Or, twenty rolls of Ektachrome and the lies we tell ourselves. Or, how to be wrong. Preliminaries Why this mad thing? I’m a photographer who uses film and makes prints in a darkroom: I like to make things which live on bits of paper, not screens. And of course I also like slightly impractical tools, …
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Film has always been the standard I measure against on the quality and color of digital imagery. The texture of grain with higher ISO, the colors rendered from the film — these are the characteristics I want my photos to take on. If you shoot RAW with digital cameras you get what most call the “digital negative”. This RAW file has all the data stuffed into it with no compression. The result is a larger image that you can fine tune more precisely.
Me and my family recently spent a week driving around North Wales in my wife’s van. Me being me, I wanted to take a lot of photos. I also took a lot of cameras. 3 more than I actually used – which is unusual for me. The ones I did use were a Hasselblad SWC and a Pentax 110 auto film cameras, and the subject of this article, a Sony ZV-1 compact digital.
The Sony ZV-1 is punted by the brand as a “vloggers camera” – as such, it is supposedly designed more for video blogging, or in simple terms selfie-video. In fact, shooting video is what I bought it for, though not for me, but for work, and not for pointing at myself. As a creative agency producing a lot of video content our team has greatly expanded in the last year. We’ve bought some new kit too. A couple of new lenses, a drone and this ZV-1 have increased our capabilities. The Sony ZV-1 was specifically bought to capture little off the cuff mini-interviews at events. It’s small size makes for a camera that isn’t as threatening to people we point it at, meaning we can get little snippets and sound bites out of more nervous people as well as capturing people who have less time etc. We also bought it because unlike our bigger cameras which top out at 100fps for 1/4 speed slow motion, the Sony ZV-1 does 1000fps for when we want to capture something much more fast moving etc.
Of course, before I could give it to the team, I felt I needed to try it first. In short, I decided to take it on holiday. Not for video, I should add – though I did take a few slow-mo clips that I’ll never likely do anything with – but for snaps.
A good camera is a good camera, right? That’s how it should be. Of course, in the world of digital cameras where the image making technology is built into the camera, how long ago the camera was made will have an impact on the potential photographic outcome. Newer digital cameras take better photos – at least that’s the line we are sold by the manufacturers. It’s true too, objectively speaking – but with a good few caveats, that idea can, and is increasingly being challenged. Photographers, it seems, are increasingly turning to the vintage digital camera!
I love the simplest point & shoot film cameras. Take a Holga or some cheap disposable/reusable model and just go enjoy shooting. They are so easy to use, so hard to master, so much fun to shoot with.
I’ve got few cameras like that in my collection and while I run the more affordable films through them, in the end it can still gets bit pricey. This got me thinking, would I be able to somehow recreate the experience in a digital form, avoiding the rising price of film and development? And what i mean by this is that I didn’t want just to switch a camera to full-auto and keep using it as before, I wanted the proper experience with guessed focus, uncertain exposure and questionable framing.
