Jonbu the baker

(Of Course this is completely my personal opinions and I have no guarantee that every I say is correct.)

I haven’t read those “How Digital is Better than Film” articles on the internet. I didn’t need to, because that was my belief before I really started playing with the manual features of my Sony. Well, the title of this entry could read “How Film is better than Sony”.

The struggle to choose between the two has always been a painful give-and-take.

The things I really like about film:

1. Shallow DOF
The manual controls are good if the camera is able to take advantage of them. But with the Prosumer non-dSLR cameras, the potentials are much limited by the actual focal length of the lens. I’m not qualified to lecture on this. If you happen to be interested like me, go to photo.net and dpreview.com for more readings. After reading the experts’ calculations, you will find that at the same aperture and focus distance, the DOF of the film medium is much shallower than that of digital.

But having a film camera doesn’t guarantee you a shallow DOF. You’ll need aperture priority to override the camera’s good intensions of giving you a focused picture.

My Kouyou picture and the tiny Namacha Panda picture on this journal are both taken with Aperture Priority. But it worked only because the object is like 10-20 cm away from the lens. I’m annoyed because once you get further than that with the V1, the shallow DOF is gone.

2. Fast
At first I couldn’t get used to the focusing lag of digital cameras. In fact, I choose the Sony mainly because it has the fasted rated focus speed amongst the same cataglory of cameras. And this spanking new F828 is supposing to be even faster. I know humans probably takes more time to think about a shot than the camera trying to focus it, but sometimes I just don’t think.

3. Cleaner Night shots.
Sometimes I like to try long exposures at night. But what I have found with (my camera at least) is noise start to acumulate in the shot for longer exposures, even when the ISO equivalence is set to the lowest (it’s worse when it’s higher). For film, the black parts will always be clean (right?).

There are counter arguments for each argument. It really depends on what a person wants. One thing about the DOF issue, if you want a shot to have a wider DOF, putting more things into focus, the camera will need to step up the aperture, and that means increased shutter time, which means potentially blurry pictures…

When I first came to Japan, I thought about an SLR. But hulking a camera while travelling is really not my thing. So I settled for a digital rangefinder. I should have just gone for a film rangefinder, but digital cameras are so cheap in japan, it’s torture not to buy one. A dSLR would really do all the things I need, and keep the convenience, though it’s heavy and bulky (a n d expensive).

(Now we start to get into John’s circular logic ->)

I dislike the inconvenience of film. Taking it to the shops. Buying, carrying, changing film. Scanning (Oh no, I need a scanner)…

If I do get a fim rangefinder though, I’ll surely have to sell my Sony. I can’t allow myself to put so much money into cameras.

But then again I can’t live without digital… This journal would be even drier if I have no pictures to show.

But then again if I do buy the film, I won’t want to take that many pictures with my digital…

So maybe I should just go for an dSLR, and bite the bullet on the heavy+bulky part.

But then I don’t see that happening..

(and John needs to make up his mind on his arrival in HK at the latest. Choosing the rangefinder to get, is a totally different circle.)