User Comparisons

I recently noticed this 2004 article by
Huntington Witherill, whose photographs are maintained in numerous distinguished public art collections. Since 1975, Witherill has taught photography for a variety of institutions and workshop programs throughout the United States:

If you don't intimately know the technical and expressive capabilities and nuances of your tools, and know precisely how to get those tools to perform to your will, you'll likely never achieve successful photographs on a consistent basis.

Digital tools and materials continue to change and reinvent themselves with the frequency of high fashion hemlines! Acquiring and subsequently maintaining control and familiarity with digital tools and materials remains a particularly elusive, redundant, and time consuming task.

There are now so many photographers either going back to film or choosing to avoid digital that I don't have time to create separate entries for every article I find. Therefore here are a few articles I discovered today from those who prefer Film to Digital:

FAQ: Why do you prefer film over digital?

Film has a depth – an artistic quality – that is hard to achieve in digital. It CAN be achieved in digital, but it’s never quite the same – the grey tones in true black and white film are only found in true black and white film. There’s no way around that.

The Medium Pt 2 – Why I prefer film

The only real difference I can see is financial, if you are a working professional and need your pictures ready within the hour.

One thing I enjoy about film is the sheer diversity of the analog world.

One thing I love about my Leica is its usability, in terms of product design. It’s such a simple tool, minimum functions, minimum buttons. It does one thing and one thing only, so well in fact, Leica didn’t think it was necessary to alter the design in nearly a century....

Why We Love Film

You want dynamic range? I got your dynamic range right here in this little canister. It's called film; a write-once, read-many (WORM) medium.

A frame of 35mm film, scanned cheaply at a good photo lab to a CD, is about equal to the resolution of a 25MP DSLR.

Last August, professional photographer Kirk Tuck had an "epiphany" that led him to reinvest in Hasselblad medium format film equipment:

Like a junky I embraced the change represented by digital....I'd make the images and process them but in the back of my mind I'd always wondered if they were even remotely as good as they could be if the clients had more time, more patience and more tolerance and respect for the process.

This pushed me to look for the holy grail of digital cameras. I've bought all comers and the magic never came along with the package. I've read a thousand times in the forums and in people's blogs that the tools don't matter, only the vision. And I bought into the truisms like everyone else. But something in the back of my brain kept nagging at me and teasing at my ego....

The essential nature of the digital image is that it is easy to make, ephemeral and disposable. Rational people generally regard things that have these qualities as having no value. - Nathan Jones

At the beginning of 2009, having chided his father for sticking with film, Nathan Jones shelved his well-loved Nikon D80 and bought a used Nikon FM2n:

I gave up a killer 11-point autofocus, accurate aperture- and shutter-priority exposure, near-infallible matrix metering, through-the-lens flash, Nikon’s famed creative lighting system, auto-ISO....in favour of a purely mechanical camera that merely opens and closes the shutter when I tell it to, nothing more....I withdrew from Flickr. I gave up the confidence I had built in the camera...and transferred the responsibility for technically competent shots from the near infallible machine to the very fallible me. Why did I do these things?

Professional photographer Michael Escalera recounts his journey from film to digital and back to film again in his recent article, The Coming Change:

I have been photographing weddings for 11 years and love what I do for a living. When I first began, I used film....In 2005 I transitioned to a digital workflow....In my experience, the digital images were not as rich as the film images. Sure, they were sharper and in some cases more vibrant, but they didn't fully match what I had hoped they would be.

In June 2001, professional photographer Kirk Tuck achieved some small notoriety and elicited dozens of reader responses when he published his very compelling A Pro Photographer's review of the Leica M6 and lenses for it:

Everyone seems to have an opinion about the Leica M series rangefinder cameras, yet so few people have actually picked one up and used it for enough time to understand the unique features and benefits that make it one of the finest tools for certain kinds of photography.

Then on September 01, 2002, Kirk abruptly "went digital:"

Commercial photographer David Beckerman recounts the experiences that led him away from film and then finally back to it:

It began on July 4th, 2004. I was by the East River photographing fireworks with my Elan 3, and nearby was a fellow with a big Canon digital SLR that he had just bought for $4500. Sure it was a lot of money he said, but it paid for itself with a couple of photography assignment[s].

Last August, Bob Atkins published an article entitled The Writing on the Wall on photo.net. The article was rather inflammatory and generated numerous Reader's Comments, many of which were informative, insightful, and even humorous.

Unfortunately, when an article goes off photo.net's front page all reader comments are currently being dropped (see the current copy of Bob's article).

Fortunately, the wonders of html caching have preserved the entire article intact with reader comments. I've republished it below, unchanged except for minor formatting corrections. Read on for more..

This is a continuation of Part One.

Brief observation by author Fazal Majid :

Once you have used a digital SLR (DSLR) with a nice, clean, large, low-noise sensor, the poor image quality of most compact digicams becomes hard to tolerate. This is in contrast with film, where a $70 Olympus Stylus Epic can compete in image quality with thousand-dollar cameras.

Then it hit me: don't consider a pocket digicam as a camera, think of it as a pocket photocopier/scanner instead, like HP's ill-fated CapShare. I use my pocket digicam mostly to record specials in stores, flyers, magazine articles, diagrams on a whiteboard and the like. Japanese otaku teenagers are way ahead of me, as many bookstores in Tokyo now ban cameraphones because the kids would just snap photos of manga comic books and not pay.

Ian Kennedy jumped in to the digital revolution with both feet, one of the first to purchase an expensive Nikon D100 digital SLR. Now he has traded it for "an all-manual 35mm rangefinder with a 50mm prime lens." In this web page he explains why:

After a year and thousands of pictures, I decided that a DSLR, with all of its wonders, had an insidiously negative impact on the way I take photos. Because I was no longer worried about the amount of film that I was using, I frequently took three or more shots of the same subject and, to my shame, occasionally "chimped" those images as I took them.

Now, don't misunderstand me, digital photography is great for commercial work. I shot four weddings and a couple of piecemeal freelance gigs with the D100, and, honestly, if I was to shoot another wedding, especially one for just any client, I would want to do it digitally. Shooting digitally frees the photographer from the concern that the shot has been missed. But, with that said, it also discounts the thought and craft, even the happy accidents of photography. I realized I had been relying on digital for what it too easily becomes: a crutch.

Read the rest of Regressing: Why I Went Back to Film.

In his review of the Leica CM at PhotographyReview.com, syuji writes,

Just when I thought about going totally digital, I realized that with a reasonable scanner, you can make 16mega pixel digital photo from high quality (or any quality) film camera.

At PhotographyReview.com, jpg writes in his review of the Leica CM dated June 13, 2005,

I came upon the CM in a round about way. Previously I owned a Contax T2, which, unfortunately I traded for the new rage, a digital camera. After returning from a vacation trip, my wife and I compared photographs. We both noticed that that her little Leica Mini pics were much sharper and detailed then my digital camera shots. So I began wishing I hadn't sold my Contax T2 and Contax is out of production so the T2 was no longer available and the last T3 at the dealers was sold.