Oh come on now.Even today digital cannot match the quality of film for resolution and aesthetics. @johnh you are comparing what is probably a poor machine generated print (perhaps some time before) and then transferred through a low quality scanner to a digital format. No wonder you think they cannot compare. Try putting the negative through a 4k scanner and then compare the difference.
@Peter Kodachrome was a great film but it was slow, ectachrome was faster, the slower the film the higher the contrast and the finer the grain.You choose the film for the end result you require and there were a huge variety along with a variety of high speed lenses. Rather than file down the edge of your lens why did you not use a soft rubber lens hood?
I used to process and print my own photographs and they never went missing. Professional film and photograhpic labs also very rarely lost your rushes if at all.
BTW I have nothing against digital and have worked with both professionally in the air and on the ground, and know well the limitations of them for still and film/video production. I’m afraid no digital camera can yet match film for resolution even at 35mm levels, let alone 2.25 inch square and larger.
Digital does have advantages in many other areas such as cost and the ability to see and post the results immediately.
Ill tell you what digital allows. It allows you (well, my GF) to take about 4000 16Mb photos on a trip to Sweden and back in an aeroplane so you can end up with 100 really good shots, and actually be able to afford the trip… 
I use this for fun, shooting free expired film when I can find it (note rubber lens hood :)) or Ilford B+W. Weighing in at 1 kg it is guaranteed to stop a bullet.
The analogue in me goes with the no gyro no electric Super Cub, and the 1972 Käfer as the daily runner.
ectachrome was faster,
Yes I used mostly Ektachrome 64, for years.
Rather than file down the edge of your lens why did you not use a soft rubber lens hood?
Only a filter would be thus modified, not the lens.
I used to process and print my own photographs and they never went missing.
That was OK for the E6 process, and if you went to slides. I used to do that too… many happy nights were spent mounting slides 
It was expensive because decent slide mounts were expensive.
Professional film and photograhpic labs also very rarely lost your rushes if at all.
True if you took it there in person. I used to use one local lab (they were good for large prints, for which you needed yet more equipment e.g. an enlarger and the Cibachrome kit) but eventually they got complaints from the (mostly wedding) photographers who would turn up and see an “obvious member of the great unwashed public” (me) going there direct, so they told me to not use them anymore.
Not sure I agree re resolution. It is probable that Kodachrome 25 (which could be processed by only two labs in the UK) which has almost no grain is perhaps lens resolution limited (which with a really pricey lens might be diffraction, even at F8 where most lenses are at their best) but that film could not be used most of the time. I definitely think Ektachrome 64 is nothing as good as a modern €1k DSLR. Some years ago I scanned in all my ~5000 slides on a high end Nikon slide scanner (with a bulk feeder) and the lower quality and the noise are immediately visible, as they were when the slide was projected onto a large screen.
One thing which slides were excellent for was ending a social gathering. You just announced that you will do a slide show
However, I am still a fully paid up member of the hipster club
After I sold the last SLR – OM4Ti – I bought the above, for quite a lot of money, which was also my first (reasonable) film camera many years earlier. I keep it as an investment, I guess…
@Skydriller, yes that is one of the great benefits of digital photography.
@RobertL18C and @ Peter great cameras and lenses and you never have to worry that the battery is flat just when that magic moment presents itself.
The Pentax Spotmatic Black became the 35mm camera of choice for aerial camera work in the 60’s because as its name suggests it was all black including the top end and helped to reduce reflections. I don’t think Nikon had an all black camera until the 70’s with the F3 and I don’t know if Olympus ever made one.
I used to get my film cheap as short ends (recanned bits of film returned at the end of a movie) from stock shops. I have a little device for loading the film into cassettes. I stick to neg stock and because movie stock processing is a bit of a palava these days (the base needs to be scrubbed off) I tend to ask old friends at the film labs if they would dunk it in their test bath, they don’t charge a lot for it.
I then scan the neg on a 4k scanner to digital.
Peter I still don’t agree with you about the resolution or the colour range. IMO a digital SLR would need to be around 64 mega watsits to match that of a 35mm full frame.
But then I am getting on a bit, I started my career making tea for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin and Daryl Zanuck amongst others, all of them long since dead. Mind you then again so are most of my contempories:)
Re: curved windows – there is a guy that makes silicone “adapters” that go between window and lens; ULH claims to be the original, but there are many “clones” on Amazon, and probably any other online retailer. The cooking section of your local supermarket might also yield something useful.
I don’t know if Olympus ever made one.
I had an OM2SP for many years which was all black. That was the first SLR which actually delivered good pics virtually all the time – due to the spot meter.
I used to get my film cheap as short ends (recanned bits of film returned at the end of a movie) from stock shops
10/10 for imagination
IMO a digital SLR would need to be around 64 mega watsits to match that of a 35mm full frame.
Which film? With Provia 100, you would see the grain at 64MP resolution if zoomed 1:1 so there is no real “information” there. You just end up with a massive jpeg if you can it to 64MP. When I scanned my slides (5000dpi) I got 90MB TIFFs and I ran Photoshop in a batch mode to convert them to jpegs and found that ~5MB jpegs were as good as was extractable. Any more and no difference could be seen, at pixel level.
Mind you then again so are most of my contempories:)
The objective is to out-live all one’s contemporaries
Peter wrote:
I have recently got a Canon G7X
I would like to get one RAW image from that Camera to try it out in Lightroom if you could? maybe on email?? I was going to buy a G7X for my business partner who is less into photography than me. It seems like it is a good compact camera and can do good video also.
I will dropbox some to you. They are about 20MB. I don’t have any because I convert the CR2 files (the G7X doesn’t do DNG) to uncompressed TIFF with a Canon batch converter because my version of Lightroom (I refuse to go for the Adobe’s £10/month rent ripoff scheme) doesn’t do CR2, and then I delete them.
Most of the pics here were done with the G7X.
The biggest problems are haze and reflections. Nice cloudless VFR usually means haze
Whilst I enjoy using film, it’s usually too much hassle to take proper photos while flying. Even with not focussing it still takes time to think about light, speed, aperture etc (only 2 out of 8 cameras have (working) lightmeters). I’ll try again with someone else flying and see what happens. The negatives are scanned on a Fujifilm SP3000 and I’ve been very happy with the results: largest print from the scan is A2 size and no loss of quality.
The lens makes a big difference, e.g. Praktikars are only good for close-ups, but Jupiter and Helios (Soviet Zeiss copies) are much better for landscapes, with Minolta Rokkor somewhere in between.
My best film aerial photo, Didcot power station, Zorki 4 camera with Jupiter 8 lens.
I got a Sony Cybershot camera in 2006 that took good photos, examples in this Corsica thread.
Keeping the aeroplane out of the frame can be a challenge, but a clean composite wing and winglets can look good.
