Hey Soupie:
Wendy and I are meeting up with a whole bunch of photographers for our AD this week. We'll let you know who we decide to go with, and why.
Ok. Here's my take on digital and film photography. From the customer's (ie. you or me) perspective, digital photography has advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
1)Easy to maintain
2)Easy to store
3)Lasts as long as you don't trash the CD, and use a quality CD
4)Easy to alter (removal of pimples, blemishes, people you don't like etc.)
5)Easy to print whenever, and wherever you like (DIY also can)
Disadvantages:
1)Decompression of an image means loss of data. Like MP3 music, a typical song is about 4megabytes +/-. This is done by removing parts of the song that are inaudible to the human ear. That's right folks. This means that you're not getting a true copy of the original, which in this case, is the image. In any case, the general rule is that a copy is never as good as the original, digital or otherwise.
2)A digital camera cannot form a true curved line. Digital images, like the fonts that you see on your computer screen, are formed using pixels. Take any digitized image, blow it up, and you'll see lots of squares. This doesn't happen with film until a much higher level.
So! Digital pictures don't have as high of a tolerance for that as compared to pictures on film. The only way to combat this effect, is to take a digital picture at a high resolution, and with a camera that has a high pixel rating. Case in point: the Canon 300D that i use is rated at an effective 6.3megapixels, and at that rating, produces an image resolution of 3072x2048 (multiply this to get approx. 6.3MP). Each file size will be about 7megabytes in RAW format. RAW formats are as good as it gets, meaning that the image is NOT COMPRESSED at all, and you need a special program to encode it for viewing and printing. The lower the MP rating, the smaller your resolution, the lower the quality of your picture. If you're running a 17 inch monitor on your PC right now, try changing your screen resolution to 640x480, and compare that to 1024x768. Which is clearer? Look at the wordings. Which setting gives you smoother fonts? Having said all that, if you're not going to blow an image up to A1 size, or even A3, then it doesn't matter which medium you choose. Go with what you feel is more affordable and friendly for your use. Only Ansel Adams would shun a digital camera. Just like an MP3 song, we can't tell the difference for our purposes.
The rest of the image, all boils down to who's taking it. Photographers look for clarity, true representation of colours, and things like framing. How the shot is done, what's the main focus of the shot and whether the shot contains any element that distracts the focus of the viewer. Pictures taken with film can also be fooled around with to obtain the desired effect. The only difference is that one is being done with smelly chemicals in a dark room, while the other is done using computer software. Ok. So the pimple on your face that day is beyond rescue on film, so you'll just have to use lots of concealer!
As with both forms of photography, any time you pass through some kind of medium, be it the CMOS chip that processes the image in a digital camera, or the film that's used in a film camera, you will never find a true representation of the subject. On a final note,i feel that photography is much like Philosophy: an endless pursuit of perfection that was never there to begin with.
I think i just made your decision even harder than before.
Ok. Time for a drink. I'm getting thirsty just typing all this. I hope this helps...somewhat.
