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 brand—such as Canon, Nikon, Minolta, or Olympus—as 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 ...

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