Some Thoughts on Film versus Digital

Introduction

Dear Readers, you may have noticed that you are seeing more film photographs here recently compared to a few years ago. I am an old geezer, so, of course, grew up during the film era. My dad used a handsome little Leica IIIC, which, at the ripe young age of 69, still works perfectly. My first camera in the 1960s was a Kodak Instamatic 500, a German unit that had manually-controlled aperture, shutter speed, and focus. My first serious camera was a Nikon Nikkormat FTn, which I bought in 1968 at Lechmere Sales in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lechmere was a well-known discounter in the Boston area, but it closed many years ago. In subsequent years, I moved on to various other cameras, both 35mm format, medium format, and 4×5 inch.

The first digital camera in the family was my daughter's Kodak LS743 in 2004, a convenient little machine that took reasonable (but over-compressed) jpeg files. My first interchangeable lens digital camera was an Olympus E-330, which took excellent files. I now have a Fujifilm X-E1, which does an amazing job in most circumstances and produces RAW files that you can manipulate to your heart's content with PhotoNinja or other software.

The vast bulk of people around the world use digital. Digital imaging is convenient, quick, and usually "accurate" technically. Pictures are "sharp," whatever that means now. They can take thousands of pictures on a weekend, sort and process with their workflow, upload them to Flickr or wherever, and then???

Back to Film

All right, you are probably wondering: with all the advantages of digital, why have I reverted to the primitive, messy, clumsy, inconvenient, slow, low-dynamic-range, toxic, and expensive chemical recording medium?

• I like the way film depicts my typical subjects. Urban decay calls for black and white film. 
• The resulting pictures do not look digital!
• For awhile, I experimented with DxO FilmPack software, which offered film emulation modes to be applied to digital files. But this bothered me. Why emulate something when I can use the real thing? Why emulate anything in life when the real thing is available? (Like the paddle shifters on the steering wheel when what you really have is a car with automatic transmission.)
• I am awed by the technology used in the mid-20th century to manufacture film and build wonderfully precise mechanical cameras. 
• Film is the result of more than a century of chemical technology, refinement, and incredibly precise industrial engineering. 
• I like old cameras. They are fun and feel solid and stable in the hand.
• Using old cameras is a deliberate and slow process. It is valuable to test yourself with something that makes you think just a little bit harder (paraphrased from Hamish Gill on 35MMC). You can't spray and pray as with a digital camera and then mess around with software to see if you made a meaningful image.
• Being comfortable with the old technology, why not continue to use and share this knowledge? Why throw it into the dust bin of history just because it is no longer trendy among the masses?
• Possibly using black and white film today helps my pictures stand out. After all, millions (billions?) of digital snaps are taken daily. And they all look alike. Just look at the ubiquitous wide-angle, over-saturated, HDR-looking, exaggerated-sky, elevator music landscapes you see on the upload sites. 
• Film may be the media that survives the decades, providing you or your family store the negatives in a climate-controlled home and avoid floods and fires. Digital media? Maybe, but only if someone periodically saves the files to whatever is the new and current storage media. The "cloud?" Think about it....

Despite denials by film-hating trolls on equipment web pages like Dpreview, there has been a revival of film usage around the world. It will not again become a major business as it was in the 20th century, but Kodak Alaris is even reintroducing Ektachrome slide film. An article in Popular Photography shows what an astonishingly complex and precise process is required to produce this little 35-mm-wide piece of sensitized film stock. This new production follows a century of chemistry, experimentation, and mechanical engineering excellence; there is nothing primitive about it! The Phoblogger presented an interesting interview with Richard Photo Lab in Los Angeles about the revival in film use:

Phoblographer: What do you believe to be the biggest edge or selling point of film photography today?
Richard Photo Lab: There’s probably two big selling points for film. First, film has a way of turning you into a better photographer. It is not a magic gateway to better images, but it slows you down and makes you more cognizant about things like framing and lighting and composition—every frame counts! Second, lots of folks think that film is too expensive and that will be its downfall—but, they forget that the tradeoff for the upfront cost of film is the money saved (both actual dollars as well as time) in digital post-processing—an often overlooked expense of digital photography. Professional photographers can use that time to grow their business, book more paying gigs, or just focus on other priorities in their life like family, travel, etc.

Mike Johnston wrote an interesting commentary in The Online Photographer about the Magic of Photography. He noted that "it's the way photographs are physical impressions of the past which are always changing in their relation to the present."

Some Comparisons

Let us do an experiment. Here are digital and film views of the same subject, from which you can form your own opinions of which media depicts the scene more effectively. Comments are always welcome.

Oasis Motel, 11th Street (Route 66), Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fuji X-E1 digital camera

Oasis Motel, Kodak BW400CN film, Olympus Trip 35 with polarizer filter.

This is a motel on 11th Street in Tulsa, along one of the urban streets used by Route 66. The digital frame shows the red background behind the word "MOTEL." You lose that in the black and white film frame, but the cloud jumps out at you more prominently.

Closed car dealer, 11th Street, Tulsa. Fuji X-E1 digital camera.

Kodak BW400CN film, Olympus Trip 35 with polarizer filter.

Here we have an old car dealer on 11th Street. Color digital or monochrome film? Note the light was more dramatic for the B&W frame.

Ranch House Cafe, Route 66, Tucumcari, New Mexico, Fuji X-E1 digital 

Kodak BW400CN film, Yashica Electro 35CC camera

In this scene, the digital color file shows the faded blue of the truck, the matching struts of the sign, and the matching window frame on the cafe. But do we need that data? Is an old truck and abandoned restaurant better in black and white?

Last gas in Texas, Route 66, Glenrio (100° F, Fuji X-E1 digital)

Last gas in Texas, Glenrio (Tri-X 400 film, Hasselblad 501CM, 80mm ƒ/2.8 lens, polarizer filter)

Continuing with our Route 66 trek, Glenrio is a cluster of semi-abandoned gas stations and motor courts at the New Mexico/Texas border. It was hot, dusty, and dry. Color or monochrome?

Maria's Kitchen, W. Cordova Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Kodak BW400CN film, Yashica Electro 35CC, polarizer filter.

In the color digital image, the yellow of the hydrant stands out. The skies are dramatic in both versions. The rainy season in Santa Fe is fantastic for photography.

Valles Caldera, New Mexico, Kodak BW400CN film, Olympus Trip 35 with polarizer.

Here is a landscape as opposed to architecture or decay. Which works better?

Auschwitz I concentration camp, Poland. Fuji X-E1 digital camera braced on door frame. 

Auschwitz I, Poland. Kodak Tri-X 400 film, Rolleiflex 3.5E with 75mm Xenotar lens.

This is a more gruesome subject, the concentration camp at Oswiecim, Poland, where about 1.1 million prisoners were killed during World War II. Color shows the dingy yellow walls but monochrome makes you concentrate on the shapes and side lighting. The format is different, so this is not an exact compositional comparison. Which image tells the story more effectively?

Film and Artificial Intelligence

A recent article in the Nov. 12, 2018 issue of The New Yorker is pertinent for photographers and those of us who use film. The title is: "In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing? Advances in digital imagery could deepen the fake-news crisis—or help us get out of it." It is about the pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence and digital imaging, and the problem of when people cannot tell what is real versus manufactured. Many people are now suspicious of still pictures that look too amazing to be real. But the dilemma runs deeper than this as to whether most people even care if it is manufactured (sounds like politics in USA in this era of non-critical thinking, ignorance, and stupidity). That is one reason why I have turned back to film. Despite its many flaws, the little piece of polyester and its gelatin coating shows exactly what the photons converted into an image. There it is, proof of what was out in front of the lens. That piece of film was witness to a piece of time and space, a time that will never return. You can manipulate it subsequently in the darkroom or, if it is scanned, with software, but the film was there.

Mike Johnston, author of The Online Photographer, wrote about how he used to call work with digital cameras "digital imaging":

"Years ago I tried to assert that digital imaging should not be called "photography," that the word photography described what we now clumsily know as analog or optical/chemical photography (I usually dislike back-formations), and that the new medium was sufficiently different that we should know it by a different name. I thought "digital imaging" or D.I. served just fine, since that had currency at the time. 

I've never changed that opinion, but I learned to back off on it, because people didn't like it—in the early days of digital, any comparison of film vs. digital quickly devolved into a status dispute, and people on Team Digital were immediately and automatically prickly about imagined slights to their standing. They wanted the main word applied to their chosen tech. So "digital photography" it was. As Mad magazine used to say, Yecch." 

A reader named Andre commented on one of the The Online Photography articles, "the thing that impresses me most about the medium is that the film itself is a physical witness to whatever event was photographed. That is, actual photons from the scene physically altered the film. For me, that gives film a unique kind of authenticity: the film was present and bears an imprint of the event itself." Andre stated his thoughts eloquently.

More discussion on the topic of film reality versus non-reality is in a follow-up note in The Online Photographer. Comments to the note are erudite, mature, and well-considered, in contrast to what you see on Dpreview. But even Online Photographer has its Team Digital readers with their need to bash film.

Standby for more film photographs in the future.

Old Friends (My Film Cameras)

• Kodak Instamatic 500
• Canon unknown model rangefinder
• Certosport unknown model
• Nikon Nikkormat FTn
• Nikon F (non-metered prism)
• Nikon F3HP
• Pentax Spotmatic (my wife's camera, in regular use)
• Pentax Spotmatic II
• Pentax Spotmatic F (in use)
• Pentax MX
• Leica IIIC (my dad's 1949 camera, in regular use)
• Leica M3
• Leica M2
• Leica M2 (family 1967 camera, in use)
• Rollei 35S
• Yashica Electro 35CC
• Olympus Trip 35
• Canon QL19
• Voigtlander Vito BL (my brand new $34 camera)
• Rolleiflex 3.5E
• Rolleiflex 3.5F (sorry I sold it)
• Rolleiflex 3.5E (in use)
• Hasselblad 501CM (in use)
• Fujifilm GW690II (in use)
• Tachihara 4×5" (limited use; I am embarrassed)

Closing Thoughts

The Heart of Evil: Birkenau Extermination Camp, Poland

In my previous article, I wrote about the Auschwitz I camp in Oświęcim, Poland. After visiting the brick buildings and museum at Auschwitz I, visitors are taken by bus a few kilometers away to a second, and much larger, camp.

According to auschwitz.org:

The second part was the Birkenau camp (which held over 90,000 prisoners in 1944), also known as "Auschwitz II" This was the largest part of the Auschwitz complex. The Nazis began building it in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, three kilometers from Oswiecim. The Polish civilian population was evicted and their houses confiscated and demolished. The greater part of the apparatus of mass extermination was built in Birkenau and the majority of the victims were murdered here.

Various sub-camps were also built, but many of these have been demolished.

Birkenau was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.

The endless rows of electrified barbed wire fencing reinforce the horror and enormity of the site. The railroad tracks in the first photograph show where trains with prisoners packed into box cars were unloaded. The women, children, and elderly were separated and almost immediately marched off to the gas chambers. Their possessions and clothing were sorted by slave workers. The victims were gassed and then inspected by other slave workers. They removed gold from their teeth. Then the bodies were loaded by more slave workers into ovens (crematoria).

Today, few of the wood barracks remain standing. When Soviet troops approached western Poland in December 1944/January 1945, the SS sent remaining prisoners west on forced marches, during which thousands died. Then they burned the wood barracks and blasted the gas chambers and crematoria. Stark chimneys are all that is left of the barracks, while the gas chambers have been left as piles of brick and rubble.

From http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/liberation/:

As the Soviet army approached and the end of the war came closer the vast majority of Auschwitz prisoners were marched west by the Nazis, into Germany. Those few thousand remaining were thought too ill to travel, and were left behind to be shot by the SS. In the confusion that followed the abandonment of the camp, the SS left them alive. The prisoners were found by Soviet forces when they liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. 

Vasily Gromadsky, a Russian officer with the 60th Army liberating Auschwitz recalls what happened. 

"They [the prisoners] began rushing towards us, in a big crowd. They were weeping, embracing us and kissing us. I felt a grievance on behalf of mankind that these fascists had made such a mockery of us. It roused me and all the soldiers to go and quickly destroy them and send them to hell."

A couple of buildings still stand. Tens of prisoners slept on these bleak benches in filth and sickness.

Some primitive latrine buildings were built to reduce disease. The former gas chambers were piles of brick, which I did not photograph. The ovens were also destroyed by the fleeing Nazis just before Soviet troops arrived. A replica of one oven has been built, but I did not photograph it. It is amazing to me that as the Nazi 1000-year Reich collapsed, the Nazi authorities tried to cover up the physical evidence of their atrocities, as if that would be possible considering the magnitude of their industrial-scale death camps.

Dear Readers, please remember that these horrors were created by the same urbane and sophisticated society that previously brought us Martin Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Bach. The camps demonstrated depths of depravity previously unimagined in cultured and civilized Europe. But evil lives very close below the surface of most societies. Government-sponsored and societal-approved brutality is insidious because ordinary people begin to believe that atrocities imposed on others is "normal" or quite all right. Consider how we treated African-Americans as late as the 1960s in the American South. It was "OK" to lynch blacks. And most people cannot or will not fight against the prevailing norms in their society - they just want to fit in. Considering the despicable hate talk we heard during the 2016 election in USA, remember the lessons of Auschwitz when you hear calls to imprison or deport Muslims and Mexicans, or when the specter of anti-semitism and racial superiority rears its ugly head again. Is the United States descending into this kind of tribalism?

The square photographs were taken on Kodak Tri-X 400 film with a Rolleiflex 3.5E with 75mm f/3.5 Xenotar lens. I developed the film in HC110 developer at dilution B for 4:30 minutes. I scanned the negatives with a Minolta Scan Multi medium-format scanner (approx. 2000 vintage). Click any picture to enlarge it to 2,400 pixels wide.

The Heart of Darkness: Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Poland

A visit to the Auschwitz and Birkenau Memorial Museum is profoundly disturbing. The former Nazi concentration and extermination camps demonstrate the incredible hatred and cruelty that men can bestow on their fellow humans under state-sponsored and state-rewarded social and political conditions. At these camps, the industrial-scale killing machine resulted in the deaths of more than a million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Poles, Roma (gypsies), and Russian prisoners of war. Readers interested in the history should study the educational and historical material at the official auschwitz.org web page.

The camps are in the small town of Oświęcim, Poland, about 20 miles west of Krakow. My wife and I visited in August of 2016. The site is crowded, and you need to reserve your visit time online weeks in advance, although there are usually openings available early morning for drop-ins. Tours are given in many languages.

Originally, the first concentration camp was established in 1940 in the town of Auschwitz (the German name in the 1930s). Initially, this was a work camp, where slave labor toiled at industries set up near the perimeter by German companies. The site had been a Polish army base built in the early 20th century, and the sturdy brick barracks were already suitable to house prisoners. Today, most of the buildings still stand and house exhibits. The tour initially takes you through the site in about an hour. The site looks deceptively peaceful today.

Each building or block housed hundreds of prisoners. These were all young-middle age men, as far as I know. Women, children, and older men were weeded out at the railroad reception area and killed quickly.

The barracks are grim inside. The men were worked with minimal food, inadequate clothing, minimal heat, and no medical care. As they died, they were replaced with more men from the never-ending trains. According to auschwitz.org:

The blocks were designed to hold about 700 prisoners each after the second stories were added, but in practice they housed up to 1,200. 

During the first several months, the prisoners’ rooms had neither beds nor any other furniture. Prisoners slept on straw-stuffed mattresses laid on the floor. After reveille in the morning, they piled the mattresses in a corner of the room. The rooms were so overcrowded that prisoners could sleep only on their sides, in three rows. Three-tiered bunks began appearing gradually in the rooms from February 1941. Theoretically designed for three prisoners, they in fact accommodated more. Aside from the beds, the furniture in each block included a dozen or more wooden wardrobes, several tables, and several score stools. Coal-fired tile stoves provided the heating.

 

The concrete fence posts with electrified barbed wire and guard towers are a constant reminder that this was a brutal prison facility. The tour next takes you by bus to the second, and much larger camp, also known as Birkenau. You can see these photographs in the next article.

I took the square photographs on Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film in a Rolleiflex 3.5E twin lens reflex camera. Film development: Kodak HC-110 dilution "B", 4:45 at 68° F. I cleaned spots and lint with Pixelmator software on a Mac Mini and resized to 2400 pixels for this blog. Click any picture to enlarge it. One photograph, that of the hallway, is digital from a Fuji X-E1 camera.