What do you figure the pros and cons are to using regular emulsion film for photos or going digital?

I worked as a photographer in the days before digital photography.

I also ran a darkroom, making museum-quality archival black and white prints, developing film up top 8×10” and prints up to 30×40”.

I love the qualities of film, I know how to use film, film is better in some ways – and I have not used film for 10 years.

I guess that says it all. For my uses, the practicalities of digital outweigh the aesthetics of film.

Though if I had more time and money, I would get a 4×5 camera and build a darkroom.

With digital cameras, you can easily doctor the image and adjust the colors. You can do that with traditional film, but it much harder. With digital, you can also see your pictures immediately, as opposed to film.

A film camera can be left in a box for 20 years, be picked up and used to take a picture and it will work. The digital would have dead batteries and no way to read the storage media.
A digital requires significantly more electrical power to operate. A film camera can sit for years in a passive state and spring into action instantly.

That said, I use a digital for everything now.

Triple the price of your gallery show if shot on film and printed traditional wet lab media.

Digital still, has yet to produce the gradient tonality range of the most basic black and white films of yesteryear. Unless you spend mega bucks on the specialized B&W only Leica M Monochrome, which is not your every day consumer cam.

Black and white film, if printed as fibre base prints, has a much longer archival life than any digital media, including pigment giclee. They are truly museum grade.

A high quality super pro film camera can be had used market for very little money compared to digital camera of same caliber. The startup costs are exponentially cheaper for film and wet lab publishing. No need for camera, and computer system expenses.

Film, if kept in a cool, dark and dry environment, still has longer archival life than CD/DVD optical storage media.

Film is virtually impossible to alter the original. Whereas digital originals can always be manipulated in some way, even the meta data, by a clever hacker.

Film, with less exposures available, gives the photographer cause to pause, and think clearly about why and what is being photographed. It develops a discerning eye. Digital is basically without guilt expense, and has fostered new categories of photography, like “My cat looking out the window… again.”

That shoe box of pictures of your grandparents will be around for your grandchildren to see. The digital pictures you took yesterday will be unretrievable within 5 years, buried under a pile of crap food shots and haul pix, or inside a lost phone, or erased by a the latest phone virus, or made unreadable by the next operating system.

Regular emulsion films last longer. You have to take care of long-term digital file storage. Copy. Copy. Copy.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Film, with less exposures available, gives the photographer cause to pause, and think clearly about why and what is being photographed. It develops a discerning eye. Digital is basically without guilt expense, and has fostered new categories of photography, like “My cat looking out the window… again.” So having 300+ shots of which you can instantly see if you botched it or not, makes photographers (or those who take photos) more lazier or more apathetic to the creative process?

@mattbrowne You have to take care of long-term digital file storage. Copy. Copy. Copy. If the media on which they are stored chances to the point it is unsupported any longer, you have to try to convert to the new media and hope you lose no quality?

@filmfann With digital, you can also see your pictures immediately, as opposed to film. That is a very desirable trait, as well as the total amount of exposures; you do not have to keep reloading and miss something. As far as being cheaper per exposure would the downside be less attentive photo takers because they can use the “shotgun” method until they get a good shot?

@Hypocrisy_Central ”...more apathetic to the creative process?”

In a nutshell, yes it can. The satisfaction one seeks through photography can be reduced to the pleasure of pushing a button and feeling as though “I did it! I did it!” The medium (camera) is mistaken for the message (image).

See, I think @filmfann‘s comment of “seeing the photo immediately after” is telling. Although true, that is not the goal. The real goal of photography is learning to, and developing the eye for seeing the picture before you make it.

Notice I didn’t say take. There is a vast chasm between taking pictures and making photographs.

Digital Has Killed the SLR Camera Star. At least in my case. I haven’t used my Nikon FM 10 for 4 years.

@Hypocrisy_Central – There’s two issues:

1) The storage device and data medium as such (floppies, tapes, CD, DVD, BD, hard drives, usb sticks, sdhc etc.)
2) The data formats (txt, rtf, doc, csv, xls, ppt, pdf, gif, png, tiff, jpg, mpg, mp4, mp3 etc.)

You need to copy from an older to a newer device and there’s no quality loss. As for the data formats, there’s a general rule: the longer they are around, the longer they will also be supported in the future. When moving from one format to the next, there might be quality loss.

I think that film photography is something that should never ever go away and that every photographer should know how to shoot film.
However, in this day and age, the workflow is already hard enough. Scanning and processing seem impractical for major shoots. Digital is where photography is heading, but if you are really going for the film look, then shoot digital and use the fantastic VSCO FILM presets. They’re very accurate.