Film should be history, right? Wrong! Yes, technically, commercially and even environmentally, it’s an anachronism. A modern digital SLR will produce sharper, smoother images than any 35mm film camera, and at higher ISOs. A single memory card can hold as many images as ten rolls of film and offer them up for inspection and printing the moment they’ve been taken, not hours or days later. The only chemicals used are the inks used to supply inkjet printers and, for digitally-distibuted images, not even these. Film is technically inferior, precludes any kind of post-shoot checking, brings a horrendously slow workflow and relies on noxious chemicals. It should be dead, but it isn’t. Why?

    I review digital cameras for a living, and I’ve been doing this for the past eight years. I’ve used every major digital SLR ever released barring, from memory, the Nikon D2x. There are probably others I’ve missed, but none which weren’t minor variants of others I have seen. All this should have convinced me more than ever that digital is the future and that film is the past. Now I’m not a ‘proper’ film photographer. I don’t have a darkroom and I don’t have silver prints made. I shoot film but then scan the results and blend them into my otherwise digital workflow. Hands up to that one. Nevertheless, the fact is, the more I shoot digital, the more I like film.

    I’m not happy unless I understand things, and I want to understand this. I’ve spent some considerable time thinking it through and I believe I’ve come up with some useful explanations.

    So here goes:

This is just my opinion, of course, and others may think differently, but when I scroll through my collection of images, it’s the film scans which stand out. You can’t make a digital image look like Velvia. You can fiddle all you like with the Saturation, Selective Color, Channel Mixer, Curves or whatever else you like in Photoshop, but it can’t be done. The closest you can get is a kind of lurid parody which just isn’t right. You can’t reproduce the complex interactions of fifteen layers of emulsion (or however many it is) with a bunch of sliders and percentages. Here’s another. A bleak winter landscape under a stormy sky begs for HP5 or Tri-X. It needs the grain, and it needs that type of grain. You can’t recreate it from a digital image in Photoshop, and I know Photoshop as well as I know digital SLRs. You can get close, or what appears to be close, but it’s not right, any more than Photoshop’s Impressionist filter can match a Monet.

A classic ‘Velvia’ shot. It’s party the colours (especially those cool, rich greens), partly the way it produces immense saturation without any artificiality, partly the way the highlights retain colour and tone and don’t just shoot off the end of the scale. Could this be duplicated in Photoshop? I don’t think it could. Not in all these different respects.

    Now I’m quite sure that digital images are more accurate representations of the world, and I’m equally sure that it’s possible to prove this. The thing is that I don’t care. I’m not interested in whether my pictures are accurate, only whether I like the way they look. We get too hung up on realism. It’s OK if you’re a lab technician, or an architect, but that’s not what most photographers are trying to do. We’re not trying to present the world per se, but our own interpretation of it. It’s more important that it’s satisfying than that it’s ‘correct’.  

    There are differences in the tonal response of film and digital. Film tends to have high midtone contrast and flattened highlights and shadows. Digital tends to be more linear in its response. Film generally has weak shadow detail but good highlights. Digital is the other way round. I simply prefer punchy midtones and well-rendered highlights. Shadow detail isn’t top of my list.

    Film is grainier, especially if you sharpen up your scans (as you generally need to). Some photographers complain about the noise levels of digital cameras - they should try ISO 1600 film! Grain and noise don’t bother me much as long as they’re in harmony with the subject. I compare it to ‘macroscopic’ and ‘microscopic’ qualities. A macroscopic quality is visible at any distance (tone, colour) but a microscopic quality (grain/noise) is only visible up close.

    Thanks to Photoshop’s Actual Size view, we go straight to the microscopic, sidestepping the macroscopic altogether. Perhaps the technological allure of digital cameras means we’re doing that with our creative processes too?

Notice something about this image? We have a sunset where the sun’s disc has not produced a larger zone of blooming/clipping around it. This was shot on Sensia 200 - you won’t get it to work on a digital SLR unless the sun is a lot dimmer than this.

Every frame you shoot costs money. Each one will need to be scanned (if you plan on using film in a digital workflow), and there are few more tedious processes than scanning. There’s no instant gratification from seeing the image played back on an LCD. You don’t take a shot on film unless it’s right.

    With a D-SLR, of course, you shoot a thousand and promise yourself you’ll find the one gem amongst them when you get back home. You won’t, of course, because there won’t be one. You’ll have a thousand lazy, hastily-conceived photographs. We assume (it’s a very Western thing) that if a thing can be done faster with less effort it’s better. Not really. Ask a painter.

    Now you might be a digital photographer who’s very disciplined and can apply the same discipline to shooting digital as shooting film. I, however, am not. Despite my best efforts I don’t, and probably can’t, interact with a digital camera the way I do with a film camera.

I like film cameras more than digital cameras, especially cameras a few years old. So what’s wrong with digital cameras? Let’s start with all the digital ‘options’, shall we? We assume that choice is good and more choice is better, don’t we? But you can’t have choice without decisions, all of which take time and introduce and the possibility of error. I have lost count of the number of digital images I’ve lost to incorrect settings because I’ve only noticed too late that the camera’s set to the wrong ISO, the wrong white balance, the wrong image size or file format, picture style or focus mode. A pre-flight check on the Space Shuttle has got to be quicker than this.

    And even after all that you’re still stuck with some basic limitations that no amount of technology can get around. We’ve got multi-pattern metering systems working to some intrinsic logic of their own that’s impossible to second-guess and still dependent on inherently flawed reflected meter readings, and multi-point autofocus systems so complex none of us have time to explore them properly and all of which take longer to override than focussing manually in the first place. (Which is much harder to do these days because the viewfinders are half the size.) We seem to have invented (and bought into) stupendously complex technology to save ourselves the effort of doing things that we are really perfectly capable of doing better ourselves.

    I have a number of favourite cameras. One is an Olympus Trip 35 from the 1970s, which cost £10 on eBay. I has a fixed focal length lens so you have to use your feet, not a zoom ring (more trouble, fewer decisions - I can live with that). The viewfinder is big, and being a direct vision type, shows you what’s around the frame as well as it it. And the mechanical shutter release is instant - really instant - in a way electromagnetic releases aren’t. You can feel the weight building under your fingertip just as the shutter’s about to trip. After any digital camera, this instant response is incredibly liberating. You really can shoot things when they happen. A selenium cell (no batteries required) around the lens takes care of the metering. It’s crude and easily fooled, but you know exactly when it’s going to be fooled and how much to compensate.

    I have another favourite, so much so that I bought a second. It’s a Pentax ME Super from the 1980s. Again, the shutter response is instant. The viewfinder is HUGE and has a microprism/split-image rangefinder in the centre for pinpoint focussing. It was £25 with a 50mm f1.7 standard lens. A 28mm f2.8 was another £25, and a 135mm f3.5 another £15. It works in aperture-priority or manual mode with quick and easy exposure compensation and a metal shutter which seems to work as well as the day it was made (more so than cloth shutters of the same era). The point about the ME Super (and the Trip) is that there’s almost nothing to know and nothing to check. My attention is 10% on the camera, 90% on the subject. With a digital SLR it’s likely to be nearer 30/70% or even 50/50%, and that’s not good.

One of my favourite cameras: an Olympus Trip 35 from the 1970s. No batteries, no zoom and simple four-position zone focussing. But less shutter lag than a 1Ds Mk III and a direct vision viewfinder four times bigger than any digital compact’s. There’s nothing to know and nothing to do, so at last you’re looking ‘through’ the camera and not at it.

This argument might sound the most tenuous, but I suspect that it’s the most important. Why don’t I like my digital images as much as my film images? Never mind their different ‘look’, their tonal range or the fact I like film cameras. I think there’s something else. I devote much more attention to my film images. I have to wait longer to see them and I have to go to more trouble. I’ve had more time to think about them and anticipate them, which means I give them much more attention when I get them. I’ve invested much more in them intellectually and emotionally than I have with my digital images, which simply require a few moment’s thought and the press of a button.

    When I shoot on film, my ideas about the image, my mental associations and my imagination are engaged far more fully. It’s a by-product of the longer process, but not all by-products are bad. I think my feelings about my own photographs need longer to gestate than the point-click-view digital process permits, and I think I’m not the only one.

An abandonned bunker complex in the Bristol Channel, shot on Ilford Pan F with a red filter. One of my favourite black and white shots. Why? Not just the composition but the tone and grain characteristics of the film, the way the camera’s fully-manual controls affected the way I used it, and the amount of thinking that’s gone into the image before, during and since. I simply don’t relate to digital cameras and the digital process in the same way.

NOT EITHER BUT BOTH

For commercial photography and holiday snaps, digital is the only thing that makes sense. You may prefer the rendition of digital to film for your personal shots too. That’s fine. Most of my photographs are shot on digital because it’s my job and because I can usually wrestle the results I want out of them. But while others may not, I do still like film, and I now think I know why. There’s more to photography than speed, cheapness and gadgets, and you can’t automate the thinking process.

    The danger for me and, I suspect, for others is that I (we) start to imagine that this is an ‘either/or’ thing, that we have to come down one way or the other in favour of film or digital and show complete loyalty to whichever we choose ever after.

    Of course, it needn’t be that way at all. My go-anywhere Panasonic TZ3 is irreplaceable for travel, outings and casual photography. No film camera could match its 10x zoom, image stabilisation, 600-shot capacity (with a 2Gb card) and sheer pocketability. Or, if I want sharp, smooth ‘commercial-quality’ images I’ll use my Fujifilm S3 Pro (superb skintone rendition) or Canon EOS 400D.

    But if I want to capture the low, scudding clouds and bleak seaside architecture of a British seaside resort in winter, it could only ever be my Pentax ME Super, an SMC 28mm, a handful of graduated filters and a pocket-ful of Ilford HP5. And if I go back in the summer with its deep blue skies, brilliant primary colours and warm afternoon/evening sunlight, only Velvia is going to get it just how I want it.

    So maybe that’s the answer: digital when you must, but film when you can.

Sometimes only digital makes sense, but sometimes only film will do.

© Rod Lawton 2008