My experience was this....
In 1994, I was told by then editor Steve Whitmore, son of late actor James Whitmore that we had to go digital, it was the brave new world, the future. He even gave us t-shirts that said "Digital or Die". I hated the first 10 years of it, cropped sensors, 1.3 megapixel cameras that needed to be plugged in when the battery died because you could not take the battery out. I remember Mary Ellen Mark looking at me in Pity when my NC2000 camera battery died as Bob Dole emerged from a limo while he was on the campaign trail. They were $14,000 a piece, huge and lousy.
But it got better and my attitude got better, after all, I was a pioneer, I was winning awards, helping AP figure out how we could use flash without making the subject look nuked...diffuse, diffuse, diffuse...
But something was missing, the wonderful attributes of a specific film, the not seeing the image right away, the reality of an image born not of a computer screen, but a paintbrush called film.
So after some 16 years of using digital, I am pretty much done with it except for specific circumstances. Most of those circumstances will be motion picture making, not stills.
I have built a darkroom, I get large Ilfochromes made from black and white Techpan slides processed in dr5, I shoot 20x24 litho film in a giant pinhole, I shoot the real thing man, I shoot FILM!
Yes, digital was well worth it, I can do it in my sleep. But the best part is it taught me that film is photography and digital is really not. For everything we do now days gets rammed up the arse of a computer, the thing that is killing backs, wrists, minds, vision, jobs and turning eye contact into i-contact.
I have had enough of this sh_t, I have had enough of fake photography ooozing in photoshop born mediocrity, I have had enough of digital.
So no, silver is not dead because I am not dead. One of the magazines I do regular work for assigned me to do a piece that would fill three pages. I shot it with my Hasselblad, souped the film in my kitchen, made actual darkroom prints and showed them at the meeting. They gave it three more pages and doubled my rate.
And yes, you had better damn well believe Silver is Better!
