Author:
Wes
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Date Posted: 19:59:55 09/29/12 Sat
>By the way, I enjoyed the pictures of the midgets you
>took for Bullrun Days. You mentioned that you used
>your Nikon camera. Is that the same model that Trey
>Hartwell uses?
Nope, Trey's is film, although I don't remember the model without looking it up. Mine (actually, the office camera) is digital.
Up until the late 90's I did a lot in the darkroom -- all black and white. It got to the point where I hated taking photos since it was such a pain in the butt to screw around in the darkroom. Color photos? If I actually had to use color it involved a trip to a one-hour photo shop.
Then came digital photos, and the end of darkroom work. It's still there but we just use it as a place to dump stuff. It hasn't actually been used since 2002, when my daughter used it for some class work. I do stuff with a few clicks of a mouse that I would never have dreamed possible when I started working with film.
As an aside: I had more or less given up on taking night football shots. The lights we had at the football field at the time looked steady to look at them but in reality they were flashing on and off sixty times a second. When you went to take a photo, the focal plane shutter moving over the film meant that a night football photo was bright-dark-bright-dark and it was all but impossible to correct in the darkroom. The only way to get a good night football show was with a big flash, and then you didn't want to be too far away.
Then came digital. Instead of a focal plane shutter, a chip is on or off and the light/dark just becomes additive. Our first digital camera wasn't real fast and I had to process images deeply to get decent shots, but digital cameras have improved so much that it's no trick, especially with a fairly decent flash, not the monsters needed with film.
The last time I shot film was on my Grand Canyon trip in 2003 -- and then only because at the time digital cameras and wet didn't get along well together. I bought a Pentax WR-95 and shot up well over $200 worth of film with it before I even started to get into processing costs. Haven't used it since. If I were going to go to the Grand Canyon today I'd buy a weather-resistant digital.
Things have changed. And in this, I have to say they've changed for the better. The only reason I see now to shoot film is if I were playing with a large-format camera, something I've always wanted to do but never been able to see my way clear to spend the money to do it. It would be strictly a hobby thing, though, and something I'll probably never get around to doing.
-- Wes
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