Sunday, April 18, 2010

Film versus digital

My friend George and I have been carrying on a running debate for the last six months on the virtues of film photography and digital photography. We've been taking pictures for a very long time with a wide variety of cameras. For film he has Hasselblads and Leicas; I have a Linhof view camera, a Rollei twin-lens and a Pentax 645 and 67. For digital we both have Canon 5D Mk2 cameras.

There is no question that the Canon 5D Mk2 takes superb pictures. It has a full-size 35mm sensor and an excellent lens. The pix are 23 megapixel pictures, which blow up directly into 16x20 and larger, and with Creative Fractals to almost any imaginable size, without any loss of sharpness or detail. What more could we want (besides talent), you may ask? Well, the Canon is large, heavy, and very complex. There are more menus than you can shake a stick at, more options than you can keep in your head, and all of them take a lot of time to change or shift modes.

George's Leica (from the late 50s) has an attached light meter, weighs next to nothing, feels wonderful in the hand, and there ARE NO MENUS! He can put it in his pocket and take pictures he can hang on a wall at almost any size. My Pentax 645 is similar, though bulkier and more heavy; nevertheless, taking a picture with it is quick and easy. The meter is built-in and there are a couple of adjustments on the top that are quick and easy AND optional.

We can send our exposed films to a lab on the West coast and get the films developed and scanned with a very high quality scanner and then sent back to us as developed film and a DVD with the large scans on it. We still do our own printing, but that's a pleasure and gives us considerable control over the outcome; even the professional labs do ink-jet printing because there is almost no-one out there doing prints and chemical development. So there's a delay in getting results back of maybe a couple of weeks. Not the instant gratification of dropping a memory chip into a slot and looking at the pix immediately.

I'm planning to make a set of identical photos, matching digital camera with film. I should be able to see if there is a quality difference fairly easily. But beyond that the issue of ease of on-the-spot use comes up. When you don't take the camera with you because it's too much trouble, you don't take any pictures. There's some kind of balance with quality and ease of use that has to be considered. George actually loves the process of using his Leica. He says he has begun to think of the 5d as more of a "chore" than a pleasure.

Well, we're not professional photographers, far from it. The digital camera has made life hugely better for wedding photographers and many professionals. No delays, no developing expense, and you can put the pix on a web site immediately. But we don't have the pressure of quantity production. What we're doing is something we do for the love of it, and for the occasional picture of which we are truly proud. So we have the leisure/privilege of just seeing which we like better.

I would certainly value comments or experiences in this area.

Monday, April 05, 2010

Why not decrease salaries instead of firing people?

That really says it all. I think it's amazingly idiotic and short-sighted to favor firing X% of employees in an organization rather than to decrease salaries by a small and necessary percent.

This is clearly more appropriate when the organization sells services more than products. A declining market may mean less demand for the product, and as a result fewer employees are needed to run the company. However, when services are the primary product, cutting employees also means cutting services. It does not save money. It only reduces the services, and if the need for those services remains constant, everybody suffers.

For instance, in the field of state-supported mental health, the need for professional services continues to rise as the population increases and as the economy heads south. A "RIF" or reduction in force means that the population served will receive fewer and lower-quality services. Since at least some income is realized by providing these services, there is also a decrease in income.

Alternatively, expecting all employees of the Department of Mental Health to take a small percentage cut would accomplish the necessary reduction in expense, without reducing the quantity and quality of mental health services. We are quick enough, it seems, to demand increases in salary when the economy is booming. When the economy tanks, why not take a decrease rather than firing some percentage of the employees? I suspect the answer has to do with an individual's belief that the firings will be of "other people", so that's the gamble: a small chance (?) of being fired versus the certainty of a 10% decrease in salary.