Wondering why I still shoot film

[Jim Jones]

It is logical for someone starting out in photography to go digital. However, I have the film equipment I used decades ago. With experience it does even better today than long ago. It is paid for, while the ever evolving digital world can be expensive. On my wall is a digital print of the White House Ruins in the Canyon de Chelly shot by Timothy O'Sullivan in 1873 with the relatively primitive equipment of the day. Ansel Adams photographed the same subject from the same position almost 70 decades later. I prefer O'Sullivan's capture. With the labor involved in wet plate photography, O'Sullivan made the best of his opportunity. It is the photographer, not his tools, that makes the photograph.

[Alan Klein]

• Though I like to think of my work as artistic, photographs are all about information or content. Clarity is something I have always valued. I am currently torn as to why I continue to shoot film because the digital stuff is cleaner, clearer and has loads more information and tonality. Despite the claims I read about film is superior...I have to question this thinking as of 2016.

I think you answered your own question. If you want information and content, clarity is very important. But art isn't about that necessarily. I shoot medium format not LF so I lose the ability of camera movements. Yet the process of MF shooting is slow, deliberate and provides a really different look from digital which appears too sharp, too clear, too clinical. In the end it really doesn't matter as long as you enjoy what you're doing.

[Peter Lewin]

My answer, and the one espoused by about half of the preceding posts, is "process." Few still argue that on a purely technical basis, film is "better" (whatever that means) than digital. Yes, view cameras let one shift the plane of focus, but tilt lenses for digital, and Photoshop, let you achieve many of the benefits of tilts or swings in digital form. What I think it always comes back to is our enjoyment of the process: the somewhat analytical approach which goes with the use of a view camera, enjoyment or satisfaction with the choice of film, developer, and the "mechanics" of development, and often the physical aspects of print making. It is tactile, and has elements of "craft" absent from the digital approach. When these things stop being fun and stop yielding satisfaction, we will switch to digital. (Many here are quite competent with digital, but continue to use film for their personal work for all the reasons mentioned.)

[Mark Sawyer]

Wondering why I still shoot film in 2016...

For the same reason everyone does everything. Because we want to.

[Randy]

When I got into digital in the mid 90's I was thrilled with it (I had been an experienced film shooter/processor/printer since the very early 70's). But after spending so many hours looking at a computer monitor, adjusting picture files that probably didn't need adjusting, or did need adjusting because I didn't take the care when I pushed the shutter release button, and after constantly being bombarded by ads telling me that the camera I just spent a grand on less than a year ago can't capture the quality of images that the one now replacing it in the line-up, I grew frustrated.
I grew frustrated with constantly spending hundreds on inkjet printers and hundreds more on ink only to have the darn thing fail after a couple years.
I grew frustrated seeing images on line by middle aged women or men in their late teens, who had never owned a camera before their first 6 megapixel consumer grade digital camera, yet they were capturing such wonderfully creative images - but - they hadn't paid their dues like I had, by processing thousands of sheets of 4X5, thousands of rolls of 35mm and 120.
Lastly, I found myself no longer desiring the kind of images that can be made with digital. I guess a sign should have been that when I shot my personal work I always mounted my old manual focus Nikon AI lenses onto my Canon 5D via adapter, and then explored ways (software) to make some of my digital images have that "vintage" look.
When I made my first darkroom print last year, first in probably 15 years, it brought tears to my eyes.
Anyway, I still use digital for the occasional snap of a butterfly or close up of a wild flower, and I still like the results. I may eventually, with age, decide I no longer enjoy the process of shooting film, but for now...

[Jim Noel]

After 80 years with film, I do it because I like the craft. I tried digital a few years ago and quickly decided it was not for me. Too sedentary, too much button pushing, no craft, and the cost of equipment is outlandish. My cameras, many of which are 80 - 100 years old, still do a magnificent job and no upgrading is necessary.

[DrTang]

EZ: DoF and 'look'... some of which is all those cool old lenses

[Drew Wiley]

What is digital ?

[Greg]

Roughly 10 years ago I scanned and digitized a collection of 1,033 mostly 5x7 glass plates taken by a local photographer Charles Harrington between 1890-1905 for our town's museum. It amazed me that I could hold up the images taken more than 100 years ago and see what the images were of. The glass plates are archivally stored and I'm sure 100 years from now someone else will be able to hold them up and look at the images. I kept on thinking that 100 years from now someone will be given the gold DVDs and probably nopt be able to view the digital files.

Recently I came across a couple of SyQuest drives of digital images that I had worked on probably in the 1990s. I have no reader so I have no idea of what the images are. Last year I made Platinum/Palladium prints from negatives I shot in the 1970s via digital negatives since those negatives were not shot for printing with Platinum/Palladium.

[JChrome]

What is film?


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