Film is true? Digital is fake?

One week ago on thursday in the evening the bavarian television station "BR" aired their "Capriccio" magazine, and it featured a portrait of National Geographic photographer Norbert Rosing from Germany and his book "Wildes Deutschland" (best translated as "German Wilderness", perhaps) - the book is about unknown and surprising sights and sites in Germany, and in the TV show they also showed super photos from the polar regions that Rosing travelled many times - photos with the Aurora Borealis, solar halos, etc. etc. - all in all, very very impressive.

One of the last sentences by the narrator was something like (translated from german): "Norbert Rosing still shoots slide film until today, he is not using digital techniques, so in a world of digital flux, his pictures are true and honest". Well... I don't know if this is the opinion of Norbert Rosing himself, too (maybe - in one of the scenes he was using a Leica R9 and a quite massive wideangle lens, with an extremely protruding front lens, much like Nikons 2.8/14-24mm).

And while I think I know how they meant it, the statement made me rather upset. I take the opposite position and dare to say that digital photography allows a much more genuine reproduction than film ever did. Why?

Think about raw data. When you store the raw sensor data, it is just luminance information. And thats it. There is no chemistry in form of film emulsion involved that reacts "somehow" to the incoming light. There is no color temperature and white balance, either. Its just the light. By the bayer pattern, and the de-mosaicing process, chrominance information is extracted from it. But that is already a post processing stage! The most genuine, true light information is in the raw sensor data, and before digital photography, there was no way to record it as pure like that.

I'm reading older books about photography at the moment (because I'm interested in the nature of photography itself, not the digital part of it - and not the analogue part, either). I just finished one book about long-time exposures and night photography, and currently I am reading one from the Audubon Society. Those books were written at a time where digital photography and manipulation did not exist (well, the book about long time exposures contains one rather hilarious example of an early photoshopped combination of three photos, quite funny).

And if there's one thing that is absolutely clear after reading these books it is this: shooting film was so flawed, I'm glad I'm using digital equipment. Now, that is a bold statement and I admit openly that I don't know all that much about film (last time I shot a roll of film in a compact camera was about 10 years ago), but from the books I read I learned something about the shortcomings of film:

Color. Film was made for a small range of color temperatures. The most common ones were of course daylight film, and film for artificial light. White balance? Neutral colors? Forget it, or counter it with colored filters. And no chance to correct a mistake one you released the shutter! Besides that, different film brands had different colors (some films had cooler colors, some had warmer colors, some had wild and vivid colors - Velvia 50 of course - etc. etc.). So, does film reproduce the true colors? I don't think so.

Next: Reciprocity, or more precisely, the low intensity reciprocity failure (LIRF - and in german, its called the "Schwarzschildeffekt" after its discoverer, Karl Schwarzschild). Basically, reciprocity means thats 2x5 equals 10 and 5x2 also equals 10 - or in photography terms: any given combination of aperture and exposure results in the same amount of light reaching the film or sensor (f/16 and 1/500s results in the same amount of light as f/11 and 1/1000s, or f/22 and 1/250s). But film doesn't respond linear, especially with longer exposures. The longer the exposure, the less sensitive film becomes. You've got to adjust your exposure times accordingly (something like "instead of 2 minutes, expose 3 minutes").

No problem so far... but color film consisted of different color layers, and some films had a different LIRF for the different color layers. The best know example is Vevia 50 again: the red layer stayed more sensitive in longer exposures, resulting in wild and blood red skies when photographers were shooting dusk or dawn. Again the question - true colors? I don't think so...

And (unlike you develop film yourself) then there's the lab. I tend to think about it as the analogue post processing stage. Its much like the automatic "enhancements" that are applied to your digital images nowadays if you order prints over the internet. They just do it, they fix colors, contrast and exposure, and most often, you can't do anything about it. And the same happens when you shoot film. Underexposure, lacking contrast, pushing your film (shooting it at a higher ISO than declared) - the photo lab would fix it for you. Control? True results? Nada.

Conclusion: film does not yield "true" or more authentic results. I'm not saying that digital photography doesn't have its shortcomings (instead of LIRF, we have to deal with hot pixels in long time exposures for examples, we don't allow ourselves artistic freedom on our quest for the holy, perfect white balance, ugly clipping highlights, etc. etc.)... but the idealized view that film is more "real" and "true" calls for objection. My personal take is that shooting film is like shooting JPEG - you limit the result on ONE possible interpretation, but still, an analogue negative is just one form of an interpretation of the incoming light (in photolytic reactions of silver halide crystals), while the digital negative (I mean the raw sensor data here) is, as I said above, pure luminance data.

The, sometimes and to some, questionable "added benefit" of digital photography lies in the post processing. It was not so easy to fake before the advent of digital photography, to "tune" your photos. Its complicated to draw the line - which post processing steps are OK, which are faking? I've been thinking about that for quite a while already, and I think I'll put my thoughts in another article - some day. :-)