When I took up photography again after almost 30 years, I started with the best digital camera of the moment (Fuji S3 pro). First, I have found something was lacking in the images, like they had no soul... So I thought it was like that because the Nikon glass was too "anonymous". I bought the whole line of Zeiss ZF lenses then, and the results were spectacular, BUT... they still had no soul. So one day I made a little project on close up photography, mimicking Kar Blossfeld... AND I discovered almost simoultaneously 2 things: the colour pictures were nice, but soulless, as usual... However, the B&W conversions were interesting, BUT they sucked technically...
After much experimenting with the conversion methods, RAW image processing and so on, I took a great Zeiss lens (Planar 85/1.4 ZM) and made some shots of my daughter on digital and on film. When I finally made 30x40 cm prints and put them one next to the other, the veil dropped from my eyes: the digital colour version was beautiful: subtle skin tones, superb smooth tonality, faithful colours and great sharpness - this is the shot:
When I looked at the B&W version though, I saw no sparkle - just spent greys, no gradation in the highlights, as if somebody wrung a floor mop full of dirty water on the image. The same shot made on film looked different - there was some grain, yes, but the image was alive, the blacks were black and the whites were white, and the multitude of shades of white were making the image acquire a new life - it had the spell...
Since that day I have only used the digital to shoot things for some documentary necessity, and my entire "pleasure" shooting is done on B&W film. I do not miss the immediacy of digital, on the contrary, I prefer to forget about the emotion I had about a photo when I was pressing the shutter. When I see it on my computer after several days, I am more objective about its actual merits. As long as B&W digital is a miserable caricature of film, in my eyes, all the digital cameras are like tools for a job that I do not need or want to do - indifferent to me.
