Film v Photoshop

Two things:

1. Digital and analogue; just different ways to turn photons into images.
2. Images should be printed.

Almost a year ago today I shot my first roll of film. As I mention somewhere on the site, after a couple of years of shooting digital a dear friend suggested it was time I learned photography. To that end, she gave me a Pentax K1000 for my birthday. This simple gift started me on a soul-searching journey trying to figure out where film belongs in my photographic world.

Flower Basket, Yarra River (Image: R.Crapnell  Pentax K1000, Kodak Gold, lab-developed)

I remember being intimidated by that heavy chunk of mechanical technology. I could not quite grasp how such a basic instrument could capture light and produce an image by way of glass, sprockets and a chemical process. My first roll was Kodak Gold that I shot around Melbourne and then just dropped into a lab and I remember being surprised by the vivid, colours that jumped off the prints at me when I opened that envelope.

Two things struck me right there. The first was that (some) film is very forgiving when it is developed by skilled professionals. Despite the fact that all I did was be sure I shot in daylight, all thirty-six frames were beautifully colour balanced. Also, in spite of the fact that I was manually focussing using a forty-year old lens (albeit in beautiful condition), many of the images were plenty crisp enough for the task.

Second, and perhaps more fundamental, was that this was the first time I had seen my images in print with no digital intermediary steps taken on my part. When I opened that envelope I immediately knew these were images in their ultimate form. Barring scribbling on some mustachios with a felt pen or doing some cropping with a real knife, the images I held were complete. From that moment I knew I had been underrating the importance of seeing an image in print, be they digital or analogue.

These two revelations provoked a lot of thought over the following twelve months as I took my first painful steps into film photography and continued learning digital. I read the discussion boards and opinion pieces advocating film over digital and vice versa. Happily, there are very many very good photographers who plainly understand that each process is simply a different way of doing the same thing. It was that view that really began to gel with me.

Shooting film with even the basic level of understanding I have reached has changed the way I feel about my photography. It has settled some disquiet I felt over being a self-taught child of the digital era, with all the associated complexes about “cheating” in the software darkroom, chimping exposures and all the rest. Was I really taking those images, or was I settling for some compromise a collection of diodes and software were offering me?

By learning just how much engineering and magic go into an emulsion I have begun to understand that film photographers can choose their “effects” by choosing their film or filter just as a digital shooter can do the same from their palette of presets. A lot of “photo-shopping” happens by default every time the shutter is activated on a film camera, and that is before any adjustments are made during developing and enlarging.

Like a choice of oils over acrylic over pencil over charcoal; digital and analogue photography are just means of capturing an image. None are used to actually recreate reality, no matter how realistic the image. The important bit is the artist's touch, through choice of medium and subject through all the little decisions of technique that deliver a final image.

Yet two things seem true for me now that I have become acquainted with film. The first is that it either way, the better the shot in camera the better the result after all the editing is done. The second is that any valued image deserves to be printed.