State of Film chat session at Atkins

[jford]

...film is extremely hard to make...

True. The Lodima experience is a case in point. Michael and Paula have had to do an immense amount of work to keep a silver-chloride based paper going after the demise of Azo. But they've done it. I hope there's enough smaller companies like Foma and Lodima out there who can tap into worldwide distribution networks to keep it going. I think they prove you don't have to be a red and yellow gorilla to survive.

[polyglot]

This session is starting approximately right now. I'll be there in probably 45 minutes or so...

[hoffy]

Crap! I totally forgot about it....

Put in a good word for us Polyglot. I am trying to wing it out of work, but it's not looking promising that I will make it.....

[polyglot]

Well, I went along, though I got there about halfway through. It was a very civilized discussion, with everyone there having had some (often significant) film experience. About half commercial types, half amateurs, including one 4x5 guy. Of course, they spent most of their time talking about digital stuff but there were a few interesting points raised - one guy was sure that unless you were raised on 'chromes you didn't know how to expose and someone else was convinced that learning to shoot at a newspaper with a Crown Graphic would force you to choose your shot carefully.

They all did agree that digital provides much more accurate colour much more easily and would get you The Right Result with less effort (modulo whingeing about Canon implementing histograms differently on several DSLRs, leading to confusion and bad exposures), but I think everyone there who wasn't actively shooting film was missing it. There was a bit of discussion about stitching vs larger formats and trickery like focus stacking of scanned LF images. We talked about the availability of film and Paul (Atkins, the lab owner) was very very confident in Kodak at least - way more confident than anyone here on APUG seems to be even though I raised the spectre of Kodak no longer getting to sell miles of motion-picture prints for distribution.

Paul mentioned that he'd recently been to a cinematography event and points out that they are now hitting the same heated film-vs-digital arguments that went through the stills world about 10 years ago, now that high-res, high-rate digital video is becoming cheaply available. For commercial reasons that means people shoot digital and there were apparently a horde of younger cinematographers whingeing that they would never get the chance to shoot film professionally.

[hoffy]

Thanks for the report Polyglot.