B&W Film Users & Digital?

[paulhillion]

Last night I watched the wonderful documentry 'War Photographer' about James Nachtwey (which by the way I'm selling over in the marketplace section!) and it got me thinking. Correct me if I'm wrong but watching Mr. Nachtwey create all those amazing images over the years his preference seemed to be for the use of black & white film. What if someone with such a preference wanted to switch to using digital, surely it would mean converting each & every image in software such as PS? For someone like Mr. Nachtwey who shoots high numbers of documentry style images this would mean a great deal more work involved and I'm guessing (not having used b&w film) that the results wouldn't be nearly as great?

I know the 20D has a b&w mode & to be honest I haven't really used it, does it produce results comparible to b&w film? And if not do you think this is something that digital SLR's will be able to replicate in future models?

[mdr]

I guess he would shoot digital, and automate the B&W workflow in Photoshop, for batch processing of large sets of imaging. Then he would look at these and fine tune the B&W workflow for the best shots.

In my view this does not differ from working in colour using digital, batch processing RAW files, and subsequently fine tuning while re-processing the good shots.

[DocFrankenstein]

There are BW digital cameras out there. I know Kodak had one for sure.

[ChadClancy]

If a person who is used to photographing with film can get satisfactory results with digital, it should be a big time saver. With film, you have to go through the processing stage to get a good idea of which pictures are the keepers and I would bet that for most professional photographers, this is a low percentage.

With digital, most of the screening can be done on the computer and as was mentioned, the programs can be set up to batch process hundreds of photos at a time to convert them to B&W if the camera's own B&W setting was found to be unsatisfactory.

[Andy_T]

Here's a review of the Kodak 760m (monochrome):
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/kodak-760m.shtml

Unfortunately, it's based on Kodaks 7xx series and this means it has a Nikon body and only takes Nikon lenses.

One of the most interesting features, in my opinion, is that without the Bayer Grid in front of the sensor (that breaks up the photosites into red, blue, green), the 6 MP monochrome camera has a resolution that corresponds to 12-24 MP on a colour camera :shock:

Unfortunately, Kodak doesn't make these any longer...

Best regards,
Andy

[mdr]

Unfortunately, Kodak doesn't make these any longer...
No wonder, you can't rely on Nikon lenses with Canon ruling the world! :lol:

[primoz]

I mostly agree with digital being time saver, even if personally I still prefer slides over digital (unless when working for press agency which needs photos right after end of sport event). I really don't have any idea about previously mentioned Kodak b&w camera, but shooting with 1d and converting to b&w it's just nowhere near real b&w film. It's not about time (with simple batch in PS I convert 1000s of photos to b&w in few sec, which is A LOT faster then anything with film) but about this how b&w film looks. Maybe I'm old fashioned about this but for me personally digital is still nowhere near some grainy b&w film :)