blurblock said:
I disagrees with you. I had shot with a film SLR for more then 15 years and still learning new tricks. The DSLR is a good boon, but then to fully appreciate photography it is still back to flim. Composition, Lightings makes a part of it..
Hi BB, I guess now I know why you sold your 10D to me
. I still have it by the way and I think its a great cam, has contributed significantly to my development in photography. I guess we agree to disagree then. As I have mentioned in many previous posts, a lot of how people view this issue depends on the type of background you come from. Those who have shot a lot of film in the past and have reached a certain level of proficiency will invariably tout film as the way to go. For newbies like myself who have shot a little bit of film and now have hit digital in a big way, I can tell you, its like night and day, digital wins hands down as a quick way to learn photographic technique, NO CONTEST!
blurblock said:
I For Don't like the picture, just delete clause, well, you will learn to rely too much on the body and too little on your own creativities. For film, I learn every shots counts. For digital I just need to take 100 pictures and in the end having 10 good pictures..
I'd rather not mess around with the technical issues and focus on composition. If it takes me 100 shots at first to get 10 keepers, with instant review, I will soon learn and will come down to 20 shots to get 10 keepers. It's already happening to me after about 1 year of shooting DSLR, I'm taking a lot less shots than before, because my technique has improved so quickly. With film, I never knew what the problem was with my bad shots and I simply made the same mistake again the next time, so I still get my 3 keepers per roll of 36, every time.
Lesson 1: Don't underestimate the power of instant review as an educational tool.
The other tool I found most useful is the histogram. Sometimes you can talk to a newbie till you are blue in the face about exposure and he still won't *get it*. When I saw my first histogram on my P&S a light bulb just lit up in my mind. Up till then exposure was a nebulous concept, my finally I could visualise how my picture was exposing. Big important conceptual jump.
Also, the advent of PS has also been a boon to improving compositional skills. How many folk are comfortable using a darkroom to try and crop, dodge etc? A lot less than those comfortable using PS to do the same I'll bet. You learn a lot by post-processing, so the next time you go out and shoot you remember to frame better, expose better, use a filter etc. It is an iterative process.
Lesson 2: You as much about composition in front of the computer as you do behind the viewfinder.
To you experienced film users to whom these techniques/concepts are old hat, you have perhaps forgotten the kind of pain you had to endure to learn them. You fail to see how important/useful these short-cuts are in learning photography.
blurblock said:
The basics is still film. If you can take film pictures, Digital is a breeze. If you can take Digital pictures, it does not mean you can take pictures with flims.
By implication, you are saying shooting film is a technically more demanding exercise. To me, the end result is the key. If you can accomplish the same result with either medium, why take the more difficult route? If I can get good results with digital, why on earth would I want to shoot film? I put it to you that shooting digital will also improve your film photography. A couple of weeks ago I picked up my Dad's old Nikon SLR, the one I had been using for over 10 years, and shot a small indoor function that was happening using a single pin flash and a card-board bouncer. I haven't seen the results yet, but I think they will not be too bad, bacause I have shot over 1000 frames on digital experimenting with different cam settings, flash settings, bounce angles etc, all for free (didn't print a single shot and deleted most of them). 12 or even 6 months ago I would never even have had the confidence to try flash photography on an SLR.
Lesson 3: Shooting for free removes a great impediment to learning.
Sorry for a long post, as is my usual style.
Cheers and take care,