Lone Pine Pictures still shoots film, which we convert to digital.

For architectural photography, 4x5 remains unmatched in its quality and its unique ability to straighten objects (like tall buildings) directly inside the camera and direct to the original.

Film remains most accurate, with the best range of color, and has numerous advantages over digital. Our film does everything digital can, and more. Plus we deliver both film and digital.

When we shoot film, we prefer to shoot in medium or large format: 120mm or 4x5.

We can even shoot 8 x 10.

Why hasn't Lone Pine gone completely digital without film?

The larger the film format, the better the quality.

The 120mm and 4 x 5 large film formats produce sharper images for:

• prints
• offset lithography and web lithography (books, magazines, brochures, annual reports)
• banners
• backlit displays
• any other large format application (including bus and building wraps).

In high end magazines where the reproduction is 'coffee table book' quality, the photographer has almost exclusively shot the image onto large format film.

The reason that high end coffee table books, magazines, annual reports, and brochure photographs appear 'tack sharp' is due to the fact that the original, at a size of 4" x 5", must only be enlarged approximately 200% to print on a full magazine-sized page. An original at the the size of 8" x 10" may print 1-1 or same size, requiring no enlargement at all.


The better the original, and the less an image needs to be enlarged, the better it prints.

Digital photos cannot be enlarged to any size and remain sharp in appearance, film can.

For commercial printing, the original image needs to be very high resolution (300dpi at the final print size). For banners and other large format applications, an even higher resolution may be preferred.

Film originals can provide the necessary high resolution for highest quality reproduction.

Grain vs pixels.

Under a microscope, you notice that photographic film is made of very tiny grains. In a similar fashion, an enlarged digital image is made of pixels.

The grains in photographic film are irregular, like grains of sand. The pixels in a digital image are square. If you put a loupe up to a photograph printed in a magazine, you will see the four halftone dots similar to the example titled 'Printing' above in four colors: cyan. magenta, yellow, and black.

Since the image on photograph film is composed of very tiny and irregular grains (look under a microscope or loupe), a film photograph can be enlarged to a great degree and still print very sharp and clear when printed on a commercial printing press.

The two most standard methods of printing are offset lithography and web offset. Though they differ slightly in pre-press considerations, they both use four-color process printing which takes a scanned image and converts it to halftone dots of various sizes that are the 4 four-color process printing colors - cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

The image above is of a sheet of 4 x 5 photographic film at actual size.

In any printing or reproduction process, the better and sharper the original, the better it will reproduce.

Lone Pine Pictures is one of the few remaining large format photographers that shoots film, yet we faithfully convert all of our film to digital.

The best of both worlds - super high-resolution images - and the flexibility of having both film and digital.

Call us today.