Why Digital Photographers Should Try Film
Digital photography has made taking photographs easier, faster and considerably more forgiving.
You can change ISO between frames, shoot hundreds of photographs without reloading, check the result immediately and correct many mistakes afterwards.
Those are enormous advantages.
But there is a downside. When the camera makes so many decisions for us, and when every frame costs almost nothing, it can become surprisingly easy to stop thinking carefully about the photograph before pressing the shutter.
That is one reason why digital photographers should consider trying film.
Not because film is somehow better than digital. It isn’t. Modern digital cameras are extraordinary pieces of technology and, in many situations, dramatically outperform the film cameras of the past.
The value of film is that it forces you to slow down and think.
Peter Ellis and Mike McNamee have both been photographers for more than half a century. Between them, they have experienced photography through the film era, the transition to digital and today’s increasingly sophisticated cameras.
They agree on one thing: there is still plenty that today’s digital photographer can learn from the disciplines of film photography.
Film makes you think about exposure
When Peter started in photography, taking a photograph involved making a conscious decision about exposure.
You assessed the light, selected an aperture and shutter speed, made the exposure and moved on.
If you were shooting expensive sheet film on a commercial assignment, you had a particularly good reason to get it right.
There was no rear screen to inspect.
No histogram.
No opportunity to zoom in and check whether you had nailed the focus.
And certainly no opportunity to shoot another 30 frames just in case one happened to work.
That pressure changes the way you photograph.
Film isn’t magically teaching you the correct exposure. Rather, the consequences of getting it wrong encourage you to pay attention to exposure in the first place.
That discipline transfers directly to digital photography.
Digital cameras can make us lazy
Modern cameras contain an extraordinary number of automatic systems.
They can select exposure, focus on faces and eyes, recognise subjects, track movement, adjust sensitivity and perform calculations that would once have required considerable experience.
None of this is bad.
In fact, these features can be incredibly useful.
The problem comes when the photographer stops understanding what the camera is doing.
It’s possible to own an extremely sophisticated camera while having only a vague understanding of aperture, shutter speed, ISO and the effect that changing each one has on the photograph.
The camera may produce a technically usable image.
But that isn’t the same thing as understanding photography.
Film removes many of those distractions.
Once you’ve selected your film, you have a much smaller set of decisions to make. That simplicity can be liberating.
Film encourages you to compose before you shoot
The same applies to composition.
With a digital camera, there is very little penalty for taking another photograph.
You can shoot one composition, move slightly, shoot another, change the focal length, shoot a burst and then work out which version you prefer later.
Sometimes that’s exactly the right approach.
But it can also encourage a rather passive way of photographing.
Instead of asking:
“What is the photograph I want to make?”
we can end up asking:
“Did I get anything useful?”
Film changes that relationship.
Every frame has a cost, however small. You are more likely to pause, look carefully around the frame and decide whether the photograph is actually worth making.
That doesn’t guarantee a good photograph.
But the habit of thinking before pressing the shutter is enormously valuable.
The cost of a photograph can be a useful lesson
Film photographers sometimes describe it as a “pay-per-click” medium.
That sounds obvious, but it changes your behaviour.
When you know that every frame has a cost, you start asking questions before making the exposure:
- Is the composition working?
- Is the light good enough?
- Is the subject in the right position?
- Is the background distracting?
- Is the focus where it needs to be?
- Is this actually worth photographing?
- Is there something I can change before I press the shutter?
Digital photographers can ask exactly the same questions.
We just don’t have to.
And perhaps that’s the problem.
A memory card capable of holding hundreds of photographs can create the illusion that quantity will compensate for a lack of judgement.
It won’t.
You can take 600 badly considered photographs just as easily as one.
Film can make you pay attention to light
Perhaps the greatest skill to develop is judgement of light.
A photographer who understands light can work with almost any camera.
A photographer who doesn’t understand light can own the most sophisticated camera available and still struggle.
Shooting film encourages you to assess the light before making the exposure because there is no immediate opportunity to correct your decisions.
Where is the light coming from?
How hard or soft is it?
What is happening in the shadows?
Is the subject brighter or darker than the background?
What exposure will preserve the important highlights?
Is the colour of the light going to help or hurt the photograph?
These are fundamental photographic questions, and they remain fundamental whether the image is recorded on film or a digital sensor.
You don’t actually need to shoot film to practise the discipline
This is where Mike McNamee takes the argument in a slightly different direction.
If the thing you want to learn from film is the discipline of thinking carefully before pressing the shutter, you can practise much of it with a digital camera.
Try this exercise.
Choose a selection of subjects that give you different lighting challenges. You could photograph a building, a sunset, a backlit portrait, a portrait in open shade and perhaps a car.
Then deliberately make your digital camera less helpful.
Try these settings
Use:
- Manual exposure
- A fixed ISO, perhaps ISO 400
- Manual focus if your lens allows it
- A fixed white balance
- A simple metering mode
- The camera’s exposure indicator rather than relying on automatic exposure
- One photograph of each subject
Most importantly:
No bracketing. No bursts. No checking the image and immediately reshooting.
Take the photograph and move on.
When you get home, look at the results.
How did you do?
Could you print the photographs without having to rescue them?
Were your exposures consistent?
Did you make the right decisions about light?
Was the composition actually good?
Did you focus accurately?
Were you happy with the colour?
You may find that the exercise is considerably harder than it sounds.
Try turning it into a competition
There is another way to make the exercise more interesting.
Do it with another photographer.
Give yourselves the same list of subjects and the same restrictions. Set a time limit and then compare the results afterwards.
You could even organise a small competition and have someone else judge the images without knowing who took which photograph.
The point isn’t really to discover who is the better photographer.
It’s to discover how well you can make decisions when the safety net of digital photography is removed.
And you may discover that the photographer with the simplest camera produces the strongest images.
You might discover how little you know about your camera
Mike remembers helping at a teaching seminar for novice wedding photographers.
The delegates were given a short list of photographs to make around the hotel grounds and sent out with a strict time limit.
One of the most striking things was how many photographers struggled with the basic operation of their own cameras.
Some even resorted to putting the camera into Program mode when they became unsure of what to do.
That’s an uncomfortable lesson.
We can spend hours researching new cameras and lenses while never spending enough time learning the equipment we already own.
A photographer doesn’t need to know every menu option in a modern camera.
But you should know the controls that matter to the way you photograph.
And, more importantly, you should know what to do when the camera doesn’t behave as expected.
Modern cameras can be surprisingly easy to confuse
There’s another irony here.
Modern cameras are designed to make photography easier, but their complexity can also create new ways to make mistakes.
Mike experienced this himself while photographing a church sundial.
The first frame was underexposed, so he adjusted the exposure compensation and tried again.
The next frame was slightly overexposed.
The following frame was dramatically overexposed.
The problem wasn’t the camera.
It was the photographer.
The camera had been left in a bracketing sequence from an earlier landscape shoot.
The exposure compensation had also been changed.
What looked initially like a camera malfunction turned out to be a collection of perfectly logical settings that were simply no longer appropriate for the photograph being made.
The camera was doing exactly what it had been told to do.
The photographer had forgotten what he had told it.
Learn to recognise when something is wrong
This is another skill that film photography can encourage.
When there are only a few controls, unexpected results are often easier to diagnose.
Modern cameras can have dozens of settings affecting the way an image is captured.
If something suddenly looks wrong, you need enough understanding to work out why.
Has exposure compensation been changed?
Is bracketing enabled?
Has the ISO moved?
Is the camera in the wrong exposure mode?
Has the focus mode changed?
Is the white balance appropriate?
Has someone else altered the camera?
Knowing your equipment means knowing how to recover from mistakes as well as how to create photographs when everything is working normally.
Film isn’t automatically better
It is important not to turn this into an argument that film is superior to digital.
It isn’t.
Digital cameras have transformed photography for very good reasons.
Modern autofocus systems can track subjects at speeds that would have been unimaginable with many older film cameras. Digital sensors offer exceptional image quality and sensitivity, and the ability to review images immediately is invaluable in countless situations.
For sport, wildlife, news and many commercial applications, digital technology has brought enormous advantages.
Even image quality is no longer a convincing argument for saying that film is simply better.
The important question is not whether film or digital produces the technically superior image.
It is what the process teaches you.
Film imposes useful limitations
This is perhaps the best reason for a digital photographer to try film.
Limitations can be useful.
If you have only a fixed number of frames, you think before pressing the shutter.
If you can’t immediately inspect the image, you have to trust your judgement.
If changing ISO means changing the film, you have to think about the conditions before you start.
If focusing is manual, you have to understand where the focus should be.
If the camera isn’t making every decision for you, you have to make some of those decisions yourself.
None of these things makes you a better photographer automatically.
But they create opportunities to practise the skills that underpin good photography.
You can take the same approach with digital
You don’t have to buy a film camera to benefit.
Try spending an afternoon using your digital camera as though it were a film camera.
Choose a fixed ISO.
Use manual exposure.
Set your white balance yourself.
Turn off anything you don’t need.
Use manual focus if appropriate.
Don’t chimp.
Don’t bracket.
Don’t shoot bursts.
And give yourself one frame.
Then concentrate on the things that actually matter:
light, subject, composition and timing.
You might find that your first instinct is to switch all the automatic features back on.
That’s fine.
The point isn’t to make digital photography unnecessarily difficult.
The point is to remind yourself that the camera is a tool and that you are the photographer.
Slow photography can be useful
Photography doesn’t always have to be slow.
Sometimes you need to react instantly.
Sometimes a fast burst is exactly what is required.
But not every photograph is a sporting event.
There is value in deliberately slowing down from time to time.
Take a landscape and spend five minutes looking before you make an exposure.
Study a portrait before you decide where to put the light.
Walk around a building and find the composition rather than photographing it from the first convenient position.
Look at the edges of the frame.
Look at the shadows.
Look at what is behind the subject.
Then take the photograph.
These are simple habits, but they can make a significant difference.
The real benefit of film is what happens between photographs
The biggest lesson isn’t really about film.
It’s about judgement.
Film encourages you to make decisions before the photograph exists.
Digital photography makes it incredibly easy to make decisions afterwards.
Both approaches have their place, but if you spend all your time relying on the second one, you can neglect the first.
So borrow a film camera if you have the opportunity.
Load a roll and give it a try.
Or, if you’d rather avoid film altogether, put a manual lens on your digital camera, fix the ISO, switch to manual exposure and give yourself one chance at every photograph.
See what happens.
You may discover that your camera isn’t the thing that needs an upgrade.
Your photographic judgement might simply need a little practice.
As the old saying goes, it’s not the box between your hands; it’s the box between your ears.
