Going Digital, Again
I was asked recently why I'm switching back to digital photography. Other than "its a digital world these days", my thought are as follows:
I'm switching back to digital for the following reasons:
- First, I've spent about $1500 or so on buying, processing, and scanning to PhotoCD, a whole bunch of film I'm mostly not willing to show anyone. Just seems like a lot to spend for experience's sake. I'll be keeping the N80, for those times when film is appropriate. I'll just be getting my experience with bits and bytes, which are both cheap, and recyclable.
- Second, if you take the cost of all that processing for this year, and the cost of it for next year, you get a larger figure than a D100 cost a year ago, and it is only about 2/3rds that price now. Heck, you can buy a Nikon 1Dx for $3800 now days.
- Thirdly, I've not found a good place to get PhotoCD scans made. I've been hugely unhappy with the quality of most of the scans I've had done. I could do this myself, and the cost of the camera would have bought a very nice scanner, but then I'm paying for it with my time, which I don't have. There is also the fact that any picture scanned doesn't look its best until it gets run through PhotoShop anyway. Digital doesn't have this problem.
- Fourth, I'm lazy. Having to get film developed is a pain. I have (just a sec while I go check...) 12 rolls of exposed film in my fridge waiting to be processed. With digital, those rolls would be on my web site already... if there were any shots worthy of public display.
- Fifth: When you have film in the camera, it is always the wrong kind of film. When I was going to shoot at a dark party and didn't want to annoy people with flash, I had ISO 50, Fuji Velvia slide film in the camera with 27 exposures remaining. I managed to use them taking pictures of the dog, and then put in the ISO 800 Fuji NPZ that I wanted to shoot with. The next day, I wanted to shoot some flowers and landscape, for which the Velvia would have been perfect, but the fourth roll of NPZ was still in the camera with only 2 shots taken so far. With the digital camera, I can use RAW mode, and assign the color-space and contrast of my choice later during processing on the PC.
I'm exchanging the pains of white-balance and focal-length modifier for the advantages of speed and convenience. And I won't get rid of the N80, since it uses the same lenses as the D100.
Posted by Wookie at April 12, 2003 12:00 AM