..it just smells funny. A tale of luminous dreams, gelatin, silver, binary, pixels and snobbery.

Last Sunday I discovered I was a digital-leper. A creature from whom ‘higher’ beings – the ones who shoot film on Sunday afternoons – recoil away from in disgust. Little did the woman know, as she snubbed me in the street in Ginza this weekend, her Hasselblad in hand – me showing her a shot that I just taken of her on my D700 – that the previous evening I had been up to my elbows in developer at a friend’s house. Or that I had a film story to tell that went back 38 years. She just looked down her nose at me, put her headphones back in her ears and walked off. Anyway, no matter. Maybe I should have told her, in my own act of inverted snobbery, that ‘real’ photographers would never use the metered prism-finder she was using on her 500CW. That they would be out with a waist-level finder and a Weston IV.

Because photography-snobs existed before digital cameras; the ones who hated electronic cameras, who hated AF, who hated colour film, who hated people who didnt develop their own film, who hated anyone who didnt shoot on manual, who hated…. well, anything you can imagine.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I honestly couldn’t give a toss about people who don’t spend just the few seconds necessary to look beyond my digital SLR and into me, but this recent episode came at the end of a few weeks in which the whole issue of film and digital photography had been uppermost in my mind again. So, this article is merely designed to stimulate some healthy conversation on the whole topic. Do feel free to chime in and add your five yen’s worth, cos I’m genuinely interested to hear.

My film story

Once upon a time a little boy stood in his parent’s living-room, in awe of the vast, luminous picture that swayed gently on the screen above him. There was the smell of dust burning as it hit the top of a hot bulb that was making the light which shone the picture out onto the screen. Around his father – who was at the controls of the large, grey, metal light-machine – there was a pool of light but none of it reached the edges of the room, which were dark and quiet. The little boy wasn’t in the picture himself, rather it was one from a life his family’d had before he’d arrived; mum, dad, brother and sister… all there on holiday, somewhere green. The little boy stood transfixed. The picture was a bit like the TV but larger, except it wasn’t moving. He walked around the back of the screen to see if he could see the other side of the hill his family were standing on in the picture….. no, it wasn’t there.

‘I want to do this,’ thought the little boy.

‘I want to make pictures where the people are frozen and shine light through them like daddy does……..’

And so I embarked upon a love-affair with photography that has, to date, lasted 38 years; 34 of them owning my own cameras. It was a love-affair that until 2005 was all about film. Then I got a decent digital camera – the Sony DSCF828. In 2007 I got my first DSLR which was also, in fact, my first AF SLR camera. So you see, I was Mr.ManualFocusFilmShooter until 2007. Why did I change to digital for 99% of the shots I take? Here’s some of why….

• It’s convenient
• It’s quick – I was always overly excited to get back home, dev and contact-print my film. Now i didnt have to wait.
• I’m not spending money every time I press the shutter: with the amount of shots I like to take, even before the DSLR came along, film always costed me an arm and a leg and three years of film-school practically bankrupted me.
• I can learn new techniques more quickly and learn from what I see on the screen – and that goes for teaching people too.
• I have fallen back in love with flash – now I dont have to shoot reams of Polaroid to test my exposure or waste loads of film on bracketing my exposures, I am back in love with flash again.
• No more tungsten and daylight film choices or shitloads of money spent on gels – I need to work in complex light situations, so LiveView and multiple white-balance options are my friend.
• My clients no longer need to wait to s long for their shots.
• My clients no longer need to carry the large costs of film – bear in mind that in the old days, one bought large batches of film and fridged it, because if you were shooting a large job for someone you needed to shoot it on the same batch of film. Then there was clip-testing and all the costs that went with that. By the end of the process, the client was paying $40 for each roll I shot.
• Together with Photoshop and the internet [the real revolutions in photography, not just digital cameras] I can now shoot outdoors, process outdoors and with a wi-fi connection I can send the shots to the client from the location, if necessary.
• I can use the 25years of experience of how different films, cameras, processes, papers, toners etc look and apply that to how I make my digital photos look in post-pro. i.e. it can still look like film but without all the time and cost issues.
• The environment is spared all the nasty chems that come with making, developing and printing film. If you’ve ever done your own colour dev and print or your own toning, you’ll know how evil the chemicals can be. I’ve seen friends end up in hospital from them.
• Animals can rest a little easier and digital is the vegetarian/vegan option for photography: the bonding element in film is gelatin. Gelatin comes from animal fat and collagen.
• I can invest my money in improving my equipment, especially my lens collection and not sink all my cash into film and processing.
• I no longer have to worry about either purchasing a very expensive scanner to do justice to my film shots, or take my shots off to have them scanned [more money: the best drum scans are at least $20 for each shot]. Cos at the end of the day, if you want to put your work online or send it to people without having to use snail-mail, every film shot you ever take will end up as digital.
• If I wanted to print, I could get a decent quality machine at home and spare myself the issues of needing space for a darkroom at home or the skin-conditions I got having had my hands in chemistry for the best part of three decades.
• No more printing of expensive portfolios and sending them by expensive courier to potential clients, agents or galleries. If I want something more than digital files they look at on their screen, I can make a book using Blurb.com and send that instead.
• Now I teach, I can realistically give one-hour lessons because myself and my student can shoot and see the results instantly.
• As a working photographer, it’s difficult to find what the ‘hobby’ end of photography can be for me. Shooting film is becoming my hobby. And actually the digital experiences are feeding back into how I shoot film.

For me it started with a frozen moment and it’s still all about that; freezing moments to share with other people. Sure, I like gear and I like the process but it’s what’s in the picture that counts. That’s the message, the rest of it’s just a delivery method.

But I don’t want to say that so flippantly as to suggest there’s no value in the delivery of the finished moment, there is. Choosing how to take a photo and choosing how to make the finished item look; these are also very important but sometimes it is all too easy to get so wrapped up in the ‘how’ that we forget about the ‘why’.

I use ‘film methodology’ in my lessons and in my work; slowing people down by telling them to shoot no more than 36-frames on a photowalk or for a project; shooting black and white in-camera as a JPEG so that people can ‘think’ in black and white with none of the options of RAW.

This all gets people thinking more about both how and why they take shots.

I use prime lenses. I love the 50mm. These are olde-worlde methods but lain on top of the convenient platform of digital.

It’s not about film versus digital. It’s about the photograph, the subject, the moment, the idea and its inception. It doesnt matter on what you shoot your photos. Film is great. Digital is great. Both have their charm, their pros and cons.

I might consider myself a better photographer for having shot film for so long and having had the chance to grow up with it and to be honest you’ll probably learn more about light and exposure on film. The experience of developing and printing is probably one that everyone should have at some point in their lives, cos its magical.

But that doesnt mean digi is bad and film is good. It means they each have a use and that, at the very end of the day, it’s all down to personal preference, commercial pragmatism, cost, expediency, charm, time……

Digital photography has, like the release of the BoxBrownie in 1929, put a camera in millions of people’s hands. This is wonderful. It may have meant a massive change for the pro and for the camera companies. But that’s never a bad thing. Nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia for the old days and keeping film alive provides a link to the roots of photography. But things move on. Sometimes not for the best but in photography’s case I really don’t see the shift away from film as such a bad thing. Ansel Adams predicted digital imaging. Hell, even people in the futurist movement in the 1920s predicted wireless transmission of pictures over long distances. And we have the comical movie  ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ to remind us that if Beethoven were alive now, he’d be up in the synthesizer department and not playing on a 1797 Broadwood in the basement.

Applaud the past. Learn from it. Experience the roots of photography by playing with film, developing and printing. But, please, don’t hate me or my DSLR just cos it’s not ‘real’ photography. Real photography is about creating a photo, stopping a moment and sharing it with other people. Doesnt matter how you do it….