Film and Digital

In the past four years or so, I went from having done a bit of photography in my past, to doing a lot of photography in my present. I went from owning merely a single beat-up rarely-used DSLR I’d owned since 2006, to having a spreadsheet full of cameras ranging from a modern mirrorless camera to dozens and dozens of old rangefinders and SLRs obtained from markets or found by friends in the bottom of parents’ cupboards.

When it comes to shooting film, I develop and scan my own B&W negatives, only resorting to going down to the local (and increasingly busy) camera store when I want a roll of colour developed.

So where am I going with this? There’s a lot I could talk about here, after all, including the ‘why’, which is a topic for another post. This morning, I want to talk about the interesting thing that I’ve found about regularly shooting both modern digital cameras and film cameras.

Why do I do it? How do I pick what to shoot with? And how has shooting with one of those affected the other? I don’t know how many people actually care about this stuff, but this blog post is as much about analysing my own techniques as anything else.

Learning Photography

When I began picking up photography again, it was because I was given another old DSLR by a friend. It was actually older and less capable than the old Canon I already owned, but unlike that one it had a functional back screen and some more interesting glass it came with. After a few months of playing around with that, I decided to get back into photography in a more serious way, and invested in a brand new Sony mirrorless camera.

Now, to be clear before I say what I’m about to say: the Sony I bought (the a7c) was objectively a fantastic camera. Well-designed, small, and with it I took photos I am still proud enough of to post or give away as prints. That said, I also found something else about using that ultra-modern Sony: it sucked to use. By which I mean the process, the workflow, and even what the result meant to me.

My history with photography is probably not entirely dissimilar to many people of that gen x / millennial cusp age group - I learned to shoot on a beat-up old Pentax Spotmatic at school, developing and enlarging my own photos. Then, a few years later with the hell of high school in the rear vision mirror, I got a DSLR and shot on that. Both processes are, to varying degrees, quite manual. Even at its most automatic, for me shooting on my Canon 60D meant putting it in aperture priority mode to select the depth of field in my shot. But even that got boring to me, and soon the 60D and its lenses became one of many things sitting in an old shoebox in a cupboard, just like all those cameras I’ve begun to collect from friends cleaning out family-members places.

Modern Digital

For what I enjoyed about photography in high school, the Sony doubled down on what I didn’t enjoy about the Canon DSLR - that it encouraged post production work. This sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but for me, the ability to alter photos beyond the natural process of cropping and picking the exposure level, was… not wrong, but certainly boring. I found myself not WANTING to shoot three hundred raw files and then spend hours tweaking them. That’s just not the fun part for me.

It’s why I eventually switched to Fujifilm’s X cameras. To me, putting it in JPEG mode and picking a film ‘simulation’ emulated film not so much in a visual way, but a procedural one - with an X camera I can manually pick settings, take a photo, and with a distinctive colour baked into the image, it meant I once again got that joy of “I wonder what I got in-camera on my last photography walk?” It’s not that I think the X cameras are better than Sony’s, but they fit my own personal style of photography (the self-imposed limitation of “what I get in camera is more or less the final product”).

Film or Digital?

Sometimes, the choice of taking one of my entirely-too-many old film cameras out vs a digital one is easy. It’s mostly a technical thing. Like, if I’m shooting in an incredibly low-light situation such as a cocktail bar on Saturday night, I will probably grab my Fujifilm X camera - something I can shoot in almost no-light situations with a digital ISO of 25,600 or higher. That is, unless I’ve decided to grab a Delta 3200 or something and try some grainy-ass low light shots, maybe even pushing it a stop or two.

Most of the time, though, I end up taking one of each. It’s common for me to, say, bring one of my rangefinders and mirrorless with a small lens. I will switch between them during the day, and when I finally run out of film, pack away that camera and stick to the digital shot.

It’s also common I intentionally give them each different lenses - say a 50 on the film camera and a wider one on the digital one, so I’m not doubling up on the kind of shots I’m getting.

Digital after Film

This feels like quite a long-winded way of getting to my point, but I needed to give some context as to just why I enjoy photography.

So, here are the ways in which shooting film has impacted how I shoot digital photos:

1. The more I shoot film, the more I tend to double down on not doing post-production work. I never shoot raw, and pick my colour (or B&W) settings in-camera, and I rarely re-frame once the photo is taken.
2. I shoot more manually. On DSLRs I used to shoot, like most people I think, in aperture or shutter prio mode, letting the camera expose correctly with whatever setting I wasn’t futzing with. These days, I often shoot with entirely manual settings, and I leave anything to the machine, it’s usually ISO.
3. In contrast with this, I often find if I have both a film and digital camera on me, I manually set the ISO to match the film I am using, and often shoot entirely manually with my digital camera.
4. More and more I appreciate digital cameras which, rather than using the DSLR style thumb wheels or touch-screen-only systems, have classic style involving physical shutter dials, aperture rings and the like (such as the before-mentioned Fuji X series, Leica digital or Nikon Zf series).
5. I shoot fewer photos. Even though I could take hundreds and hundreds of shots in a few hours on a modern digital camera, my lack of interest in post production means rather than getting 8 very similar photos in quick succession to “make sure I got it”, I often take just a single digital shot before moving on. If I didn’t get it quite right? Too bad, move on.
6. I keep fewer digital photos. In a roll of 36 film shots, I will scan maybe half of them, of which only 2-4 will be ones I think are worth keeping in my photo library, the rest going into a backup folder sitting on an external drive to re-visit later with fresh eyes. With digital, this number is similar. I usually shoot twice as many shots, two rolls worth or so, but try to keep that number down, often lining up a shot and discarding it before I even push the shutter. Choosing what NOT to shoot is important to me in film, and that’s translated to my digital photography too.

The final point is a new one, and so because it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to, I’ve decided to flesh it out a bit here.

When I shoot digital these days, there are two ways I shoot. The first way is essentially ‘practice’ for shooting fully mechanical film cameras.

Training Wheels

The first way I use digital cameras is, essentially, practice for sunny 16 shooting. I turn every feature to manual, set my ISO to a standard film one, and shoot entirely manually. This doesn’t always work perfectly as in my experience the iso setting of a mirrorless camera varies a bit in terms of how closely it matches what film itself is rated at. (The most accurate one I’ve found is my Fujifilm X-E5, I can basically sunny-16 that pretty easily.)

Manual Isn’t Always Good

The second way, and most common way I shoot digital these days is to actually leverage what these cameras do well and work around what they do poorly.

Firstly, selecting shutter speed and aperture is critical to the aesthetics of an image. By contrast, shooting at ISO 400 vs ISO 1600 on a digital camera makes less difference. As a result, more often than not I shoot with the ISO set to automatic and everything else on manual.

Secondly, unless I’m shooting on a digital rangefinder (which, let’s face it, basically means my Leica M Digital as nobody else makes them) I also rely more on zone focusing or auto-focus if I’m shooting human subjects.

As much as I love manually focusing shots, the face tracking on modern mirrorless cameras is absurdly useful for shooting candid photos at parties or bars.

Using Both

I enjoy shooting film, very much. I also enjoy shooting with some of the more interesting modern digital cameras. Each has their place, depending on my mood and what I’m shooting (and if I want to commit to the cost and time of developing and scanning a whole-ass roll of film in the next week or so).

Shooting film has impacted how I shoot digital, and shooting digital has made me appreciate the many fine qualities of shooting on film.

I can’t picture myself ever giving either of them up.

Hell, I’m even growing to appreciate the old Canon and Nikon DSLRs I’ve still got lying around. Now, quick, everyone stop me buying an old classic Canon 5D or a Nikon D200… (gear acquisition syndrome is real)