It has been stated, said….written in stone or perhaps not; that there is a difference between film and digital images. In fact, a friend of mine who goes out with me will always say, that since I eventually will scan my negatives, that I have digital images. Well, technically I cannot argue since I have scanned the images, but the output is just different. My film, is way different than his digital…..period. Written in Stone.
Case in point. Two images are coming up, one film, the other digital. Now, both were done in Black and White and both were relatively difficult images to capture. These were taken at night with no flash, and the images show a reflection in the window from the opposite side of the street of a few large heads (Linda McCartney, John Dillinger etc) . The image also has, as a reflection, cars moving in the street in front of those large head reflections, as seen below. Now, inside the store/bar…the images will show various things. Take note of the back posters on the wall to the left and any people who might be around those posters, either in the background or foreground. For that differs slightly between these images.
The above image is film ….400 Fomapan taken with a 50mm 1.4 Zuiko lens on an OM1 SLR. Notice the cars and the large heads which are the reflections. Notice the poster “Short Film Night’ …. and the couple seated by the poster. Now compare this to the image below which is the digital.
That was taken with a digital 35mm lens on a Fuji F100 series. You can see roughly the same in the background but the foreground has more people. The lady on the left was not present when the film image was taken but the lady ‘centered’ and talking to the other lady who has her back towards us was present on the film as well.
You can clearly see obvious difference. The Digital is sharper….no grain, the Depth of Field is more intense. The film image has more shadows, deep blacks, more grain and less polished. The people up front, while there….are not visible on the film image.
Why is that? Well….I imagine that it is due to ISO more than much else. The film ISO was set at 400 and I needed to have my camera wide-open at 1.4 while the shutter was near 1/60th…while I know that my friend had his ISO ‘up to’ 6400’ for the evening on his F100 digital. I am not sure what the Iso setting was for this particular image, but I know it was close to 6400. Now with the ISO, he could afford to shift his other settings to accommodate more a field of view. He was using ‘live’ so not sure he really new the settings when he took the image.
Is one image better? Well, that depends on your thinking and what you prefer. For me, the film has character. The digital just looks sharp and not real, not authentic. Film all the way for me baby.