Film versus Digital Photography: Which Leads to More Success?

For a while I’ve been telling people that shooting film slows me down and makes me more thoughtful about my photography. I get more keeper images relative to the total number of exposures than I do when I use a digital camera.

That’s what I’ve been telling people. But the database geek in me wanted hard numbers to back up those claims. Since I organize my photography using a custom-built database application, I can get those numbers fairly easily.

Other than the obvious distinction between film and digital photographs, there are a few other key data points that make it possible for me to quantify my claims.

First, I’ve become a diligent editor of my work. Beyond simple deletion of images that I don’t want, I also rate each photo I end up keeping on a scale of 1 to 5. I consider those photographs that I score as a 4 or 5 to be truly good images, and they get synced over to my iPad, which serves as my electronic photo album.

My rating process involves making a totally subjective gut call about a photograph. But it’s been a great way to help me identify what subject matter and photographic techniques typically result in images that give me satisfaction. Rather than let a handful of good images swim around in a sea of mediocrity, it feels great to separate out the good ones from everything else.

For my digital photography, I’ve also gotten into the habit of creating virtual contact sheets. Before I do anything after I shoot a series of photos, I’ll generate an electronic contact sheet that contains a small rendering of each image I shot. Similar to film contact sheets, these PDFs serve as a complete, end-to-end record of my shooting sessions. I also note in my database the first and last sequence number that my digital camera generated for each photograph I took during a given shooting session. The bottom line is that I know exactly how many exposures I made.

On the film side of things, I scan each exposure from a roll of film no matter how bad the photograph is. Each exposure then makes its way into my photography database. If it’s an image that represents a total failure of decision making where exposure settings or composition are concerned, I’ll scan the exposure at a lower resolution to save time and computer disk space. But regardless of how good or bad a film photograph is, I’ll make an entry for each in my database. Generating image counts for film shooting sessions is therefore pretty straightforward.

With all this in mind, I asked myself this: how well have I done in recent months?

For my analysis, I limited myself to shooting sessions I categorized under solitary photo walks. In other words, I omit photos I may shoot while traveling, photos that I’m a bit less critical about in terms of how I rate them. I grant myself a bit more rating leeway with my travel photography. I also omit images from photo walks with other photographers since the point of getting together is to enjoy each other’s company. As much as I enjoy interacting with others, I also find it breaks my concentration when I’m actually engaged in the act of making photographs. I suppose I am a bit of a loner.

On solitary photo walks between September 1, 2023, which was the day I began generating digital contact sheets, and yesterday, I shot a total of 3693 exposures. Here’s the breakdown by film and digital:

When I go out on solitary photo walks, I fire the shutter on my digital cameras far more than on my film cameras. My data tells me that, on average, I shoot 53 exposures per photo walk when I shoot digitally versus 14 when I shoot film, a ratio of 3.8 to 1. This disparity is to be expected, of course, given the constraints of film and the virtual limitlessness of digital file storage. With a 128 GB SD card loaded into my Canon EOS R8, for instance, I can shoot and shoot until my battery is dead, amass hundreds of image files, and not come close to filling the card.

Where is all that digital camera shutter clicking getting me? It turns out that, over the past ten and a half months, I have only 40 more images I consider “good” on the digital side of things than what I did on film.

But relative to the total number of exposures I made on a given medium, the percentage of good photographs—my success rate, so to speak—is almost three times higher with film than it is with a digital camera.

What does this tell me? Just as I suspected, I am being far more careful and discriminating about making decent photographs when I shoot film, and my success rate is higher as a result.

There’s no doubt about it: shooting digitally is way, way easier. If a subject even marginally catches my eye, I can shoot a photo of it without much thought. I can stand there and shoot several exposures of the same thing and later choose the best one out of the bunch. The differences among them may be exceedingly subtle, but it costs me nothing to be rakish with the shutter button.

But being able to pump out a ton of images doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be any good. More often it only increases the amount of effort I have to put into the editing process. The more photos I have to sift and winnow, the longer it takes for me to get through them.

When I get home from a digital photo walk and separate the good images from the bad, I’m fairly ruthless about the number of photographs I save and the even smaller number of images that I give a rating of 4 or 5. If I rate a photo highly, it’s really because I have a good gut feeling about its stopping power, whatever it may be. But those images tend to be few and far between relative to the total number of shots I take over a given session. Indeed, I often look at what I’ve done after getting home from a walk and wonder to myself why I shot a series of photos to begin with. I have no compunction about deleting them.

I am equally ruthless about rating my work after I get done with scanning a roll of film. I’ll look through my images and decide about those few that I deem to be good enough to care about. On average for each 36-exposure roll of film, I give about 7 photographs a rating of 4 or 5. That’s about an 80% rejection rate. When each push of the shutter button equals money spent, that starts to feel painful. Each keeper image feels all the more precious as a result.

But one thing I’ve learned after looking at the contact sheets of celebrated film photographers is that a high rejection rate is not unusual. Rather, it’s desirable. Looking at the work of other photographers, I’ve realized that it’s not uncommon for there to be just one truly remarkable image on an entire roll of film. I take solace in that. If the pros blew through an entire roll of film to get one really good image, then maybe it’s okay for me to do the same.

Whether I’m shooting digitally or with film, the numbers don’t lie: quantity doesn’t mean quality, and ease of execution doesn’t automatically lead to excellent results.