Digital vs. Film - Why Both Must Co-Exist

A recent article I found on the web wonders how much longer photographic film can survive in this exceedingly digital world we live in. The topic comes up many times as sales of film rapidly decline and less and less businesses exist to actually develop and print your film. So in the battle between digital and film, it looks like digital has its opponent on the ropes.

Not so fast, I say. I believe we are oversimplifying the issue by even comparing the digital and film processes. Digital photography and film based photography can and should co-exist, and let me tell you why.

The false assumption when comparing digital and film is that the ultimate product, the photographic print, is exactly the same for both processes. However, if art teaches us anything, it is that the process itself lends itself to the finished product. For example, you can draw a portrait using colored pencils or you can paint the same portrait using watercolors. Even if you tried to make the images look the same, there would be some obvious differences in the finished products because the process of drawing with a pencil is very different from the process of painting with a brush.

Digital photography and software based editing tools such as Photoshop helped democratize the creative process around photography. You no longer needed fancy equipment in a darkroom and hundreds of hours of classroom training to create some amazing effects with your photographs. In that sense, digital photography was a revolution for the “Everyman” photographer and a huge time-saver for the professional photographer. However, digital photography is closer to science than art in the sense that if you write down your settings (or create scripts) you can duplicate your effect perfectly.

Now think about the process of taking an image from unexposed film to print in a darkroom setting. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of variables that change the outcome of your final image: chemical temperatures and dilutions, light leaks, emulsion imperfections, just to name a few. You could take a photo of the exact same subject and from development to print, you would never get the exact same result.

This randomness of consistency is what is currently driving the revival of lo-fi equipment like Holga and the popularity of the much-inferior Instagram, which is merely a digital representation of a process that is by nature very analog. People dig imperfection. That’s what makes us human and it makes our images human.

My point is this: the digital photography and film-based photography processes are so vastly different they should both be considered art forms in their own rights. You may be a Photoshop wizard who can’t even burn a print in a darkroom. Great - be the best digital photographer you can be. Or you may be an old school darkroom jockey whose clothes always smell like “fix” who doesn’t even know how to download images off an SD card. Awesome - go out and create the richest images you can.

I realize there are economic factors which may decide the fate of photographic film in the long run. But I believe as long as there are people who are willing to pay to keep an art form alive, film-based photography can and should live forever right alongside digital photography.

Comments

[Stef]

I very much agree with your point of view in this post. As someone with an interest in photography, I own a Nikon D90, a Minolta X300 film camera and a polaroid camera. I primarily use my Nikon D90 because not only am I more familiar with using its functions, I am someone who cherishes the simplicity of shooting in digital. I bought my film SLR last year and don’t use it as much as I would like to. But when I do it is because I think of how film creates a different kind of photograph than digital does. Although I think of digital photography as the simpler option, I don’t just think of that difference between the two. They both offer such different ways to create photos both in the shooting and the developing processes. I very much agree with the fact that digital and film photography should co-exist. There will always be the people who prefer to shoot in film, and those that prefer digital. And from that, we are only able to create a more vast and exciting world of photography. Thanks for a great opinion to read!