Film versus Digital, and vice versa

Film and film cameras are so awesome if you have time and money to waste.

I did it from 2012 to 2022 with few rolls developed and some frames printed under enlarger ... per week.
It was easy job, easy life time. I have purchased, fixed, sold dozens of film cameras of all formats.

Right now my life is much more busier, dare I say, interesting and challenging to keep waste it on film.

My 12YO daughter switched to Canon digital P&S after realizing how much instax film cost...

Sorry.
 
For me film has become too costly and too much hassle (whether turnaround times, faffing with chemicals or all the shennanigans with scanning or digitising by camera), relative to what I get with digital.

Sometimes I look at my digital photos and think "wow that looks like an old film photo", but I have never thought "I wish I'd used film" no matter how bad the photo came out - though I do sometimes wish I'd used a different (digital) camera, or that the (digital) camera I'd used wasn't so capricious/situational/whatever.
 
I dunno. I've been shooting and processing film since I was 8yo, that's 62 years now. The worst I can say is that it's a little tedious at times. Better or worst than digital capture? Irrelevant with any modern camera.

I like what film looks like, but I also like what digital capture looks like. I have good cameras in both domains so, eh? The real advantage to shooting with a digital camera, for the way and what I shoot, is how quickly I can turn a shoot into prints .... But I'm never in a rush and have no clients bangin' on the door any more, so I get to enjoy whatever process I pursue.

G
 
I love taking pictures with my film cameras; the tactile delight of loading and winding the film, the feel of a precise mechanical device in my hands doing exactly what I tell it to and nothing more, looking through an optical viewfinder. I love the look of my photos on black-and-white film. I can get black-and-white images I like with my digital camera or my phone, but they don't look like my film photos.

I'm mostly a black-and-white photographer. I like color photography, but I don't like my color photography. With color, I still greatly prefer shooting with my film cameras, but I don't like the results enough better than what I can get from digital to bother most of the time. If slide film wasn't so astronomically expensive, I might think differently.

The quantity of film that I shoot is small enough that the cost is tolerable. I have noticed that for me personally, I am okay with the cost of film until it goes over $10 per roll (35mm). If black-and-white film gets over that, I will probably rethink my position.

Realistically, I am never going to have time, space, or money to have a darkroom, so getting images from my film cameras is going to involve scanning at some point. I have found an inexpensive lab to have my film developed and scanned, and other than a few frames that have had obvious dust, I have been very happy with my results.

I always keep my negatives, but in terms of archiving my photos, I prefer digital hands down. Having my photos save on my personal hard drives (plural) plus backed up to three different cloud services makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Well, other than the fact that one of those services is Google, which is probably using my photos to train its AI. Don't have to worry about that with my negatives in the shoe boxes, at least!
 
Felt it's not versus. Seems like some other members have similar sentiments too.

It's all about what we want and like. Depends on the season in life we are in.

I went through a period of shooting film but the time and cost are harder and harder to justify, so I went on to shoot digital.

And recently got into the craze of digicams to capture those 90s digital vibe :D happy that I was buying those unwanted digicams before the price hike!
 
Dust spotting with LR is quick and simple as long as there are only a few. Dust spotting from a negative is a PITA, whether with Spotone on a print or digitally. Removing sensor dust spots in images can be impossible without a LOT of tedious diddling and doodling around.

i repeat: I hate spotting.

Spotting with Lightroom's tools makes it a pleasure.

G

Quick and simple (sometimes) but never a pleasure.




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