Dear Ian,

If you are fishing for some answers to your question, you will certainly get a variety of qualified answers from this group, and few expletives thrown in for colour balance...

That said, I use a film negative, and although I do not use a digital camera, I marry the analog environment, and the digital environment together through a quality scanner. For the moment, I prefer this marriage. I plan to reestablish a silver fiber based print medium back into my image making process, created from a scanned digital file, whether it is a digital negative assigned to contact printing in the darkroom, or a digital file managed by a digital enlarger. If you have a moment, maybe you could review the following article, written by a great American image maker, since you may require an additional perspective, from a non member too.

The article is located here: http://www.barnbaum.com/Thoughts_-_article.html

I hope you are successful in your schooling...

jim k