The Allure of Film Photography
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“Film?! Why on earth would you ever shoot on film?”
I hear variations of that question all the time. Believe me, I asked them all many times before I actually took the plunge myself. After all, it had been decades since I had even touched a roll of film.
In late 2002, I bought my first digital camera, a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P31 with paltry 2 megapixel sensor. Not long after that, I said goodbye to my malfunctioning Olympus Stylus Zoom, light leaks and all, and gave it to Goodwill. From then on, I thought that was the end of the road for me where film was concerned.
But years later, I found myself reconsidering that position, albeit in halting steps and with a good deal of hesitation.
A Film Enthusiast’s Progress
After having spent much of 2020 and 2021 researching and writing about the history of Questar telescopes, it was inevitable that I would learn more about the film cameras of the middle part of the twentieth century. After all, accommodating photography was a key design goal for the Questar.
I took a big step forward during the summer of 2022, when I happened upon a sales listing for a Questar-modified Nikon F camera body that included a 50mm f/2 Nikkor lens. Although I had it serviced not long after buying it, I initially found myself wanting the camera more for its collectability than for its functionality.
Old and persistent memories of dealing with film made me wary about going further with my curiosity than I already had. The list of misgivings was long: Being limited to a set number of exposures on a roll. The cost of film and developing. The waiting. The inferior image quality. If I went down the road of developing film myself, all the stuff I would have to accumulate, not to mention all the difficulty involved with disposing spent developing chemicals in a responsible way. With no one local willing to accept it as hazardous waste, I refused simply to dump the stuff down the drain and pollute our waterways.
And then there was the matter of getting a final image. I enjoyed the simplicity of digitally-rendered images and not having to store physical prints. If I hesitated over developing my own negatives, I was certainly not going down the road of acquiring a full-blown darkroom with an enlarger, developer tubs, and the like. Paying for scans or getting my own scanner and doing that work myself was therefore a given. But if all I would be doing was scanning negatives to a digital file, I asked myself, why wouldn’t I just bypass the time-consuming and costly intermediary (film) by simply using my digital camera to create the digital file straight away?
The question of handling metadata also entered my mind. I had become a stickler for recording things like date, time, and exposure settings. Having to write down all that metadata and transpose it into my photography database seemed like yet another chore.
At bottom, couldn’t digital cameras do what film cameras did, and couldn’t they do it better? Although I wasn’t about to pose snarky questions to others, I knew I wasn’t the only one with doubts.
Film? What a pain in the butt. I’ll just be honest and emphasize that: film is a pain in the butt. So why bother with it?
Because you embrace a medium for what it offers you.
Why Use Film?
My realization about the lasting value of film came to me after I actually got out and started to use my new (to me) Nikon F camera. With a bit of effort and experience, I realized what I had been missing all that time, and I fell in love with using film.
What does film offer you? What can it do that digital photography can’t? Lots of things.
It turns out that the supposed drawbacks of film photography are actually some of its most compelling features.
The Virtue of Being Constrained
Limitations focus the mind. With a film camera in hand, those limitations force us to consider a subject more deliberately. Rather than using the “spray and pray” approach by haphazardly working the shutter button of a digital camera to excess, being hemmed in by a maximum of 36 exposures on a roll of 35mm film makes one put more thought into what you’re shooting.
Ironically, John Schaefer warned about the dangers of indiscriminate shutter button clicking when he wrote about the pros and cons of 35mm photography relative to using medium format and sheet film. In his book The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniques of Photography, he cautioned about the “subtle psychological pitfall” of the format (p. 41):
Thirty-six exposures, automatic exposure control, automatic flash exposure at low light levels, automatic focusing, motor drives, and other “automatic” features offer enormous photographic potential. It is easy to slip into the habit of taking a picture of anything that catches your eye for a moment and hoping that a few negatives may be interesting enough to print. A state of mind can develop in which chance displaces creativity. At that point the camera controls the creativity of the photographer, rather than the other way around. Awareness and selectivity are critical characteristics of fine photography, and it is essential that “automation” not be allowed to diminish those personal qualities.
To be sure, the author was writing about 35mm film photography in the context of the late 1990s, when the only other serious options were all film-based. But if this advice applies to the user of 35mm film, it is far more poignant for the digital photographer and the nearly bottomless amount of modern digital file storage that’s available.
With the explosion of capacity that’s possible with a digital camera equipped with even a modestly-sized storage card, the small number of exposures on a typical roll of 35mm film suddenly feels like a tremendous constraint. But there is virtue that exists in that constraint.
When I shoot film, I end up with more keeper images relative to the total number of images I shoot compared to what I often do with my mirrorless camera. Even on a brief walk around town, I can easily shoot 40 or 60 digital images before I even notice what I’ve done. But with a film camera, the frame counter that sits on top of my camera in plain sight is a constant reminder to put more thought into what I choose to capture in an image.
The Benefits of Going Manual
You would think that an electronic device automating the process of light metering and focus would be liberating. And it is. But in another respect, you become chained to that technology if you become totally reliant on it.
Don’t get me wrong: certain fast-paced situations demand the benefits of automation. But other situations may call for a more considered and intentional approach. Film cameras, especially the older and completely manual ones, are particularly well suited to this.
You may even decide to go completely without a light meter and use your eye to judge the luminance of a subject. You’d then have no electronics making decisions for you whatsoever. It’s a little frightening especially when you know that each film frame equates to money spent. But at the same time, it’s exhilarating especially if you go all the way and do a fast-paced, high-action shoot without a light meter.
Of course, you can shoot a digital camera in aperture priority mode and exercise a sense of intentionality that way. You can also shoot a digital camera in a fully manual mode. But when you’re forced to do so, it’s different.
With a fully manual film camera, you have to put more thought into what you’re doing. Considering your focus and exposure settings by your own wits makes you think about them much more carefully, and the result is often a much better photograph... and ultimately a much better photographer, too.
The Joy of Using a Completely Mechanical Machine
I sometimes smile when I hear digital cameras reviewers complain about poor battery life. I also shrug my shoulders when I see warnings about how a film camera’s light meter or shutter become inoperable if the button cell battery dies.
When I’m out and about with my Nikon F and its plain prism eyelevel viewfinder, I get tremendous joy out of knowing that I’m handling a completely mechanical camera that’s powered by nothing more than levers, springs, cranks, and gears. I get a little endorphin rush when I feel that tactile sensation of the shutter mechanism, aperture diaphragm, and reflex mirror all firing in concert and in the blink of an eye. The same thing goes for working the film advance lever. Feeling the slight resistance of the film and hearing the movement of something physical inside the camera are all part of the experience.
I nodded with understanding and strong approval when I saw that the good folks at Pentax were setting out to develop a new film camera model with all this in mind, and I was heartened when I saw that I wasn’t the only one.
Having fought with computers by programming them for a living, I totally understand the appeal of using something with absolutely zero electronics in it. I know that other folks who are younger than me and who grew up completely during the digital photography and internet ages have the very same understanding.
Waiting
If you’re my age or older, you probably remember the sense of anticipation about getting your most recent batch of pictures back from the developer. Yes, digital cameras give you the benefit of immediacy, but they do so at the expense of the kind of excitement we felt upon first seeing photographs days, weeks, months, sometimes years after we took them.
Today, there is no one near me who develops film. Since I’m reluctant to do it myself, I send it up to a lab for processing. But I like getting stuff in the mail. You know the song lyrics: “Brown paper packages tied up with strings / These are a few of my favorite things.”
When I get my negatives back in a little brown cardboard box, I eagerly tear it open and immediately hold them up to the light to see how they look at first glance. As my scanner generates a preview, seeing an image materialize for the first time on my computer screen is another moment of excitement especially after weeks have passed since making the exposure.
When we switched to digital photography, we lost that sense of excitement and anticipation. With film, we can have it back.
Film Negatives as an Enduring Record
Amazingly, nearly all my film negatives have followed me around over the years. More recently, I’ve referred back to them to reassemble the chronology of events that I lost when I customarily rearranged my prints not long after receiving them from the developer.
Now that I’m armed with a proper dedicated film scanner, I’ve been rescanning them and discovering the incredible amount of detail that has been hiding in the negatives all this time. I’m also able to recover those images whose prints I had edited out and trashed not long after getting them developed. With a fresh eye, the value of those discarded images is now far more apparent to me now.
By looking at my negatives, I could also see that I had a complete record of how I worked a subject. It turns out that an entire book exists on that topic: Magnum Contact Sheets, which I highly recommend.
On a more sentimental level, I also realized that my negatives especially from my youthful travels abroad were the actual physical thing that was with me when I experienced a place, the actual physical thing that “saw” what my own eyes saw when I took the photo.
We lost all of this when we switched to digital photography. If you’re like me, you may simply be deleting files that don’t make the cut. I still do this myself. But having been inspired by the value of the old-fashioned contact sheet, what I do now is generate a digital contact sheet of all my frames before I trash anything. I like having a sequential record of an experience, and making this virtual contact sheet by printing to PDF enables me to do this without having to manage the bloat of excessive file storage on my computer.
But what’s not really possible at all with digital files is being able to hold them in my hand. They’re only ones and zeros stored on a hard drive, after all. With my current film work, though, I love being able to hold up the sleeves that contain all my negatives and know that I have a running physical record of my experiences.
Image Quality
At the end of the day, one does photography for the photographs. The quality of those images should therefore be of paramount concern. But conflating image quality with exactingness leads to a sense of one-dimensionality in one’s work.
The unique characteristics of photographic film up a whole new world of aesthetics. The soft grey tones of lower-speed black and white film or the grain of a higher-speed film may be the key to a photograph’s stopping power. With a bit of skill and experience, one can effectively make use of these and other attributes as photographic symbols.
To be sure, when I’m out shooting pictures of the Moon with my Questar , I’m looking for the sharpest, best-resolved image that I know my telescope’s fine optics can deliver.
But not every composition calls for clinical sharpness. If my intention is to capture moodiness, dreamy softness, or the feeling of urban grit, film is often times the better choice.
Film and Digital Photography: Two Complementary Media
When photography emerged in the early to mid-nineteenth century, some feared it would displace painting as an artistic medium. But in spite of its promise to capture a scene with far more fidelity than what even the most skilled painter could manage, the older media survived simply because one could not achieve with a photograph what one could express in, say, a watercolor or an oil painting.
The same thing applies to photography itself. A digital photograph may capture something with breathtaking sharpness and accuracy. Certain subjects call for this. But other subjects demand a softer touch. Film continues to offer this to the photographer.
And whether the question concerns film or digital photography, both offer only the illusion of true fidelity. I’m reminded of what Andreas Feininger wrote in his book The Complete Photographer about the how camera can in fact “lie” (pp. 48-49). Photography is not a naturalistic medium, after all. It is capable only of a two-dimensional rendering of three-dimension reality. And at least where still photography is concerned, it can only freeze the action of reality which is constantly in motion. To represent that reality, then, a photographer uses all of the symbols of the craft—light, contrast, blur, and many others—to convey in an image what it felt like to experience that reality (pp. 231ff).
Film continues to be relevant because it gives us an opportunity to use some of those photographic symbols in a way that digital photography is incapable of rendering. Some may try to mimic the look and feel of film images by digital postproduction editing. But imitations are almost always inferior. One is better off just going for the real thing.
When I’m sick of one, I reach for the other. It’s nice to have that choice especially when I find myself in a creative rut. If shooting digital has gotten boring, shooting film shakes things up. It’s something different.
Ultimately, I’ve come to realize that one medium hasn’t taken over for the other. Digital photography can do things that film can’t, and film can do things that digital photography can’t. They are complementary media.