Digital vs. Film

by Sean Alan Stone, January 10, 2023.

In a digital age, is film finally dead? Ask any person on the street, and they'll tell you the only camera they carry is the one on their phone. It takes fine pictures, is easy to share, and doesn't involve other purchases. But in the underbelly of cities worldwide, millions of folks would disagree. Film is in high demand if you can believe it. With companies like Polaroid closing up shop in 2008, many wrote film off as an archaeological art form cataloged away with the hieroglyphics. But, like hieroglyphs, things don't go away. They change formats. 🍑💨 am I right?

Film is no different; with more custom smaller film companies rising to the forefront of popularity (such as Cinestill), there are broad options for new and seasoned photographers. But what about digital? You're reading this digitally. The photos you see below are scanned in and digitized, and there are billions of images added to 'the gram' and other sites daily to stoke the digital fire of "feed me more content." Not to mention all the options (I'll cover in another post) about DSLRs, sensor size, lens kits, anamorphic, prime, filters, RAW, Photoshop, and other staples in the modern photography tool belt. A lot is going on.

In the battle between Film vs. Digital, I fall back on what I know to be the truth. So use what works for you.

It's a simple truth but a challenging one to maintain. Many blogs cover how much better the newest camera is than the older version. How superior film cameras are to digital ones or vice versa. Buy this new gadget, a new LUTs package, a new strap, a new tripod, and an app that schedules all your posts. And all that is well and good, but for most of us, that's not why we got into this or keep coming back to it.

I love photography because it gives me an escape from the day-to-day. It puts me solely in the present moment and makes me feel like an adventurer or archeologist out on a dig about to discover a missing piece of magic or another world. When you are shooting moments, they are lost forever as soon as you press the button, never to return. There is something powerful about that. Even on photoshoots with clients, I've seen many people stressed out about ensuring everything is the image of perfection. I understand that stress, as so many things have come into place to bring us to this moment. I acknowledge the pressure and then exhale deeply, let it go, and enjoy the moment instead of being stressed because the moment is life. The moment is us living our life in real-time, and we get to document and save this part.

(Collage of 35 Film, RAW Digital, and Digital Graded shots of @EricJKuhns and @NigelBarros)

I have shot on iPhones, flip phones, disposable, film cameras, SLRs, and DSLRs, the first iteration of a digital camera back in the early 2000s. I can't remember what type of camera that was, but the images were grainy, the zoom was pure digital zoom, the storage was a floppy disc inserted in the side, and as far as I know, all the photos I took with it are with the hieroglyphs. They may still be somewhere, but they're hard to find and even harder to decipher in most cases. So what's the verdict?

Shoot what you love and shoot what you have. Digital? Great. A Film guru? Awesome. A person just starting out and only has an older model phone? THAT'S GREAT! Use what you have, and that can only make you better. I look back at photos I've shot with my Sony a6000, and I felt mixed emotions at the time.

I felt great because that was the first camera I bought for myself, and I felt like I was "official" and not my phone. But I also felt bad because the internet shamed me. I felt my phone wasn't this enough or that enough or was "entry level." To all those who say you're less than for doing what you love, brush them off. They are missing the point and that has more to say about them than you. The point of photography, and life on a larger scale, is to enjoy the process. To get out of our patterns and routine, to experience life in a new way. A hopeful way. Around new people or places, see the world in that moment.

That's all we really have, and I am glad it is.

#Photon: This hashtag is a portmanteau, aka the squishing together of two words, Photo On. It's also "a particle representing a quantum of light or other electromagnetic radiation. A photon carries energy proportional to the radiation frequency but has zero rest mass." A distant ancestor of photography. Feel free to tag your post with #Photon; I'd love to see what you see.

Follow Eric J. Kuhns and Nigel Barros on Youtube and Instagram for more great content.