With Film Dead or Dying, Can You Still Get the 80s or 90s Wide Open Low Light Look?

Film is going the way of other elegant, exotic, but evolutionarily condemned creatures such as the Tasmanian Tiger, the Dodo bird, and the Macarena. Somehow chart the decline of film use against the rise of digital and you’ll hear a lot about ‘how to make digital look like film’ in your research. It’s almost an existential crisis for shooters of our transitional generation, and the heart of digital’s identity crisis. If film is the look of cinema, what’s the key ingredient? Resolution? Latitude — or worse, light response curve? Motion transfer? Color reproduction? Or should we just let “the digital look” evolve into its own beast altogether? That’s a lot of heavy questions for a Sunday afternoon read, but ones unavoidably raised by a post from Art Adams of Pro Video Coalition about the wide open lensed and low light look of ’80′s and ’90′s films. (more…)