Chris Northcott

This is a quote I heard quite recently from a… “professional” photographer upon telling him I use film. A similar reaction was garnered from my local Flickr group after our last meet.

What a load of toss. I LOVE film. I HATE digital photography, with a passion. Call me old school, but I’m only 23 and I’ve seen the rise of solid-state digital cameras and they’re still nowhere near comparable to film in my opinion.

Dynamic range. Remember GCSE maths, and the differentiation between discrete and continuous values? Colour values in digital are discrete *and* limited to a certain range. Got a scene with REALLY high contrast? Well tough — if metering for light the dark bits are going to be extremely dark and vice versa. This is changing in the higher-end dSLRs but is still a problem I see ruining otherwise good photos all too often.

Resolution. To recreate all the detail on a 35mm print neg would require approximately 10Mpx of data; a 35mm slide negative, like the 150lp/mm Fujichrome Velvia 50 RVP, requires almost 90 megapixels to obtain the same amount of detail. Things go even more detailed when you factor in MF and LF films; a single LF exposure would require a scanner with effective resolution of approximately 450Mpx — that’s almost half a Gpx!

Archival. Yes, if not stored properly, gelatin, and therefore film, degrades. But it takes decades! The FeO2 on a hard disk platter will probably start to degrade after 8-10 years, and silicon (SSD) storage is so unreliable for long-term archival storage I’m not even going to go there. By all means, store your negs digitally — but I’ve seen properly stored negatives from the 60s and 70s that are still printable and just as usable as the day they were developed. You can just put them away and forget about them. But if you store your photos online, companies go bust. Data gets lost. Hardware fails. You actually have to check on your backups, which is something you don’t need to do with film.

“Think before you shoot”. Each exposure costs money. On Velvia bought in the UK this can be as high as 20p per exposure, or 3p/exp on the cheap stuff. But the fact this resource is finite, and expensive, makes you think much, much more before randomly snapping. Thinking about composition and similar factors to make sure you make best use of film is the best way to make sure you get good images every time.

Character. If you’re doing commercial photography that requires crystal clear, sharp-as-a-tack, clinically clean images with no noise whatsoever then yes. By all means go digital. But that clinical characteristic robs the final product of character and warmth. A trained eye can tell a digital image from a film one by just this lack of character.

So my rebuttal to this? Digital is kind of like the Polaroid of the 21st century. Yes, you get clean, tack-sharp images, but they have about as much soul, depth and character as a brick wall. Call me silly if you want but part of the art of photography is catching the mood/soul/character of a scene, which digital misses a lot of the time, even after the photographer has expended significant effort in trying to capture it.