Digital photograph: “Eclipse in red”
Fridays people usually go out so there are just a few visitors, and I suspect those visitors are from their smart phones in middle of a party. In any case I’ll take advantage of the day and I’ll publish an experiment I did in July: take the same image with a digital camera and a film camera.
Film photograph: “Mystic red”
If you have visited Qhapaq before then probably you have seen the film version already. Nevertheless it coul be useful for somebody trying to have an opinion about the use of film cameras in this age of ones and zeros.
Digital photograph: “Against the wall”
A carpet made with a shadow, a wall made with trees, a sky made with red and a space in blue
The digital camera is my Sony R1, a 2005 camera with APS-C sensor (smaller than the 35mm film) and the film camera is my Samsung ECX-1 that if were digital today would be calle “Full Frame,” the roll was the fantastic Kodak Ektar 100. I “scanned” the negatives with my digital camera and processed both digital and film with RAW converters.
Digital photograph: “Butlers of blue uniform and white shoes (digital dream)”
Film photograph: “Butlers of blue uniforms and white shoes”
I processed first the negatives to get the maximum of the colors, and after a painful week I got to complete the task of process the 36 photographs. With digital I can process that same number in about two hours… Anyway, I processed the digital versions trying to match the colors the best I could without more modifications, being the exception the photographs “Butlers of blue uniforms…” because the film camera has a longer zoom so in the digital I had to crop to match the composition.
Digital photograph: “The calm in the afternoon of another century”
Film photograph: “Chiaroscuro of savage with red skin and green crown”
To get the most of the colorful roll of film I chose the monastery of Santa Catalina. Now seeing the photographs I see I choose mostly vertical compositions, viewfinders in film cameras usually don’t cover the total of the captured image so the little differences.
In any case I want to prove that digital photography is not soulless as some film photographers like to write; and film is not incapable as some digital photographers are tempted to think, it can be inconvenient but still quite capable to expres a message. The soul is in the person that compose and the capability is in the personal skill; otherwise there is no a person sensible to the world having fun but a camera tester stressing about digital noise or scratches on film negatives.
Qhapaq 