My Experiences With a Digital Camera
by Dana Trout

I recently bought our first digital camera and gave it to my wife for Christmas. I have the advantage of having several friends who are experienced photographers who have digital cameras of their own, and so was aware of many of the foibles of digital photography. But that doesn't mean I didn't discover some new ones!

At the GDTPUG meeting on January 3 I was asked by several people to summarize my feelings about the tradeoffs between digital and film photography. I didn't have a very coherent reply then, but I think the following is a better answer. But first let me set the context, which means defining the classes of systems we are comparing.

Digital:
  $300 to $500 camera (like Nikon 775, Canon Elph, etc,)
  $200 or so accessories (128MB medium, battery, charger, case)
  $200 or so 6-color printer (like Epson Stylus Photo 785)

PNS Film:
  $100 to $300 point-and-shoot camera (includes accessories)
  $400 scanner
  $200 or so 6-color printer (like Epson Stylus Photo 785)

SLR Film:
  $300 to $500 SLR camera (includes accessories)
  $400 scanner
  $200 or so 6-color printer (like Epson Stylus Photo 785)

Immediacy
The digital camera allows you to see the picture a few seconds after you've taken it. Although the resolution is limited, you can see if there are gross errors in composition, lighting, or focus. However, a digital camera takes some time to turn on (6 to 8 seconds), and most of the consumer-grade digital cameras don't actually focus until after you depress the shutter button. The result is that by the time the camera actually takes the picture everything has changed. You absolutely cannot catch fleeting images, such as at sporting events, or even the big "Hello" expression when an old-time friend unexpectedly walks in the door.

The PNS (point-and-shoot) film camera also takes a little time to turn on, but it is typically well under two seconds. The shutter latency (the time lag between pressing the shutter release and when the photo is actually taken) depends on the camera. I have an Olympus Stylus that I detest because even though it will measure and calculate the proper exposure and focus when I depress the shutter release halfway, it doesn't actually move the lens until the shutter is completely depressed. That means the latency is nearly a second, which is often too late. I also have an older Pentax that does all the mechanical stuff when the shutter release is depressed halfway, so when I press the release fully the picture is taken immediately. Much better for catching the passing ephemera! However, as with any film camera you don't see the picture until you get the roll developed, and that may be several airline tickets later and very expensive to go back to try again (even if possible).

The SLR film camera usually turns on instantaneously, and if you decide to use manual focus, will take the picture instantaneously as well. Wonderful for catching the passing scene, except the camera is quite big. This has several consequences:
   (1) It's real hard to be inconspicuous and not affect what's going on,
   (2) It's big enough that you don't often have it with you, so you miss many great opportunities.
So even though a SLR operates immediately and would seem to be ideal for capturing fleeting images, it requires you to become committed to being a photographer, instead of the friend, family member, or even stranger who imperceptably slipped out a camera, shot a picture or two, then put it away before being noticed.

Affecting the Scene:
The digital camera isn't very sensitive -- it's about the equivalent of ASA 100 film. So for many pictures you either have to find a good way of holding it very still (and hoping your subject doesn't move either) or you have to use flash. It's hard to be inconspicuous with a flash, and it's not much easier when using a tripod. You can use a beanbag to hold the camera steady on a wall, car, doorframe, post, or whatever and that's doesn't get much notice. But often there isn't a convenient surface or the subject is moving and you're stuck with flash. At Christmas my family was complaining about possible sunburn from all the flash pictures I was taking. (Yeah, it's my wife's camera but somehow it wound up in my hands. Honest!)

The PNS film camera lets you choose higher-speed films to alleviate the flash problem. Of course they are grainier but at least you get to take the picture without attracting notice.

The SLR film camera also lets you choose high-speed films, but its sheer bulk makes it much more difficult to be unobtrusive. But at least you don't have that flash go off which annouces to the whole auditorium "Hey! Somebody right over there took a picture!".

Quality
The digital camera has only a small number of pixels so you have to make each one count. Compose your picture so you don't have to crop it later. The sensor isn't real good in shadow detail, either, so you don't have a lot of latitude to fix up a poorly-exposed picture later in some image-manipulation program. However, it is really easy to fix up color-cast issues due to different kinds of lighting (outdoor, tungsten, fluorescent) compared to doing it for color film.

The PNS film camera's lens is typically about as "fast" (has the same aperture) as the digital camera. But if you use a decent fine-grained film you can get a much larger number of usable pixels than the digital camera provides. However, the scans are not nearly as "smooth" as what you get from a digital camera -- the grain boundaries of the film cause artifacts in the scan that makes it look relatively noisy.

The SLR camera's lens far outweighs either the digital or PNS camera lens, both in aperture and sharpness. It also outweighs them in sheer weight. But it does allow for much better low-light photos than either of the other two camera classes, which reduces the grain boundary artifacts significantly.

Prep for Print
The digital camera's photos are already in digital format so we can skip the tedious step of scanning them. Nor do we need to get the film developed, nor do we have to worry about it being zapped at airports. All we need to do is transfer them to the computer, select which ones we want to keep, do any adjustments we want, then print them. Or, we can skip all of that and just take the camera to a local quick-print place and they'll read the images into their system and hand you then standard 4x6 or 5x7 prints you're used to getting from them. The beauty of digital cameras is that pictures don't cost anything until you actually print them. So you can blaze away to your heart's content and print only those few pictures you consider exceptional.

For the film cameras we do have to get the film developed which means we either have to wait until the roll is finished, or just run it over to the quick-print place anyway and waste the unexposed portion. We can get the normal prints, or we can scan the film ourselves and print on our own printer. I've been doing scanning for years and the best single word description I can think of is "tedious". It is important that everything be very clean (no, Fluffy can not come in here) and you have to be careful how you handle the film so you do not get dust, scratches, or fingerprints on it. Remember, to get a 4x6 print you are going to enlarge that image four-fold, which makes every hair, bit of dandruff, or other debris a focal point of the print. Each strip takes several minutes to scan, then you have to take out that one and put in the next. There's not much you can accomplish in between feeding the scanner, putting away the old strip, cleaning the new one, and after a while you begin to wonder about the theory about computers and their ilk being man's servant.

So why not get the photos on a PhotoCD, or the more recent PictureCD? I have found them to be highly variable in quality and often I know there is a decent picture in there but the person saving the photos to disk set the contrast too high, or the brightness too high, or whatever. So for pictures I like I often have to scan them myself anyway.

Summary
So do digital cameras supplant film cameras yet? Yes, for snapshots as well as consumer instant photography. There's a good reason Polaroid is in bankruptcy. And at the high end, for many commercial photographers, digital is taking over. But for those times when you need pictures taken immediately when you press the shutter release, and you don't want to pay several thousand dollars for the privilege, you are looking at using a film camera.

Personally, I like all three classes. I take the SLR when I want really good photos, I take the PNS when I want something with me all the time but need to capture the instant. The digital camera is a blast, especially when people are involved. Sue and I took a walk on the bluffs yesterday and took the digital camera. The pictures of the ocean are OK, of the dolphins leaping non-existent (would you like to see our pictures of the spreading ripples?), but then we met a guy pushing a baby stroller with his "baby" in it -- a radio-controlled airplane. So we took pictures, showed them to him, and he struck up even better poses. We got his email address and mailed them to him. This interaction of subject, photographer, and photos would not have turned out nearly the same with a standard film camera. And even with a Polaroid camera, it would have been quite different because of the expense and wait-time for the prints to develop.