Film, you and me, long time
Sep 25th, 2007 by Brad
I’m still loving shooting film, although it is getting harder. I see smaller shelves of film, my long-time portland lab no longer does any film, and expenses are rising. Sometimes I get asked “why not switch, you do such crazy stuff that kinda looks digital, why bother with film?”. I still like film and think it makes a difference. I also like creating a very different type of image that looks like it was created but it isn’t.
My of the artists and commercial pros I know still rely on film when things are critical to them. There is even an AP article on film: “Film Still Popular Among the Pros” by Ben Dobbin (sept 19).
- Photojournalist Chris Usher, “I shoot just as much digital as the next guy out of necessity,” Usher said. “I use film probably a third of the time, on personal projects 100 percent of the time. There’s a richness and a depth of field that becomes more prevalent when you’re shooting film as opposed to digital. It has a tangible feel to it.”
I’ll give you another technical consideration specifically for my current work. In my series “Night Amalgam” the images consist of both day- & night-time exposures.
“Pacific City†by Brad Carlile Copyright 2006 all rights reserved
This past weekend I did some new shots where one of the many exposures took 80sec on one day, another took 64 sec on a different day. Film pays off in this realm, Digital noise would have ruined those images. Since a single frame can take 2 hour to 3 days to create, work hard to minimize “do-overs”. Film still rules in this area.
- Photojournalist Chris Usher, went on to say: “Film by its very physical nature is layers of grains of different colors. It’s hard to describe, but it does actually have a micro three-dimensionality that you can see in that weird way.” By contrast, he said, “digital pictures look very flat, and even the prints. … Digital looks literally cut-and-pasted.”
Agreed!
