Digital VS Film

Before the commonly used digital cameras, how were the old cameras used? How did people work with them, having to set everything manually and not even being able to rely on an ‘Auto’ mode? In terms of lighting, white balance, aperture and even ISO, how did people back in the day manage to achieve these elements in their photographs with a manual film camera?

Following the questions above, how was the editing process in film photography? In today’s world, with the digital cameras, everything can be uploaded easily with just a cable, transferred into Photoshop and edited accordingly.

Digital versus film photography has been a topic of debate since the Digital Age came about. Digital cameras were beginning to become a trend and a common household object. But which one is better?

Back in the 1920’s, the only film available was black and white (or, monochrome) film. It was the only way to produce art quality B&W prints because the image is a single monochrome silver halide layer. Unfortunately, digital cannot come anywhere near film for black and white imaging. Black and white film is a single silver layer. Digital grayscale is just desaturated RGB and can never be made to look as good as a print made from film onto paper. So with a digital camera, you cannot get the same picture quality and contrast of that from a black and white film camera.

Color film, on the other hand, gives a superior image quality especially when compared with digital at the higher ISO sensitivity settings which are needed to get an image in low light. With film, the colors stay smooth in the dark areas. Digital images become speckled with little dots that make the picture look somewhat ‘rough’ which is called ‘noise’.

Adversely, digital cameras can get pictures in much lower light than any film can; however, as noted above, dark areas in the higher ISOs are speckled with noise. Additionally, as with film, image quality is lowered drastically as ISO increases and at ISO 12,800 the image is unusable.

Digital images, however, have several big advantages over film. Digital has wider latitude, which is the amount of information visible between the lightest and darkest areas. As the picture is wide, the image details are large compared to one in film.  Besides that, compared to film, which have a limited number of shots per roll, memory cards that can hold thousands of high resolution images, are tiny and are reusable. With a digital camera, you get to see the image immediately after you take it and with professional cameras you can enlarge any part of that image to the pixel level to check the focus.

In my opinion though, I’d prefer photographers working with film cameras as it requires more skill as to getting the right picture. Also, work in the darkroom demands a lot of time and skill as well. The darkroom allows the processing of light sensitive photographic materials, including photographic film and photographic paper. But however, in this era of needing responses quicker than a snap of your fingers, I admit that the digital camera would be more convenient as it is lighter, adjustable (photo quality), easily uploaded, downloaded and transferred; and so on and so forth. But in terms of professionalism, hands down film photography would be my weapon of choice.

Some examples of film and digital cameras :