Story: Down on digital

I think it is hard to put into words the qualities that film shooters enjoy about their medium. Film has a way of giving a response to your creative input that makes one feel that the material has soul. This can be as simple as the look of a certain film stock, or the way a certain developer creates a long or short tonality.

When I first shot digital I thought that this is what I would enjoy about the lcd back--and in fact, I do quite a bit when I'm shooting with lights, but by and large the lcd is a distraction.

The process of film is poetic. I like the drawn out quality of the image making process vs the instantaneousness of digital. I like the perversity of needing darkness to create light, of putting up the blackout in my powder room and loading film onto the reels. This isn't nostalgia-it's real experience, interactive feedback with my materials.

It's great to have choices. Why would photographers want to hasten any move toward homogenization?
 
I think the author is just trying to put words to/explain why he prefers one medium over the other. Certainly when he says "soul" he doesn't mean it literally. (I don't get why so many folks get hung up on that, as though figurative speech is beyond them.) His viewpoint is pretty close to my own on this topic. Some people simply enjoiy the process of film-based photography (more than digital-based photography) as well as the end result. It's just the way it is. It's kinda like the whole zen/tea-making ceremony process. It is more than just drinking a cup of tea.
 
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Film and digital both allow "the intervention of the hand" to capture and manipulate the latent image. Film imposes more discipline by having more limited process options, higher incremental cost per capture and practical limitations on the number of captures one can make in one session. These can be effective psychological constraints which can focus thought on what you want to say with your image and how you are going to do it, rather than banging away on auto-everything before engaging the most important tools, the brain and soul.
However digital's instant feedback and lower incremental cost make it the easier medium to experiment with. Yes it has a different look and that is not always preferable in many situations. The overall shift in final output from prints to screen will favour digital. I much prefer quality prints to screen output and I mostly prefer the look of film even though I largely shoot digital.
Photographers who have only shot digital probably have a harder time learning to apply the forethought and self-discipline that were always part of using film. The time it takes to set manual camera controls favours pre-planning and a roll of 36 forces you to think before you shoot. The renewed attraction of film, with its simplicity, discipline, and unique look, is very understandable in a largely digital, commoditised world.
 
Surely you have heard of "soulful music". It moves you/ touches you deeply. I've never heard anyone declare that music has no soul. Everyone seems able to process this sentiment. Well, some folks get a similar type of feeling with processes like photography, and for some reason, film photography does it better for them. I get the same kind of zen/focus in the moment feeling building wooden furniture, hack that I am. Hours can go by unnoticed, or rather fully noticed, moment by moment.

This is really not an arguable point. This is the way it is for me, and evidently for many others. Sorry if that bothers anyone, but I guess I don't care if it does.
 
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The irony is, the people who now rail against digital photography and exalt film as inherently superior, are the same people who, had they been born in another century, would have railed against film and exalted the image-making methods, such as painting, common when they were born.

I don't think there will ever be a case when technology, other than military, will stymie the production of art or rot the brain of a true artist.

I shoot 99% on film.
 
"By virtue of it's very design and purpose, to get as much of your money as possible year after year, digital was dead before it was born...."

But in the end, digital won over film. Like in the end, SLR's won over rangefinders. It's not the death of digital we're approaching, but the death of film.
 
Pickett Wilson said:
"By virtue of it's very design and purpose, to get as much of your money as possible year after year, digital was dead before it was born...."

But in the end, digital won over film. Like in the end, SLR's won over rangefinders. It's not the death of digital we're approaching, but the death of film.
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No, it is not, because it lives in the hands of those who use it. And you would be very surprised to know how many young people are using since they are sick of digital everything.
 
redpony said:
The process of film is poetic. I like the drawn out quality of the image making process vs the instantaneousness of digital. I like the perversity of needing darkness to create light, of putting up the blackout in my powder room and loading film onto the reels. This isn't nostalgia-it's real experience, interactive feedback with my materials.

It's great to have choices. Why would photographers want to hasten any move toward homogenization?
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A nice rebuttal to the "it's just nostalgia" argument! 🙂
 
KM-25 said:
No, it is not, because it lives in the hands of those who use it. And you would be very surprised to know how many young people are using since they are sick of digital everything.
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I know a few people who prefer to ride horses, walk or cycle in preference to driving a car ... but I'm not expecting it to catch on! 😛

Then again with fuel supplies dwindling ... who knows!
 
All the young people I know are in love with everything digital. I keep hearing on the Internet that young people are embracing film, but the declining fortunes of Fuji and Kodak don't seem to back up those assertions.
 
This is a useless debate.

FYI, there was a time when color film was seen as the arrivist newcomer, as opposed to B&W, which had "soul." In fact, in the words of one of those photographers who derided color and digital (friend of mine, though, recently deceased): "Color came to mess everything up."

Just go out, burn some images in film or sensor and give this silly notion a rest.
 
The business about film having more soul is, I think, just sentimental hooey. And, there's nothing about the technique of using a film camera that can't also be applied to a digital, if one so chooses.

On the other hand, lots of people, myself included, shoot film for one reason or another. Whatever the reason, they're all legitimate. No one is keeping score.
 
FrankS said:
Surely you have heard of "soulful music". It moves you/ touches you deeply. I've never heard anyone declare that music has no soul. Everyone seems able to process this sentiment. Well, some folks get a similar type of feeling with processes like photography, and for some reason, film photography does it better for them.
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You're exactly right. Detractors of this article earlier in the thread are playing symantic games. Of course, the author doesn't mean "film pictures have a soul/digital lack thereof..." Music, likewise, can be said to posess more soul, and many audiophiles will tell you that their old analog recordings have more soul.

Could it be that we perceive something created by an analog process, as opposed to digital, it can cause us to react more emotionally to it? Could it be that this is because reality is delivered to us via analog sound waves and analog waves of light? Might our brains be able subconsciously detect the differences of reality captured in a way that it, itself, captures reality through decifering analog signals and reject, at some level, the artificial digital realm? Could it be what we call "soul" in the arts be a quality that is only propagated through analog media?
 
Solinar said:
Whatever floats your boat to get you inspired works for me as well - but the camera itself is just a tool without a soul.
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Two points.

First, in many religions everything is sacred.

Second, even if you don't buy that notion, human-created objects are in fact imbued with human thought and the work of human hands. The designers and builders leave traces of their imaginations and skills and hopes and failings in anything that they create. An M3 - or for that matter, a 1911A1 or a Fender Stratocaster or the Parthenon or the Golden Gate Bridge - is not in these respects different from a painting by Degas or a print by John Sexton.

Deny that a camera can have soul because it is an object, and you must do the same for the other things on that list, and every other physical work done by human beings.
 
Pickett Wilson said:
But in the end, digital won over film. Like in the end, SLR's won over rangefinders. It's not the death of digital we're approaching, but the death of film.
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Just as photography totally replaced drawing, and the printing press won over woodcuts, etching, silkscreen, stone litho, and other printmaking processes. As we know, no artists use those media any more, and no galleries exhibit contemporary work that employs those methods.

Thanks for clearing that up for us.
 
One other thing -- a note for those who would claim that process does not matter: y'all get back to us when you have assembled a body of work that is as good as Chuck Close's, m'kay?
 
semilog said:
One other thing -- a note for those who would claim that process does not matter: y'all get back to us when you have assembled a body of work that is as good as Chuck Close's, m'kay?
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"And then digital came along and I thought, Oh God, here we go. But then I realized it just not matter at this point in my career."

Chuck Close during an interview, the place I made the photograph of him, in black and white...
 
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