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I'm afraid I disagree. It's not a different art form, it is just an evolution of it. There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's c

I'm afraid I disagree. It's not a different art form, it is just an evolution of it. There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better. Comparing the transition to painting versus photography is just ridiculous - you might as well compare painting to sculpture, because they are genuinely different art forms. 3D printing and sculpting are completely different processes to produce a 3D shape - film and digital photography are two almost identical processes to produce the same end result. I don't see a single argument in favour of film besides nostalgia. A much more accurate comparison would be someone who insists on heating pots over a wood fire every night, rather than using a gas flame.

noblethrasher 12y ago
Introducing (artificial) constraints can produce a different form of art.
rubyrescue 12y ago
people still cook over an open fire. we call those people "campers".
gaius 12y ago
two almost identical processes to produce the same end result Not true - wet printing with silver paper is fundamentally unlike digital output. Also, good restaurants do use wood fired ovens for pizza.
- singlow 12y ago
  Pizza doesn't go in a pot.
mbrock 12y ago
Do you think this argument is going to convince someone who enjoys shooting with film? I'm sure it won't, and that's interesting. The question comes up all over in art making, and it's never resolved through these kinds of arguments. I don't think most people who enjoy shooting on film put it forward as better than digital. That's why you don't hear "a single argument in favour." It's not a question of better or worse. As for your argument, "digital cameras can do everything film cameras do" is first of all wrong, and second of all irrelevant even if true. Why wrong? Well, consider chemical crossprocessing, or the effects of expired film, or just the different tones of different types of stock. You might either be uninterested in such things, or think that these effects can be easily reproduced with postprocessing, but even in the latter case it's different, different skills are required, different tools, different mindsets. Why irrelevant? Because at least some of the perceived value of film comes from the limitations themselves. That's something you can never get at through making the digital tools more advanced—in fact, it just gets worse. For someone who shoots on B&W film, the lack of color can be a feature. Even the small capacity of a film roll can be a boon; for example, it might give me a mindset of scarcity and significance. There's a restaurant in Stockholm that only uses wood fire. I won't knock it until I've tasted it. And the presence of fire is something in itself, aside from culinary blind tests.
- gaius 12y ago
  For someone who shoots on B&W film, the lack of color can be a feature. Yes, you will definitely notice this if you shoot alot - composition in B&W images is more about geometry and symmetry and texture, and you look at colours differently two, you are always thinking, that's a vivid contrast in colour but they will be the same tone of grey. Shooting colour with the intent to convert later, is as you say a different mindset.
  - 75dvtwin 12y ago
    I agree with that. I find that looking at good B&W photos is similar to listening to acoustic instrumental music. Where the characteristics of the music are passed through an instrument without coloration by voice or by other instruments
  - steve19 12y ago
    how is it a different mindset? you don't see B&W through your viewfinder? you see the exact same thing the color-covert-later shooter is seeing. also, modern digital cameras with EVF allow you to see B&W through the viewfinder.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      But not film B&W, which has a different colour and contrast response to "let's remove all the saturation" viewfinder B&W. Personally I'm happy with a 100% digital workflow. In fact these days I take most photos on an iPhone, and leave the SLR at home. But I also know that film and optical filtering look different.. You can produce an imitation of a film look with digital processing. But it's an imitation. There are subtleties of colour, grain, contrast/brightness response, and differential colour resolution that are very complicated. And different films respond in different ways. Everyone can see the difference between digital, budget Kodak, and a roll of Fujifilm Velvia. And if you're shooting medium or large-format, that's a different ballgame again. Don't believe me? Take some pictures of a fire. The film and digital versions will look completely different. Is it worth the effort? For snappy snaps, certainly not. Digital kills it for convenience. But if I worked as high-end commercial landscape, architectural, or art photographer, I'd certainly consider film for at least some projects.
foldr 12y ago
> There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better. Like the other posters, I disagree that this is relevant. However, there are no practically affordable large format digital cameras, and the depth of field effects and resolution that you can get from a 4x5 or 8x10 view camera still can't be obtained digitally. (At 2000dpi, 4x5 is 96MP and 8x10 is 320MP. You can get that resolution from a decent consumer flatbed.)
- unfamiliar 12y ago
  The resolution of digital cameras is limited by optical diffusion, not megapixel count, and since this applies just as much to film cameras your 2000dpi is irrelevant.
  - pandaman 12y ago
    Depth of field, though, is limited by the sensor's dimensions, which is drastically different between film and digital. A 35mm film equivalent digital camera is already a pretty expensive "full-frame", a mid-format digital cameras are available at the price of a mid-luxury car and large format digital is not available for a consumer at all.
    - steve19 12y ago
      depth of field has nothing to do with sensor size, it's only related to focal length. the advantage of large/medium format is that longer focal lengths have a wider field of view than 35mm.
      - pandaman 12y ago
        Well, I won't get into semantics fight and will concede this to you. Yet, you are still looking at the fact that you can take pictures with a film/glass camera that are either very expensive or impossible to take with a digital one. Specifically, you won't be able to get the same depth of field with the same composition of the frame for the reasons we both seem to understand.
cbabraham 12y ago
https://medium.com/@cba/film-photography-for-rationalists-6494c57c77a6 https://medium.com/@cba/film-photography-for-rationalists-64... I wrote this to address exactly this intuition about film. But tl;dr, the experience of shooting film and digital have huge differences and the photos you get at the end are influenced by the process of taking them. They are not just pixels that exist in a vacuum.
- micampe 12y ago
  Excellent reading. I smiled at this “Unlike the dSLR, this camera isn’t a black box”.
aaronbrethorst 12y ago
Digital cameras cannot produce a latent image on a piece of film coated with silver gelatin. That's good enough for me.
WalterBright 12y ago
I suppose it's a lot like the silliness about preferring vinyl records to CDs. Sometimes there's nostalgia about the snap crackle pop of vinyl, and I like the smell of the turntable, but there's no way that the sound of vinyl is better. And I own a thousand or two vinyl records.
- boredinballard 12y ago
  To be fair in regards to vinyl, it does sound different. And to some people that sounds better.
  - WalterBright 12y ago
    I've recorded my vinyl onto the computer. It sounds the same as the vinyl :-)
    - amelius 12y ago
      The problem with this is that all the cracks and pops happen at exactly the same moment whenever you replay the record; to a large extent, this is not so with vinyl, I suppose.
      - WalterBright 12y ago
        The rumble is different, as it comes from the turntable, but the cracks and pops happen at exactly the same time. You can see the defects in the vinyl that causes them - the vinyl surface is hardly pristine.
snowwrestler 12y ago
> There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better. If one likes the look of Tri-X, one could shoot digitally and do a lot of post-processing to replicate the look. Or, one could just keep shooting with Tri-X.
moron4hire 12y ago
For people buying their cameras and shooting landscapes and waterfalls on their vacations, sure. That's the only photography I do, and I do it fairly well. But nobody is going to pay for that, because everyone has that friend they can just get the pictures they want from. But fine-art photography necessarily must set itself apart from the masses. It's about selling a story to fine-art customers. And you can't sell the story of "I bought this camera at Best Buy and I sat in my livingroom pushing pixels in Photoshop on my laptop to make this image." I know people who are grinding their own lenses. I know people who are making cameras out of box trucks. They are making film negatives the size of posters. You're not going to find a CMOS sensor anywhere near that size, for any price. That said, I know people who are deliberately glitching their digital cameras to make different types of images. You can't do that with film. And that's the point. Yes, if your notion of "fine-art photography" is the dime-a-dozen wedding photographer stuff you see in the background of every Medium blog, no, there is no difference between film and digital. But anyone can do that, thus nobody is making money off of photography like that.
- wlievens 12y ago
  I work for a company that designs CMOS sensors and the notion of a poster-sized sensor made me chuckle :-) We do have a sensor bigger than my iPhone and that thing is a monster.
anigbrowl 12y ago
I shoot both film and digital and I don't think they're at all the same. When I'm shooting film I pick lighting and development techniques that will maximize the chemical nature of the film, bringing out grain and so on. Certainly you can emulate those things digitally, but generally when I shoot digital I aim to preserve as much information as possible, when I shoot with film it's more about pushing against the physical limits of the medium. Pushing against the physical limits of digital looks like ass; when digital fails it fails ugly, because you fall off a cliff rather than rolling down a hill.
beezle 12y ago
The only thing "better" about a digital camera is ease of use/convenience - it is perfect for the "I want it now" generation. There is no digital equivalent to medium or large format film cameras. Your final analogy might be better if it was stated as the difference between bbq over real coals/wood vs a gas grill with propane tank. Yeah they both cook the food. The gas grill is move convenient. But it ain't better.
patsplat 12y ago
Oil painting is 15th century photography. Film isn't going anywhere, and frankly neither is cooking with a wood fire. There's a national holiday practically dedicated to cooking on a wood fire (Fourth of July).
jtoll 12y ago
"It's not a different art form, it is just an evolution of it." I would agree that it's not a different art form. However I would strongly disagree that digital photography represents any kind of evolution. Digital photography is simply a new tool, nothing more, nothing less. It has its own aesthetic, process, and result. The vast majority of people take terrible pictures and are undoubtedly better off with digital. It's quicker, it's cheaper, and it's easier. But when talking about a skilled photographer and printer, the differences between digital and analog become more apparent. Digital looks like digital, and analog looks different. For your average snapshot, digital probably yields better average results. But in my opinion, I've not seen a gallery quality digital print that I thought matched the quality of the best analog prints. Digital looks strange to me, especially at larger sizes. (I think it might have something to do with the way edges get rendered.) That's just my subjective taste, others might prefer digital. I certainly don't hate digital, I just don't like it as much. Regardless, I think the important point is that photography is an aesthetic art form, and therefore you are going to have people that prefer one or the other aesthetic. It's not a question of good or bad, they're just different. To say that "There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better" I think misses the ultimate point. The thing that digital hasn't been able to do, is look like analog. P.S. Regarding your specious analogy of wood fire versus gas flame, if you can't tell the delicious, smokey difference between grilling over a wood fire versus a gas grill then I would suggest that your obsession with ease of use is just as ridiculous as someone obsessed with nostalgia.
bonaldi 12y ago
A much fairer comparison would be watercolour vs oil painting. It's the same art, but different mediums, involving different skills, different techniques and achieving different ends. Fwiw, there are certainly things that are extremely difficult to replicate digitally. Solarisation is one of them. (Don't get hung up on the camera bit. There is more to the darkroom than just a primitive analogue Photoshop.)
EliRivers 12y ago
There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do Yes there is. Film cameras can force you to take into account the additional limitations you have when you go about taking your photographs. If you're practising an art form, that is part of your art. film and digital photography are two almost identical processes to produce the same end result. End result? Sure, that's one part of the art. One part. It's an important part, but if you're talking about art, it's by no means all there is.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
I use a charcoal grill, would never stoop to a gas grill. Its an art form. If the cameras were being used as reality-documentation devices, then sure use a digital one. But as an art, its like using camel-hair brushes instead of plastic, or doing pottery in a shed in northern Wisconsin instead of a flat in NY. It changes the person; it changes the art.

noblethrasher 12y ago

Introducing (artificial) constraints can produce a different form of art.

rubyrescue 12y ago

people still cook over an open fire. we call those people "campers".

gaius 12y ago

two almost identical processes to produce the same end result Not true - wet printing with silver paper is fundamentally unlike digital output. Also, good restaurants do use wood fired ovens for pizza.

singlow 12y ago
Pizza doesn't go in a pot.

mbrock 12y ago

Do you think this argument is going to convince someone who enjoys shooting with film? I'm sure it won't, and that's interesting. The question comes up all over in art making, and it's never resolved through these kinds of arguments. I don't think most people who enjoy shooting on film put it forward as better than digital. That's why you don't hear "a single argument in favour." It's not a question of better or worse. As for your argument, "digital cameras can do everything film cameras do" is first of all wrong, and second of all irrelevant even if true. Why wrong? Well, consider chemical crossprocessing, or the effects of expired film, or just the different tones of different types of stock. You might either be uninterested in such things, or think that these effects can be easily reproduced with postprocessing, but even in the latter case it's different, different skills are required, different tools, different mindsets. Why irrelevant? Because at least some of the perceived value of film comes from the limitations themselves. That's something you can never get at through making the digital tools more advanced—in fact, it just gets worse. For someone who shoots on B&W film, the lack of color can be a feature. Even the small capacity of a film roll can be a boon; for example, it might give me a mindset of scarcity and significance. There's a restaurant in Stockholm that only uses wood fire. I won't knock it until I've tasted it. And the presence of fire is something in itself, aside from culinary blind tests.

gaius 12y ago
For someone who shoots on B&W film, the lack of color can be a feature. Yes, you will definitely notice this if you shoot alot - composition in B&W images is more about geometry and symmetry and texture, and you look at colours differently two, you are always thinking, that's a vivid contrast in colour but they will be the same tone of grey. Shooting colour with the intent to convert later, is as you say a different mindset.
- 75dvtwin 12y ago
  I agree with that. I find that looking at good B&W photos is similar to listening to acoustic instrumental music. Where the characteristics of the music are passed through an instrument without coloration by voice or by other instruments
- steve19 12y ago
  how is it a different mindset? you don't see B&W through your viewfinder? you see the exact same thing the color-covert-later shooter is seeing. also, modern digital cameras with EVF allow you to see B&W through the viewfinder.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    But not film B&W, which has a different colour and contrast response to "let's remove all the saturation" viewfinder B&W. Personally I'm happy with a 100% digital workflow. In fact these days I take most photos on an iPhone, and leave the SLR at home. But I also know that film and optical filtering look different.. You can produce an imitation of a film look with digital processing. But it's an imitation. There are subtleties of colour, grain, contrast/brightness response, and differential colour resolution that are very complicated. And different films respond in different ways. Everyone can see the difference between digital, budget Kodak, and a roll of Fujifilm Velvia. And if you're shooting medium or large-format, that's a different ballgame again. Don't believe me? Take some pictures of a fire. The film and digital versions will look completely different. Is it worth the effort? For snappy snaps, certainly not. Digital kills it for convenience. But if I worked as high-end commercial landscape, architectural, or art photographer, I'd certainly consider film for at least some projects.

foldr 12y ago

> There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better. Like the other posters, I disagree that this is relevant. However, there are no practically affordable large format digital cameras, and the depth of field effects and resolution that you can get from a 4x5 or 8x10 view camera still can't be obtained digitally. (At 2000dpi, 4x5 is 96MP and 8x10 is 320MP. You can get that resolution from a decent consumer flatbed.)

unfamiliar 12y ago
The resolution of digital cameras is limited by optical diffusion, not megapixel count, and since this applies just as much to film cameras your 2000dpi is irrelevant.
- pandaman 12y ago
  Depth of field, though, is limited by the sensor's dimensions, which is drastically different between film and digital. A 35mm film equivalent digital camera is already a pretty expensive "full-frame", a mid-format digital cameras are available at the price of a mid-luxury car and large format digital is not available for a consumer at all.
  - steve19 12y ago
    depth of field has nothing to do with sensor size, it's only related to focal length. the advantage of large/medium format is that longer focal lengths have a wider field of view than 35mm.
    - pandaman 12y ago
      Well, I won't get into semantics fight and will concede this to you. Yet, you are still looking at the fact that you can take pictures with a film/glass camera that are either very expensive or impossible to take with a digital one. Specifically, you won't be able to get the same depth of field with the same composition of the frame for the reasons we both seem to understand.

cbabraham 12y ago

https://medium.com/@cba/film-photography-for-rationalists-6494c57c77a6 https://medium.com/@cba/film-photography-for-rationalists-64... I wrote this to address exactly this intuition about film. But tl;dr, the experience of shooting film and digital have huge differences and the photos you get at the end are influenced by the process of taking them. They are not just pixels that exist in a vacuum.

micampe 12y ago
Excellent reading. I smiled at this “Unlike the dSLR, this camera isn’t a black box”.

aaronbrethorst 12y ago

Digital cameras cannot produce a latent image on a piece of film coated with silver gelatin. That's good enough for me.

WalterBright 12y ago

I suppose it's a lot like the silliness about preferring vinyl records to CDs. Sometimes there's nostalgia about the snap crackle pop of vinyl, and I like the smell of the turntable, but there's no way that the sound of vinyl is better. And I own a thousand or two vinyl records.

boredinballard 12y ago
To be fair in regards to vinyl, it does sound different. And to some people that sounds better.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  I've recorded my vinyl onto the computer. It sounds the same as the vinyl :-)
  - amelius 12y ago
    The problem with this is that all the cracks and pops happen at exactly the same moment whenever you replay the record; to a large extent, this is not so with vinyl, I suppose.
    - WalterBright 12y ago
      The rumble is different, as it comes from the turntable, but the cracks and pops happen at exactly the same time. You can see the defects in the vinyl that causes them - the vinyl surface is hardly pristine.

snowwrestler 12y ago

> There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better. If one likes the look of Tri-X, one could shoot digitally and do a lot of post-processing to replicate the look. Or, one could just keep shooting with Tri-X.

moron4hire 12y ago

For people buying their cameras and shooting landscapes and waterfalls on their vacations, sure. That's the only photography I do, and I do it fairly well. But nobody is going to pay for that, because everyone has that friend they can just get the pictures they want from. But fine-art photography necessarily must set itself apart from the masses. It's about selling a story to fine-art customers. And you can't sell the story of "I bought this camera at Best Buy and I sat in my livingroom pushing pixels in Photoshop on my laptop to make this image." I know people who are grinding their own lenses. I know people who are making cameras out of box trucks. They are making film negatives the size of posters. You're not going to find a CMOS sensor anywhere near that size, for any price. That said, I know people who are deliberately glitching their digital cameras to make different types of images. You can't do that with film. And that's the point. Yes, if your notion of "fine-art photography" is the dime-a-dozen wedding photographer stuff you see in the background of every Medium blog, no, there is no difference between film and digital. But anyone can do that, thus nobody is making money off of photography like that.

wlievens 12y ago
I work for a company that designs CMOS sensors and the notion of a poster-sized sensor made me chuckle :-) We do have a sensor bigger than my iPhone and that thing is a monster.

anigbrowl 12y ago

I shoot both film and digital and I don't think they're at all the same. When I'm shooting film I pick lighting and development techniques that will maximize the chemical nature of the film, bringing out grain and so on. Certainly you can emulate those things digitally, but generally when I shoot digital I aim to preserve as much information as possible, when I shoot with film it's more about pushing against the physical limits of the medium. Pushing against the physical limits of digital looks like ass; when digital fails it fails ugly, because you fall off a cliff rather than rolling down a hill.

beezle 12y ago

The only thing "better" about a digital camera is ease of use/convenience - it is perfect for the "I want it now" generation. There is no digital equivalent to medium or large format film cameras. Your final analogy might be better if it was stated as the difference between bbq over real coals/wood vs a gas grill with propane tank. Yeah they both cook the food. The gas grill is move convenient. But it ain't better.

patsplat 12y ago

Oil painting is 15th century photography. Film isn't going anywhere, and frankly neither is cooking with a wood fire. There's a national holiday practically dedicated to cooking on a wood fire (Fourth of July).

jtoll 12y ago

"It's not a different art form, it is just an evolution of it." I would agree that it's not a different art form. However I would strongly disagree that digital photography represents any kind of evolution. Digital photography is simply a new tool, nothing more, nothing less. It has its own aesthetic, process, and result. The vast majority of people take terrible pictures and are undoubtedly better off with digital. It's quicker, it's cheaper, and it's easier. But when talking about a skilled photographer and printer, the differences between digital and analog become more apparent. Digital looks like digital, and analog looks different. For your average snapshot, digital probably yields better average results. But in my opinion, I've not seen a gallery quality digital print that I thought matched the quality of the best analog prints. Digital looks strange to me, especially at larger sizes. (I think it might have something to do with the way edges get rendered.) That's just my subjective taste, others might prefer digital. I certainly don't hate digital, I just don't like it as much. Regardless, I think the important point is that photography is an aesthetic art form, and therefore you are going to have people that prefer one or the other aesthetic. It's not a question of good or bad, they're just different. To say that "There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do, and in most cases do better" I think misses the ultimate point. The thing that digital hasn't been able to do, is look like analog. P.S. Regarding your specious analogy of wood fire versus gas flame, if you can't tell the delicious, smokey difference between grilling over a wood fire versus a gas grill then I would suggest that your obsession with ease of use is just as ridiculous as someone obsessed with nostalgia.

bonaldi 12y ago

A much fairer comparison would be watercolour vs oil painting. It's the same art, but different mediums, involving different skills, different techniques and achieving different ends. Fwiw, there are certainly things that are extremely difficult to replicate digitally. Solarisation is one of them. (Don't get hung up on the camera bit. There is more to the darkroom than just a primitive analogue Photoshop.)

EliRivers 12y ago

There is literally nothing that film cameras can do that digital camera's can't do Yes there is. Film cameras can force you to take into account the additional limitations you have when you go about taking your photographs. If you're practising an art form, that is part of your art. film and digital photography are two almost identical processes to produce the same end result. End result? Sure, that's one part of the art. One part. It's an important part, but if you're talking about art, it's by no means all there is.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

I use a charcoal grill, would never stoop to a gas grill. Its an art form. If the cameras were being used as reality-documentation devices, then sure use a digital one. But as an art, its like using camel-hair brushes instead of plastic, or doing pottery in a shed in northern Wisconsin instead of a flat in NY. It changes the person; it changes the art.