Film versus digital photography

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Okay, this is a sensitive subject that I have been dreading writing about, and if you look it up on the internet, you will find thousands of old-school photographers and digital enthusiasts engaged in battle over which is better. The truth is that neither is better, they're just different and which is the better choice is going to depend a whole lot on what you are trying to do with it. If you look at this strictly from the viewpoint of photo quality, and especially resolution, most 35mm films can't stand up to modern digital cameras -- except that there are still one or two left that can. These tend to be very slow ISO 25 (or lower) black and white films and ultra-high resolution films; yes, there are still a very few of those around, like Rollei 25, Adox CMS II 20 and Bluefire police film. They can stand up to digital cameras because the limiting factor, in BOTH cases (digital and film), is going to be the lens, not the recording medium. BOTH very high resolution film and the very highest megapixel digital cameras are capable of capturing more than any lens can deliver. 

That said, film has a greater latitude (also known as  dynamic range). In simple terms, this means that you will see more detail in the very dark and very light areas of the photos. This means that if you are standing inside a shadowy barn and you're shooting a brilliantly lit subject, wearing a white dress, who is standing in full sunlight outside, you are going to have much more trouble capturing detail both inside the barn and in the subject if you are using a digital camera than you would if you were using one of the aforementioned films. Film also comes in medium format and in large format, where digital cameras, of the same format and with comparable lenses, still can't really compete. A Hasselblad, with the best lenses money can buy, can make enlargements of up to 3x4 feet before running into something called empty enlargement (the point where enlarging a photo any more only results in lowering its quality). That same camera, with a roll film back and a very good ISO 25 film in it, can go to 4x5 feet before running into the same problem. There is no perceptible advantage in resolution, of course, unless you happen to be participating in an art show where you'll be showing BIG prints or unless you are shooting for billboards or murals, but it is there if you DO want to shoot those things. All else being equal, pretty much the only immediately perceptible difference in smaller prints is going to be in the dynamic range.

All that said, digital cameras do have several distinct advantages over film. They have almost entirely supplanted film cameras in photojournalism, because if you can upload your images to a laptop and e-mail them to your editor in a few minutes from Istanbul, then your film-using competitor has no hope of beating you to the punch. Even if he has a film scanner, he has to take time to develop and scan his negatives and by converting them to a digital format, he has lost all that dynamic range that was his sole advantage over your digital photos. In order to produce prints that have the advantage of the added dynamic range, he has to make them with an enlarger, in a darkroom and send them by snail mail, where his editor (who may or may not ever receive them up to two weeks later) isn't going to be able to produce all that detail in his magazine of newspaper. This is one reason why the last bastion of old-school film photography is mostly in making museum quality or show quality fine art prints. You are never going to see this difference in any images you find on the internet, by the way, because everything on the internet is digital (you have to scan it to put it there).

Another big reason why film photography is still around, especially on the fine art scene, is because of the papers that you can use to make prints. With digital photography, one paper is very much like another. With film photography, different papers have enormous differences, and some papers show more detail than others, as well as there being many differences in finish, archival qualities and tone (no one really knows how digital prints will stand up to film prints archivally, because there are no 150-year-old digital photos). There are even differences in the porosity of the paper, and the permeability of the emulsion, which make a visible difference. Some papers react to toning differently than others (gold toning a print can show more detail with some papers, and some papers can have color shifts when over-exposed to toners) and some papers react to different toners more or less strongly too. If you know what is going to happen, you can USE this.

In short, different strokes for different folks.
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Vonburgherstein's avatar
Shooting film with a 60 year old camera is more fun than shooting with a new digital. Film makes you think twice about the shooting conditions. I love the old sunny 16 rule.

Cheers and happy shooting