Hack 92 Preview Film Pictures with Your Digital Camera

Digital cameras can take the guesswork out of film photography by allowing you to preview the composition and lighting before you make the film exposure .

One of the advantages of sticking with a camera brandsuch as Canon, Nikon, Minolta, or Olympusas you move from film to digital is that many of the accessories that work with your traditional SLR should be compatible with your prosumer or digital SLR. This benefit shines brightest when dealing with the challenges of flash photography with your film camera.

That's right; some of us still shoot film and will continue to for a long time. I prefer film for wedding photography, brightly lit landscape scenes, and any time I have to deliver a ton of prints that I don't want to edit in Photoshop. Heck, sometimes it's nice just to hand over the whole shoot to a photo lab and let them do the work.

One of the drawbacks of film photography is that you don't get to see how the picture turns out until it comes back from the lab. For important shoots, such as weddings, this causes great anxiety. To get around this problem, photographers sometimes use Polaroid cameras, or a Polaroid back on their film camera, to preview the exposure.

Actually, this technique works quite well. You expose the Polaroid, and if the shot looks okay, you use those same settings to expose the film. That way, everyone sleeps better at night.

The problem is that Polaroid film is messy, expensive, and not always accurate. Digital cameras are actually better proofing devices, as long as you spend a little time calibrating them first.

This brings us back to staying with the same brand name so that your accessories work on both your film and digital cameras. For the last couple years , I've been using a Canon EOS Elan 7 to shoot weddings. But for proofing, I also keep a Canon G2 digital camera in my bag. The G2 has the same hot shoe as the Elan 7 (see Figure 8-19), which means that it accepts the same external flashes. The Canon flashes behave the same way for the G2 as they do for the film-based Elan.

Figure 8-19. The hot shoe on the digital G2 and the Elan 7

So I did a little testing and discovered that the film I use for weddings reacts to light about the same as my G2 set on ISO 200. Ah, I can feel a good night's sleep coming on already.

After a wedding ceremony, when it's time to take the group shots, I get everyone in place. Then, I take a picture with the flash attached to the G2. I review the image on the LCD monitor and zoom in to make sure that everyone's face is visible and illuminated properly. If I detect a problem, I make an adjustment and take another shot with the G2. When everything looks good, I take the flash off the G2 and put it on the Elan. I double-check my settings (shutter speed, f-stop, etc.), to make sure they are equivalent to what I used on the G2, and then take a few frames with the Elan.

Since I've started using this digital proofing system for film photography, I haven't been disappointed with a single group shot. And I sleep so much better at night. This system works within just about any family of camera accessories.