With new films like Kodak Ektar 100 being released, is film back on the up?

[wogster]

I like to think of the newspaper applications. Who cares about the image quality when it's intended application is a piece of newsprint with a useful life of a few hours at most. As for actual attainable image quality, I believe that film and a high resolution scanner can beat digital capture every time.

One of the problems in the photographic arts is that people tend to want a universal format. There isn't one, if you want a big, gallery quality print, then you want to start with a big negative, so you may want to shoot that image on a 4x5, If you need a lot of images, quickly, for print publication, projection or Internet, then shoot that with a digital camera, in other words use the right camera for the job. If your print requires that you have a high level of magnification, but your working with a small gallery quality print, then your best to use 35mm, in that you can get your higher magnification, but your print must be smaller to not overwhelm the resolution of the media.

[Poisson Du Jour]

[...]
I still would think Ansel Adams would shoot film if he were still alive. But that is just a guess
[...]

Probably, but note that Adams predicted the day of the "electronic image" as far back as 1981, so there is a hint that he probably would have dabbled in digital today — if only for entertainment value! For the fine art stuff, my guess is he would not budge from established film-based methodology — especially his own.

[AutumnJazz]

He probably would have only done it if there had been a non-scanning back for his LF camera(s). Why would he, of all people, trade down to MF or 135?

[Schlapp]

My guess is that Adams would be using a hi-end digital back in MF if he was still an young man - something like the Hassie. But its a guess just like everyone else.

[JBrunner]

As AA got older he shot a lot of MF and 135. Being a wise man, he suited the technology to the job. It should be noted however that the large format prints by his own hand are the ones that sell for thousands of dollars and are replicated in ink on a vast scale for mass consumption. That probably has more to do with his use of that format as the appropriate tool for the job, just as HCB used 135 as the appropriate tool for his vision. When persons proffer the notion that such and such is now "as good" a such and such it just illustrates the common big brained monkey impulse to quantify. Aesthetic isn't quantifiable, and those who try only reveal what they fail to understand.

[Poisson Du Jour]

He probably would have only done it if there had been a non-scanning back for his LF camera(s). Why would he, of all people, trade down to MF or 135?

As JBRunner points out, Adams was never averse to using 135 (35mm) format and did make a lot of use of this in the late 1970s and early 1980s along with his LF work. When he died in 1984 he had equally massive amounts of all formats.