Please share your experiences in moving from film SLR to digital SLR ...

Is the cost.

In 1983, fresh out of college, I splurged and bought a Nikon F3. Bulletproof and simple. Not a lot of fancy options, just the basics, but it never let me down. I still have that F3, and it still works. Never saw a reason to consider a more advanced body. They had more options, and better AF (my F3 had Nikon's first AF attempt, which was a bit poky), but image quality would be the same. Entirely reliant on the film and the glass.

Film and processing cost me $500-700 a year, as a not too prolific amateur.

Going digital, I'm not spending anything on film and processing, and $1.50 per 8x10 dye sub print, which isn't very often. However, I am updating camera bodies about every two to three years. They advance enough that it's worth the cost, even though I typically wait 1 year after a body comes out, for the lower price.

Did a little calculating, and body upgrade costs and 8x10 prints average out to around $500-700 a year.

What a coincidence...

Scott's a fraud who's made up his experience. He live an alter ego on forums like this and Photo.net.

I was going to be one of those people that stuck with film. The one day I went out and bought a cheap digital camera just to see what it was like. I don't remember the thought process, but weeks later had my first credible digicam and have never loaded another roll of film.

Regrets: 1. I let my film stuff go for cheap, just to have the bucks to get into a DSLR. I had some nice glass whose continued value to me I didn't realize at the time, and which I now miss. 2. I let some old slides go, back in the day. Some were overexposed, and some had artifacts (a hair or piece of fiber that'd gotten between the lens and the film). I could've whacked the latter in PSE, easy.

I was already into PP, having scanned some prints and done some nice things with them.

I don't miss the disappointment of receiving scratched negatives from the processor, or that of seeing how poorly-exposed some of my shots were, at $20 a roll.

...for a number of years.

My first real digital camera, a Minota Dimage 7, was expensive, but produced terrible quality images. That killed my interest in photography for several years, for I had no desire to set up a darkroom again and go back to film.

Necessity required me to pull the Dimage out of storage and forced me to understand digital. Now I had forgotten that much of the work of photograph takes place in the darkroom, and I had expected the camera to do all of the work, which was very naive of me, having worked with film for many years.

I was unable to get good images from the Dimage, so eventually I replaced it with a much cheaper but new Fuji, which produced much better images fresh out of the camera.

In order to get acceptable images, I had to learn how to use RAW conversion and Photoshop, and how to properly use these tools. As it turns out, the Dimage actually produced excellent quality images, but it merely required the right software - RAW conversion vastly improved over the years, and I finally was able to properly handle the nonstandard colorspace used by the Dimage, which had always been a problem before.

Artistry requires mastery of the tools of the art!

The predictive methods for measuring optimum exposure in film cameras are archaic, compared with Histogram and Flashing Highlights - learn how to use them to get the best exposure for digital.

--
Mike . Sydney, Australia
http://www.pbase.com/mikeaus/galleries
http://s23.photobucket.com/albums/b356/MikeAus/?

... The experience for me was immediate. I had tried film but being unwilling to develop my own was constantly disappointed with results from outside developing even though the lab did everything they could to make my lousy photos look good. Once I got my first digital camera it was totally different. I could see the results immediately and learn what I was doing wrong. That was many years ago and I am more into photography then ever.

Had it not been for digital I don't know how I would be spending my retirement years...

Jim

Being an engineer in my late 40s, I have suddenly become aware of this 'retirement' phenomena! I agree, digital helps.

regards

jim

Mark Scott Abeln said:

...for a number of years.

My first real digital camera, a Minota Dimage 7, was expensive, but
produced terrible quality images. That killed my interest in
photography for several years, for I had no desire to set up a
darkroom again and go back to film.

In order to get acceptable images, I had to learn how to use RAW
conversion and Photoshop, and how to properly use these tools. As it
turns out, the Dimage actually produced excellent quality images, but
it merely required the right software - RAW conversion vastly
improved over the years, and I finally was able to properly handle
the nonstandard colorspace used by the Dimage, which had always been
a problem before.

Click to expand...

I went through very much the same experience with a Minolta film scanner, the "Scan Speed". It's actually a wonderful combination of inept hardware and totally (and I do mean totally) useless software.

Eventually, by switching to Hamrick's VueScan software, I was able to get acceptable scans out of the Minolta.

But nothing really helped the Scan Speed workflow. The Scan Speed was a fairly expensive scanner, about twice the price of the model below it. And it could scan one negative or slide faster than the model below. But it could not scan a full carrier (four slides or a strip of 6 negatives) faster. Unlike the lower priced scanners, the "Speed" had a loading mechanism that could not advance a carrier all the way through. You had to scan half the carrier, pull the carrier out, flip it end over end, reload it, and hope the scanner wouldn't botch focus or exposure.

The end result of all that juggling was that it was near impossible to match how fast a much cheaper scanner could go through a few rolls of film.

Mark S Abeln said:

Artistry requires mastery of the tools of the art!

Click to expand...

But if the tools are not functional, how can they be mastered?

--
Rahon Klavanian 1912-2008.

Armenian genocide survivor, amazing cook, scrabble master, and loving grandmother. You will be missed.

Ciao! Joseph

http://www.swissarmyfork.com