Still, when you shot film you rarely shot 20 frame bursts of the same baby-posing-with-toy that we do today with dSLRs. Simply because it was expensive and you were pretty likely to miss something important while you changed rolls.
If a photographer today has several thousands of pics from a day it's likely because there were lots of burst shots, and the culling should be pretty simple: take the best frame from a burst and delete the rest immediately.
On a side note it would be an interesting data compression challenge to compress bursts of raw frames using video compression techniques.
With a roll of film people often tried to just take 1 or 2 photos of something. Now it's easy to take like 30 photos of some interesting thing happening. Then later how do you decide to delete 29 of them? What if a few of them captured some interesting thing you didn't expect, or if different things are accidentally in focus. It's maddening.
I'd also expect the storage convenience to have had an impact, you can store dozens to hundreds of pictures in a memory card the size of a nail (a pretty huge nail for CF cards, but most of the market will be consumers shooting on SD anyway) and you can offload them into a computer or a bigger storage system at the end of the day, instead of having to lug around cases of film.
There's also the ability to quickly remove "failed" or extra shoots on the spot without wasting a valuable spot in the card, where film... a photo taken is a spot taken, no going back.
> I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds.
I'm not sure your argument is much helped by you comparing professional film with consumer point-and-shoot from 5 years ago.
There was a time when cameras had a roll of film in them, usually 35mm limited to 36 shots per roll. You had to put thought into shooting because there was no preview, undo or delete. Once the films was exposed, it was done. Mistakes costed money.
Now you can shoot until your 1TB+ SD card is full, preview, delete, edit, etc, right on the camera as it is now a general purpose computer with a digital camera hooked to it. So photography is a now a cheap afterthought for many. Point, click, forget.
Well, nowadays digital documents, such as videos and photos, are much more important and widespread and mundane than they were a couple of decades ago.
During the 80s there was no digital consumer camera market. Nowadays every person can easily generate hundreds of megabytes of photos and videos per day. Each hour of a 4K video can be close to 7GB, and we're already seeing cellphones which are able to record 4K video at 60fps and 1080p videos at 240fps.
I think it was a sacrifice of quality for the convenience of digital cameras. It was a great joy to be able to download and view photos immediately after taking them, rather than send the film to be developed. It was also extremely liberating when I realized I could buy a 1GB card and store photos taken over an entire trip. The freedom to not worry and keep clicking was a huge departure from the experience with standard 24 shot film rolls. I remember trips with my family where we'd spend lots of time just looking for shops selling film.
For B&W, it actually wasn't quite that bad with 35mm relative to today. For something like a football game, I might have shot 5 rolls (so 200 frames or so). Random assignments for a given day a roll or two. You made contact prints and printed up what was needed.
Definitely a bigger consideration than today but it's not all about quantity.
It's still BS. A consumer level analog camera captures around 1GB of data with each picture. The peak of film sales was in 1999 when 800 million rolls of film were sold and 25 billion images were captured and printed which works out to around 25 EB of data just from analog cameras in 1999.
Yes! As amazing as digital photography is it's very much the automatic transmission of the photography world. It's easy to just treat a shot as a checkbox and "move on".
Film requires specific consideration and slowing of pace due to the inherent limited resources and turn-around time involved with the medium.
I don't do much photography any more but loved shooting film for this reason when I did.
Compared to a typical 27 frame film that was still an improvement. Plus you could preview the photos and delete shots that didn’t come out, while a film camera was literally a black box until you developed the film.
I think the act of developing film meant that photographs had a higher signal to noise/duplicate/blurry factor. It's trivial to take 100 pictures in an afternoon, with only 1-2 being worth saving.
Maybe you misinterpretted what I was meaning. What you quoted from my post was meant as saying they took all of the image from a 35mm frame just to shoot a measly SD image. That's like shooting 4k to deliver SD. It's seemingly way overkill.
>That type of use case seems better suited for mini-DV or other contemporary video formats.
You realize that people were shooting film for TV production long long before DV was ever invented right?
Early digicams weren't powerful enough to pull off a lot of the fancy behind-the-scenes instant post-processinf modern cameras do before you even get to see the picture. The result was they often resembled film photography in many ways, especially the digital noise that in the right circumstances didn't look too dissimilar from film grain.
This is why I personally have a small collection of early digicams I like shooting on from time to time, and why they've recently become a whole TikTok trend.
I think if we allowed modern cameras to have an option that performs little to no post-processing on captured photos (without having to resort to RAW capture), we could get pictures that a lot more closely resemble this stuff.
Cameras were far more expensive back in the day. Not just the camera or the lenses, but also the film, and then you'd also have to pay to get the film developed. Fast photo processing was only just taking off (late 70's). Taking a good photo was hard and an entire discipline unto itself. You had to develop an eye to know what F-stop and aperture and other settings to use, and then wait a day before seeing if the picture even came out.
It wouldn't have been a quick "lemme lay the photos out real quick" setup. You'd probably end up moving all of the lights in the house into the living room just to get enough light for the shot, and then play around with camera settings for half-an-hour before taking the first shot.
Surely the issue of digital cameras was mostly quality?
Back in 1998, using the bundled 8MB CF card a Powershot A5 could store 8 (CCD Raw mode) to 236 (small size, normal quality) images, with the "default" (large size, fine quality) being 44. And of course you could swap cards in and out, and 48MB CF were available for basically infinite number of pictures per card (compared to the 20~30 of a film roll). And a CF card was both lighter and more rugged than a film roll.
What you were getting out, however, was 1MP of compressed JPEG (or 0.25MP in small size).
Anecdotally, I heard that this is the reason why, as recently as 10 years ago, a majority of movies were shot on film: it handles highlights so well. It took a while for digital to catch up.
Per the old is new again trend, anyone remember does disposable Fuji film cameras you used to take on vacation? Only had like 35 frames. You wouldn't dare take a photo every 5 minutes and run out of film on day one.
I don't miss the limitations of a roll of film, I usually took about 10-12 rolls of 120 film on a trip. thats 120-150 frames. Never bracketed, sometimes took two pictures of the same subject from different angles. The habbits carried over, with digital i shoot maybe twice as much (with about the same number of good pictures per trip, so for me more shots != more pics).
What i miss is the experience and workflow of a mechanical 6x6 TLR camera. You hold the camera at chest level, look down on the viewscreen, frame, then decide to take the picture or not. Nothing in digital does this yet.
Except for delivering images to an editor seconds after they've been shot. Best case scenario for a photo-journalist using film back then would have been a couple of hours for an E6 run, even the very first Kodak DCS with its pcmcia storage cards could beat that.
If a photographer today has several thousands of pics from a day it's likely because there were lots of burst shots, and the culling should be pretty simple: take the best frame from a burst and delete the rest immediately.
On a side note it would be an interesting data compression challenge to compress bursts of raw frames using video compression techniques.
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