digital is no magical panacea - it requires as much work as film. It is only in the last three or four years that digital has been able to compete with film for print quality, even now the production of high quality Monochrome images requires very expensive equipment - unlike using film/paper the results of which have stayed constant - except for the loss of those lovely heavy metal impregnated papers.

 

Osscat

[Agent M10]

Noah,

 

I didn't write that digital doesn't work and I didn't dismiss it as a photographic medium. What I did do is provide some initial impressions of a test drive of a Leica M8 and how a digital sensor and software may render light differently from a latent film emulsion. As Mary Ellen Mark has said, film and digital are really two different mediums.

 

My son's picture may be overexposed, but I'd argue against that. I've taken that same picture for a number of years, same place in the house and same position, and never had the kind of light boost with my M7 that I had with the M8. The photograph was representative. I could have uploaded photographs of penguins and monkeys where I thought the same thing occurred (a small number of photographs, but still a number). I cross-linked Mike Johnston's article on the D3 for similar comparison (Johnston's article also touches on the fact that there are even different photographic approaches in camera software).

 

The reason that I started the thread was to show, as osscat puts it, that digital photography is not a magical panacea, as much of the press claims. Even going from a film camera model to its digital equivalent is not a matter of just switching out hammers, so to speak. The guy thinking of buying a digital camera isn't just getting a new camera, but he is buying into a different photographic approach - which may or may not be what he's looking to do.

 

I was fortunate in that my local camera shop participated in the test drive program. If not for the test drive, I would have had to pluck down $3K+ in order to see that digital is not for me. It may be that my initial impressions give another photographer pause before plucking down his own $3K+ for a digital M or SLR sight unseen.

[Guest noah_addis]

I might not be communicating my point clearly. This will be my last post on this topic so hopefully I'll get it right this time. It's not that digital is better than film, because it's not. Nor is film better than digital. You keep restating that digital renders light differently from film, which I guess is technically true, but the reality is that if you know what you're doing with digital, you can make it 'render light' in a very similar manner to any film you might choose.

 

I don't agree that film and digital are different media. In my mind photography is about content and concept and intent, not the tools used to make the photograph. When I go to the cinema I don't care if I see a movie shot on 35mm film or HD video, I care about the content, the story and the quality of the picture, not the camera used to make it. Same goes for still photography.

 

It might be helpful to think of digital as a new variety of film. Pretend kodak came out with a new film with a linear response curve and low-contrast/super-high tonal range. Clearly, if you take this low-contrast piece of film and print in the same way as you would print a tri-x negative, the print would look horrible. It would be flat and probably look very much like your M8 raw files.

 

So the photographer has two options, throw away the low-contrast negs and go back to the old film, or learn to print them well through testing and scientific methods (or trial and error).

 

I spent years learning how to shoot film. Through college and beyond I spent time testing films and developers and I eventually came up with some combinations that work well for me. I know them like the back of my hand and I know how they will react under different light.

 

I've been shooting digital since 1997, often under tight deadlines and difficult circumstances. The cameras I used in the beginning had no LCD screens. With technology as advanced as it is now, it's relatively easy to get digital files to look however you want. You can even save batch settings and automatically apply them to your raw files before you look at them.

 

I'm not saying that you or anyone else should switch to digital. I love film as much as anyone. But I feel that you may be doing a disservice to yourself as well as other photographers (whom your post may give pause to) to try a camera out and pass judgement on it without learning how to use it. Some people don't have easy access to film and processing and it would be a shame to have them think they have no good options.

 

As a side note for film photographers, learning to deal with digital images can definitely help in your scanning technique. For instance the Tri-x image in the OP had rather flat shadow detail, and the white shirt was blown out. I'm sure the detail was in the negative, so with better scanning and photoshop skills the loss of detail could have been avoided.

 

Ok, pretty easy to tell which one is film, but I think they look respectably similar once printed out. And there is very little post processing to either file, just a quick curves adjustment. The M8 file is from a BW in-camera jpeg.

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[Agent M10]

Noah, like you, maybe I have not communicating my point clearly. And this will be my last post on the topic.

 

As Mike Johnston's linked article shows, there may not only be a distinct difference between what the photographer sees in a scene and what the digital camera captures, there is a difference between the manufacturers' light-rendering software. There is a connection between equipment and quality, however subjective that quality and intent might be (just ask Stephen Spielberg to shoot one of this films with digital equipment).

 

Being a film photographer, I took the M8 out and didn't like the way that the camera rendered the scenes as I saw them - and in some instances it was substantially different from what my experience has been with film. The results of some 200+ photographs convinced me to stay with my film Ms (and, yes, I am familiar with the requirements of post-processing and all).

 

With regard to your idea about options, my point is exactly the opposite of yours. For more than a few years now, folks have been pushed (or rather shoved) towards digital capture. Few are told of the differences between film and digital and even fewer are advised about the enormous investment in money, time, and equipment that digital requires.

 

As you wrote, the digital camera buyer cannot be content just to buy a high-end camera like the M8, but he must also be ready to invest heavily in post-processing gear, software, and the like to get what you term decent results. It would be a shame for him to think he has no other option. Anecdotally, the industry is seeing a resurgence in film because many are finding out, after all that heavy investment, that the jump to digital hasn't been what's it's all cracked up to be.

 

Just a note - I'm not sure what part of the discussion the photos you've attached to the posts are supposed to support.

[mindlessdocumentation]

Though I don't own one, I have seen some wonderful results with the M8 series. And I must (with a little bit of guilt) admit I'm pretty much "sold" on digital for color photography. That said, for someone on my payscale (I have to be very calculating on what I buy) it is not a sound enough investment. Yet. I look forward to having no excuses not to pick one up.

[fingerprinz]

Thank you for the interesting discussion Peter & Noah. Learned a lot. And I love both your portfolios. Peter, your Haiti images are amazing, especially the portraits.

[jaapv]

Hmmm. It seems to me that some of the participants here have never done their own colour lab work and have relied on the rough and ready output of commercial labs. I cannot emphasize enough the level of control and quality that can be obtained in the digital darkroom as opposed to the chemical one.

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[Guest noah_addis]

Just a note - I'm not sure what part of the discussion the photos you've attached to the posts are supposed to support.

 

Forgive me for trying to include some examples in what some might see as a dry discussion. I won't discus this anymore but figured I'd add technical details...

 

The image with my first post was M8 and 21 Elmarit Asph, and was intended to show that high contrast results, as you might expect from Tri-x or similar, can be easily acheived with digital.

 

Out of the second pair of images, one is with the M8 and 28 'cron, the other with M6ttl, 35 'cron and Tri-x. It's not a fair comparison really as the light and locations were totally different, but my intent is to show that the two can be compatible.

 

Both M8 photographs are from in-camera black and white jpegs, which isn't how I process final files but these are just quickies.