[Bassat]

...
The last time I tried a few rolls of film maybe 5 years ago, I just found the whole process tedious and truly annoying.
...
I still find the process of creating images fascinating and enjoyable, but I'm enjoying the output a lot more because of digital display. If you're doing a lot of digital display, analogue input just doesn't make sense.
...

I find the process of making digital photographs indistinguishable from making analog photographs. Turn on camera, set ISO, aperture, shutter speed, frame, release shutter. Quite similar from where I sit. Viewing photographs is also essentially the same experience. Open Lightroom, select folder, select photo. Not seeing the difference. The only difference I can see is: with digital, I can see my images when I get home from the shoot. With film, I have to wait 5 days or so before my processed and scanned photos are available for download. Once they are downloaded, they are treated the same as my digital work. The tedious and annoying part of film work is developing, printing, scanning. I pay someone else to do that.

[luftfluss]

For those who care about such things, DPReview has the K-70 and KP included in their list of "Best cameras under $1000 in 2020".

[normhead]

For those who care about such things, DPReview has the K-70 and KP included in their list of "Best cameras under $1000 in 2020".

Does this mean I have to say something nice about them?

---------- Post added 02-22-20 at 01:09 PM ----------

I find the process of making digital photographs indistinguishable from making analog photographs. Turn on camera, set ISO, aperture, shutter speed, frame, release shutter. Quite similar from where I sit. Viewing photographs is also essentially the same experience. Open Lightroom, select folder, select photo. Not seeing the difference. The only difference I can see is: with digital, I can see my images when I get home from the shoot. With film, I have to wait 5 days or so before my processed and scanned photos are available for download. Once they are downloaded, they are treated the same as my digital work. The tedious and annoying part of film work is developing, printing, scanning. I pay someone else to do that.

I didn't mean to imply that you can't restrict your use of digital technology so much that they become much the same, or that you can't pay someone to do the work for you. I once went to a workshop lead by famous recording artists. She said "For some their photography is their art and livelyhood, for me my singing pays for my photography." She would take a week year, rent a darkroom with technicians and take her best work of the year and just live there with the techs until she got them way she wanted them. I've never had that kind of income. And I have trouble imagining that anyone not following that procedure is getting maximum value from their work. They used to say, behind every great photographer is a great darkroom technician. Digital lets you short circuit that whole process.

At the time of the workshop she was demoing Photoshop on a Mac Book pro with a second monitor set up. I'm sure her former darkroom techs thought digital was a horrible thing too. It cost them a weeks work every year.

Too me the biggest oddity in film is all the guys who thought they could produce top quality work without hiring a top quality darkroom guy. That for me is the biggest difference. When it's done, it's done the way I want it. Not pretty close but i can't afford to print another one that's just right, not almost there, but exactly the way I wanted it based on the Digital Negative I have to work with. The use of slider bars for many effects means I see how applying an adjustment changes, with a little more or a little less before I decide on the final. I know of no one apart from that singer, who had that kind of information from film. With film there are far fewer options in terms of effects constrats, colour balance etc. It's not even close to being the same thing. Especially when you consider controls like "definition" which effects micro-contrast in digital. There's simply no similar effects for film.
How wasteful is it to take a negative to scan to modify, and then produce a digital negative? Who wants to pay for two negatives to get one useful DNG?

If I ever go back to film it will be for a larger than digital format, like a 4x5 view camera or something that has many advantages over digital to go with the disadvantage. But I'll never again use anything 120 film size and under in a film camera.

The cameras are in my closet. I'm just not interested in using them.

[Bassat]

Does this mean I have to say something nice about them?

---------- Post added 02-22-20 at 01:09 PM ----------



I didn't mean to imply that you can't restrict your use of digital technology so much that they become much the same, or that you can't pay someone to do the work for you. I once went to a workshop lead by famous recording artists. She said "For some their photography is their art and livelyhood, for me my singing pays for my photography." She would take a week year, rent a darkroom with technicians and take her best work of the year and just live there with the techs until she got them way she wanted them. I've never had that kind of income. And I have trouble imagining that anyone not following that procedure is getting maximum value from their work. They used to say, behind every great photographer is a great darkroom technician. Digital lets you short circuit that whole process.

At the time of the workshop she was demoing Photoshop on a Mac Book pro with a second monitor set up. I'm sure her former darkroom techs thought digital was a horrible thing too. It cost them a weeks work every year.

Too me the biggest oddity in film is all the guys who thought they could produce top quality work without hiring a top quality darkroom guy. That for me is the biggest difference. When it's done, it's done the way I want it. Not pretty close but i can't afford to print another one that's just right, not almost there, but exactly the way I wanted it based on the Digital Negative I have to work with. The use of slider bars for many effects means I see how applying an adjustment changes, with a little more or a little less before I decide on the final. I know of no one apart from that singer, who had that kind of information from film. With film there are far fewer options in terms of effects constrats, colour balance etc. It's not even close to being the same thing. Especially when you consider controls like "definition" which effects micro-contrast in digital. There's simply no similar effects for film.
How wasteful is it to take a negative to scan to modify, and then produce a digital negative? Who wants to pay for two negatives to get one useful DNG?

If I ever go back to film it will be for a larger than digital format, like a 4x5 view camera or something that has many advantages over digital to go with the disadvantage. But I'll never again use anything 120 film size and under in a film camera.

The cameras are in my closet. I'm just not interested in using them.

I must admit to not understanding where you are coming from. Once I get my film scans downloaded, I am as free to make any adjustment(s) I choose in Lightroom. For me, the process in exactly the same as with my digital photographs: load frame into editor, edit to taste. I never play with 2 negatives, and have never used a DNG. I process my file, digital or scan, how I see fit. When finished, I export the JPG. Done. Simple. Perhaps I am doing it wrong. I have to go back to my initial premise. The camera is just a light box. The photo comes out of my head.

[PDL]

Does this mean I have to say something nice about them?

---------- Post added 02-22-20 at 01:09 PM ----------



I didn't mean to imply that you can't restrict your use of digital technology so much that they become much the same, or that you can't pay someone to do the work for you. I once went to a workshop lead by famous recording artists. She said "For some their photography is their art and livelyhood, for me my singing pays for my photography." She would take a week year, rent a darkroom with technicians and take her best work of the year and just live there with the techs until she got them way she wanted them. I've never had that kind of income. And I have trouble imagining that anyone not following that procedure is getting maximum value from their work. They used to say, behind every great photographer is a great darkroom technician. Digital lets you short circuit that whole process.

At the time of the workshop she was demoing Photoshop on a Mac Book pro with a second monitor set up. I'm sure her former darkroom techs thought digital was a horrible thing too. It cost them a weeks work every year.

Too me the biggest oddity in film is all the guys who thought they could produce top quality work without hiring a top quality darkroom guy. That for me is the biggest difference. When it's done, it's done the way I want it. Not pretty close but i can't afford to print another one that's just right, not almost there, but exactly the way I wanted it based on the Digital Negative I have to work with. The use of slider bars for many effects means I see how applying an adjustment changes, with a little more or a little less before I decide on the final. I know of no one apart from that singer, who had that kind of information from film. With film there are far fewer options in terms of effects constrats, colour balance etc. It's not even close to being the same thing. Especially when you consider controls like "definition" which effects micro-contrast in digital. There's simply no similar effects for film.
How wasteful is it to take a negative to scan to modify, and then produce a digital negative? Who wants to pay for two negatives to get one useful DNG?

If I ever go back to film it will be for a larger than digital format, like a 4x5 view camera or something that has many advantages over digital to go with the disadvantage. But I'll never again use anything 120 film size and under in a film camera.

The cameras are in my closet. I'm just not interested in using them.

When I first started using DSLR's I read several essays on how digital was effecting the jobs of "technicians". Back in the film days, pro shooters did not do all that much in the darkroom - they had specialists who did the work for them. People who had the knowledge and time to carry out the complete workflow (think Ansel Adams, Weston, Cunningham etc.) were mostly a rare breed. Cartier-Bresson,Robert Capa and National Geographic photographers rarely saw the inside of a darkroom. Most of the photojournalists sent in their images to a lab, where technicians developed the images, handed the images off to editors who decided on what was to be printed. The photographer was to a certain extent a camera Sherpa.

When digital came on the scene, photographers were suddenly off to the races having to shoot, select, process - edit and produce basically the final product. Photographers had to learn a completely new workflow and they (we) have become bogged down in post-processing minutia to a large extent. And of course the film guys did not/could not go on a trip for 24 hours and generate 1000's of still images without having to have a film Sherpa while we have Gigabytes of SD cards at our whim. Heck I have two 500GB drives just to copy my vacation images and I am thinking about getting a 1TB drive.

Some of the old ways are still being used - in terms of workflow. NG requires that its photographers send in RAW images during the project. The editors look at the images and if they judge the images will take too much work for publication - they get another photographer to do the job. Some head shot, fashion, landscape people have their "assistants" do the post processing work and only look at the finished product. Some shops outsource retouching too. Digital has changed how the whole industry works where there are still technicians and they are still very expensive, but their are not all that many publishers left and the idea that a phone photograph is "good enough" has killed off more pro photographers and photojournalists than you think, the loss of technicians is background noise being replaced by Instagram.

[Lord Lucan]

... digital led me astray. ... I realized I was growing bored with photography. ... I bought a few old 35mm bodies from E-Bay. I was amazed at how different my photographic process had become while using digital gear.

I find the process of making digital photographs indistinguishable from making analog photographs.

Are those two comment from the same Bassat? They seem to contradict each other. I don't find any difference myself when taking pictures, as in the second quote, other than the auto-focus.

Don't fall for the camera companies' (all of them) marketing hype that you NEED A BETTER CAMERA!. That is a product of (mainly) the digital age. They want you to buy a new camera every 18 months.... They want you to buy the magazine, visit their web-site, see their advertising. ... Ignore the reviews.

Well we can't fall for Pentax marketing hype because there isn't any. I bought a DSLR because I could no longer get the pictures from my film SLR processed at a reasonable price. 12 years later I upgraded from APS-C to FF because I still had old lenses I wanted to use in the manner for which they were intended.

I do read reviews, lots of them, and I think I am capable of weighing them up, balancing them against each other, and reading between the lines. The reviews in this website are useful for example, or did you mean "Present company excepted!". I'm not often wrong in my choices (cameras, cars, TVs, etc). One thing I have learned is to trust word of mouth less than published reviews - very often, if someone buys a lemon they will recommend it to others because they don't want to be the only person with the lemon. So you buy the Crapsina Super they recommend and it falls apart after two weeks, and they say "That's funny, it happened to mine too".

[reh321]

When I first started using DSLR's I read several essays on how digital was effecting the jobs of "technicians". Back in the film days, pro shooters did not do all that much in the darkroom - they had specialists who did the work for them. People who had the knowledge and time to carry out the complete workflow (think Ansel Adams, Weston, Cunningham etc.) were mostly a rare breed. Cartier-Bresson,Robert Capa and National Geographic photographers rarely saw the inside of a darkroom. Most of the photojournalists sent in their images to a lab, where technicians developed the images, handed the images off to editors who decided on what was to be printed. The photographer was to a certain extent a camera Sherpa.

When digital came on the scene, photographers were suddenly off to the races having to shoot, select, process - edit and produce basically the final product. Photographers had to learn a completely new workflow and they (we) have become bogged down in post-processing minutia to a large extent. And of course the film guys did not/could not go on a trip for 24 hours and generate 1000's of still images without having to have a film Sherpa while we have Gigabytes of SD cards at our whim. Heck I have two 500GB drives just to copy my vacation images and I am thinking about getting a 1TB drive.

Some of the old ways are still being used - in terms of workflow. NG requires that its photographers send in RAW images during the project. The editors look at the images and if they judge the images will take too much work for publication - they get another photographer to do the job. Some head shot, fashion, landscape people have their "assistants" do the post processing work and only look at the finished product. Some shops outsource retouching too. Digital has changed how the whole industry works where there are still technicians and they are still very expensive, but their are not all that many publishers left and the idea that a phone photograph is "good enough" has killed off more pro photographers and photojournalists than you think, the loss of technicians is background noise being replaced by Instagram.

Interesting the examples you chose. In sports - especially the Olympics - the photographers send JPEG to editors who finish them now. I'm not sure how news operates these days, but they are more interested in catching the moment than in spending time making the rendition 'perfect'.

[normhead]

I must admit to not understanding where you are coming from. Once I get my film scans downloaded, I am as free to make any adjustment(s) I choose in Lightroom. For me, the process in exactly the same as with my digital photographs: load frame into editor, edit to taste. I never play with 2 negatives, and have never used a DNG. I process my file, digital or scan, how I see fit. When finished, I export the JPG. Done. Simple. Perhaps I am doing it wrong. I have to go back to my initial premise. The camera is just a light box. The photo comes out of my head.

Here's where I'm coming from Bassat.

I never handle film. I don't buy film or order it. I don't load it in the camera, I don't take it out of the camera and put it back in it's cute little plastic container., I don't mail it or take it to the processors. I don't pick it up. Five things you are doing that I don't and that you didn't do with digital.

My K-3 was preloaded with the equivalent of 20,000 rolls of film. That saves a lot of fricking about.
It's hard to explain how much I hated film changes in the middle of the action.

I could go on for another half hour on the output side, but, I know you're just trolling me. To quote John McEnro "You can't be serious."


Correct me if I'm wrong. But there are distinct differences between film and digital and digital work flow. But seriously dude, you don't have to have that be true to enjoy film. It's clearly worth the effort to you so it's moot. It should make no difference to your preference for film.

[Wheatfield]

I find the process of making digital photographs indistinguishable from making analog photographs. Turn on camera, set ISO, aperture, shutter speed, frame, release shutter. Quite similar from where I sit. Viewing photographs is also essentially the same experience. Open Lightroom, select folder, select photo. Not seeing the difference. The only difference I can see is: with digital, I can see my images when I get home from the shoot. With film, I have to wait 5 days or so before my processed and scanned photos are available for download. Once they are downloaded, they are treated the same as my digital work. The tedious and annoying part of film work is developing, printing, scanning. I pay someone else to do that.

I got into photography because of what you find tedious and annoying. I would much rather spend a day in the darkroom than a day in front of a computer.
The process of the original capture is pretty similar, especially for someone who has only used postage stamp cameras, but trust me, from someone who has done both, the similarity ends the moment the film or memory card is taken out of the camera.
There is ZERO similarity between the two processes.

[biz-engineer]

My K-3 was preloaded with the equivalent of 20,000 rolls of film. That saves a lot of fricking about.

Not necessarily, if you are taking less photographs of superior quality, digital is not as cost effective as film. See how many large format film images you can take with for the price of a large format digital camera... it's just that if you are not a professional shooting hundreds of thousand of images, say you shoot 100 large format film images per year, film is still way cheaper than digital for the same format. With digital you have to pay for the 20 000 film rolls upfront even if you will only use 100 rolls Pentax Canikon charge you the same price, whereas with film you pay per use.

[BigMackCam]

Perhaps we should return to the subject of the thread, folks?

Thanks

[biz-engineer]

Back to topic.

They say:
Nikon D3500 is number one. It's the best, I suppose. Number 1 is usually the best.
Pentax K1 Mk II comes last: the worst DSLR of 2020 according to Digital Camera World.

Since I already have a K1 II, so here is my conclusion:
1) I'll not get a D3500 I'm afraid, even if Nikon give it to me for free.
2) I'll not buy another Pentax K1 mk II because I already have one.

What else?

---------- Post added 23-02-20 at 10:36 ----------

P.S it's one of these uneducated reviews. We should never review ILC cameras alone without considering lenses, because... the world best ILC cameras with a pinhole lens is never going to be as good as the worst ILC camera with good lenses. That how a lot of hobby photographer get their purchase decision wrong, and also how all camera marketing campaigns induce customers in making wrong decisions.

I'm surprised that we keep seeing such camera only reviews in 2020... For me "camera only" reviews and rankings = Zero.

---------- Post added 23-02-20 at 10:42 ----------

I give you my own immoderate ranking:

Best: Phase One 100Mp
Excellent: Medium format GFX100 (lenses are available)
Good: D850
Acceptable: D500
Mediocre: micro 4/3, compact cameras
Junk: mobile phones, not only the sensor is super small, but the choice of focal lenght is extremely limiting.

[Serkevan]

Perhaps we should return to the subject of the thread, folks?

Thanks

This is what happens when I spend 45 minutes trying to wake up on Sunday while posting. Sorry!

Edited out the bible about film cost.

On topic, the list is predictably standard: the latest cheap beginner gear on top, and a mixture of older (amazing value for money: any flagship FF will still slam entry level stuff 5 years newer all the way) and newer flagships (with admittedly better specs but much more expensive). Seeing as there are exactly 3 brands still making DSLRs, I would have preferred to see the KP or K-70 on the list, but oh well.

[Rondec]

I have to say that I was pretty excited to read that the Canon T100 has a "Creative Zone Mode" that helps you progress from progress from basic zone to creative zone modes. Sounds thrilling. And all for the low price of 359.

At the same time, it is hard to take seriously a list that includes a D3500, T100, D850, D780 and D750. I think for the most part they stuck most of the cameras released in the last couple of years on the list without any particular ranking.

[normhead]

I'm not sure what the point of these rankings are. They could really only be of interest to complete newbies. Anyone who's used a DSLR for a few years will have an idea of what suits them, based on what and how they shoot.