One Caveat for the New Era of Digital Photography
Are digital cameras good enough compared to their film sblings? This question has been around since the birth of the first professional DSLR. Many digital advocates tried very hard to prove it. Clark’s Film versus Digital My Summary signals the new era of digital photography. Pros are adopting DSLRs feverishly while dumping their old film equipment via ebay. Some pros even prefer Canon’s 1Ds over bulky pricey film medium cameras. Though, large format film still rules for serious landscape photography.
As digital cameras prevail, even common people can get wonderful shots. But, on the other hand, pro-photographyers are telling us that digital shots/prints are flat, it is important to have accurate exposure and accurate color balance, and it takes a lot of time to do post-processing. More specifically, we are suggested not to over-expose or even under-expose a 1/3 stop. The article Expose (to the) Right (ETTR) uncovers the major difference between film and digital sensor, dated back to 2003 – 2004. ETTR has been rediscovered in the March/April issue of American Photo.
Each spot on the digital camera sensor can be treated as a bucket for water, where light is water. Buckets are always wet. There is always noise even without any light. Thus, we need enough light to avoid noise. Worse, once the bucket is full — white, it cannot contain extra light. Thus, we need to avoid over-exposure, which would turn everything into white. All in all, we need to push histogram to the right while not to over-expose shots, which is contrarily to film that could be pushed and is more tolerant on not-that-accurate exposures.
The digital new era means new ways of taking photos, and doing dark room processing. It is always important to understand the tools that we are using. 