As far as I can see all (or most) professionals shoot on slides instead of negatives. What is the advantage to that other than easy viewing on a lightbox? I've been wondering about this for awhile and now I want to know :)

There are a couple opinions on this. Biggest advantage is that the photographer has more direct control; not subject to interpretation by some printing lab. Because slides have to look great for professionals without resorting to printing tricks, most innovation effort has gone into making the slide emulsions better. Opposed to negatives, where most innovation is driven by making it cheaper. So, the slide emulsions are actually better at color saturation, accuracy, grain, speed, and sharpness than the equivalent negative materials. That being said, negatives aren't bad, particularly when the final result is a paper print or computer screen. (It seems to me) the intermediate processing steps here negate the advantages of slides, and negatives are more forgiving of errors.

another atvantage to slides is that paper scans tend to be less sharp than scans using slides. much of this is due to quality of the original scanners and the source images themselves. I know that when i can afford a good slide scanner I will rarely shoot film again. It is just that the focus with slides is quality as misha stated.

"Negatives"....I guess the name says it all ;)

I guess I'll try some slidefilm next time :) Thanks for the info.

Don't forget one thing when shooting with slide film, it is VERY unforgiving of mistakes. The exposure latitude of slide film is about 1/4th to 1/6th that of print film. Getting your exposure right is very important if you don't want a ruined shot. If you can't yet get consistently good exposure on your print film shots, I wouldn't even try slide until I could. But that may just be me. -=>Donald

Well, as a professional (fashion) photographer, I can tell you the REAL reason most photographers use slides. And it's very simple. 99.9% of magazines, ad agencies and publishers in the world print from slides. That's what they're set up to handle. If you give them prints taken from negatives, you're giving them a third-generation image (reality / neg / print) which they then have to scan, making it 4th-generation. It's not quite so bad nowadays when most mags can scan without a problem, but 10 or 20 years ago, it was pretty rare. So that's the main reason. You don't want to piss off a client by taking in material that's going to cause them any hassle. On the technical side, there are also good reasons. First of all, slides are much richer in color saturation because they're viewed by TRANSMITTED light; ie. the light source comes from behind them. Prints are viewed by REFLECTED light, with the light reflecting off the print, which makes for low color saturation. Secondly, most professional labs used to specialise almost exclusively in slide processing. If you wanted negs done, you had to go to dodgy labs who did your stuff along with Granny's snapshots of the kids. Again, not a problem today, when a lot of good labs do both. Third reason is that slides are way faster and you can get 'clip tests' done. I do a shoot, drop 20/30 rolls at the lab, and get a clip test done from 1 roll of each situation. This is the first 5 or 6 frames of the roll, processed normally, and allowing me to see what I need to do to it. I get the clips back in under 2 hours, and can then 'push' (over-develop) the rolls for that situation, or 'pull' them (under-develop), depending on what exposure I want. And since pushing/pulling can be done in increments of 1/8 of a stop, you can see that it's possible to have total control over your film. And I can get the whole lot processed in a couple of hours, edit it at night, and give it to the client the next day. No messing around with prints. mac PS A little historical note. When I was an assistant (in milan, italy), I worked with a lot of top fashion photographers who came over. And the older guys from the 60s, like Bert Stern, used to have a special 'clip back'. This was a spare film back for the Hasselblad or Mamiya that was used to shoot only 1 frame of each situation. That roll would then be processed on it's own, and used as a guide to the processing for the entire shoot. A neat trick which I still use.

Wow, quite a lengthy story. Thanks for the info mac. Since I'm only a hobbyist (fulltime software engineer) I won't have the need to develop 20-30 rolls :) But you've given me enough to think about. I'll play around with slidefilm and see the results. Maybe compare 2 shots taken at the same time and actually see the difference.

I was given a Mamiya (2 eye) camera by my dad which make 6x6cm slides/negs. Still working up the nerve to shoot with that :)

'I'm only a hobbyist' Hey, hobbyists need information just like professionals do. The only difference is no one will refuse to ever give you a job again if the shoot doesn't come out. You're lucky! LOL. Just to repeat what dholman said, slide film is very unforgiving of mistakes in exposure. But it's definitely worth a try. I used to have a Mamiya twin-lens too. Great cameras. That's definitely worth a shot. And the technique's no different, so don't be afraid of it. When you see the quality of 6 x 6 slides from it, you'll die of shock. mac