Film vs Digital

Since shooting film, the most common question I get asked by hobby photographers and clients is about the difference in film and digital. Most of the time I am finding it hard to explain myself. Of course I try to discuss the dynamic range of film and its ability to render colours differently, the beauty and rawness of grain vs digital noise, the ability to shoot very large format negatives for a fraction of the price of a digital large format, and and and . . .

I am not sure whether you have ever found yourself in said situation, but 2 min into that conversation, the client’s face usually looks either very confused, bored and no more wiser then before.

Combining my love for flowers and my nerdy curiosity, I embarked on setting up a photoshoot solely for the purpose of comparing not just digital vs film but also show that digital images straight out of the camera (SOC) still need a little tweaking to help them look a little bit more like film. You will notice that I didn’t enhance it by much but tried to get as close to the film image as possible. I didn’t use any presets either, the processing of the digital images was done in Lightroom.

There is absolutely no right or wrong. Taste always is a question of the individual person. While, there are certain situation where digital def. wins over film, I find myself shooting film more and more. For me its also not just the result of film, but also the entire process of shooting film. Film is not a cheap option and due to the cost of it, it makes me slow down and think about the frame before I take it. When I started photography I shot only digital and it was very easy to take too many pictures of the same thing. When it came to selecting the final images, it was very easy to overlooked good ones due to there just being too many of the same frames.

The next big question for me was about processing film. Of course there are several options how to process film. I won’t be getting into developing of film but you can check out Richard Photo Lab Blog. They are one of the best Lab out there. Yes you might say that me being in Australia, to send film to the US for development and scanning might be a little over the top, but besides being consistently good with results, they help me develop my style.

After you master shooting with film and have figured out what style you prefer and how to get it in camera, the next element besides development is the scanning of the images. There are two main scanners out there Noritsu and Frontier. I have always wanted to know exactly what the difference is and so here I give you Frontier vs Noritsu scans.

Of course I thought it might be helpful to have scans with people in it, as it was important to me to see how the different scanners render skin tones. So just so happens that a little unplanned visitor named Matty made and appearance and has been immensely helpful in modelling :).

Of course I am sure that one can tweak the Noritsu scans to look maybe a little less red perhaps. Personally, I prefer the Frontier scans in this instance. Again thanks to Richard Photo Lab for the comparable.

While i was playing around with this little munchkin, I thought it might be good to try and compare the two film stocks that I use most. May as well while I am on it! 🙂 Fuji400 and Portra400.

I love both film stocks for different reasons and I suppose its down to the photographer to select the right film stock for different situations.

This comparison helped me confirm and determine a few things and I am hoping that by sharing this it might also help some other people.

Lastly, I want to say thanks to my beautiful friend Jess from Kindred Floral, who inspired and helped with the flower arranging and binding. I hope I lived up to your standards :). Also a huge thanks to my friend Jacky and her little boy Matty who kindly let me shoot in their amazing house!