Cameras - Digital versus Film - questions?

The truth is that there still are there photographers who swear by using film only. I totally understand that. Even though the process of actually taking the photograph (the way the light enters your camera obscura) is the same to a great extent, the way you take it out of there is quite different. The film needs to be post processed ,and the way that is being done depends on the type of film you are using (negative or transparency), the film's sensitivity (speed) and the effects you are looking for. Now you can do a lot more in the digital world if you take out a digital file out of your camera, and the most flexibility is offered by cameras the allow you to record your images in what is called RAW. Now, RAW is not actually a file type but more of a concept. It's the idea of recording the information that your camera sees during the short time when you allow the shutter curtains to be released and the image to be captured on the media, in this case digital media.

The flexibility comes from you being able to tweak with all that information afterwards, when you open the digital file on a computer. That includes colors, saturation, sharpness, and the most important, white balance and even exposure. The beauty of this is the elimination of color correction filters for artificial lighting (such as correcting the yellow/orange hue of a picture taken in tungsten lighting or the green hue of pictures taken in fluorescent bulb lighting.)

If you use film, you need to correct that light before it enters your camera and you cannot do much after that. I am not sure if you could correct the light as you develop the film. I know you can use special film balanced for that particular lighting. Yes, there are special films for different types of lighting (indoor, outdoor, sunlight, sunset, etc.) The drawback for film use, from this point of view is that you need to "consume" a whole roll before you can change it to a different roll for a new location or different lighting.

Film has its upside in the financial part of your photography. I will explain the different sides of it here: first, most film is cheap now, but in the long run, if you take lots of pictures, or use continuous shooting, you run out quickly and that eventually adds up. Film cameras are cheaper than digital cameras, even the SLR ones. (SLR single reflex camera). There are exceptions of course. Leica is one of them. (Don't be thrown of by the '60s look of their models. Their beauty lays in some other place.) Second, it costs money to process and if you want to do it on your own and want to be able to control the process, it will be costly since there is a lot of "chemistry" involved. The up side is that a lot of photo buyers (yes, there are people interested in buying photographs from you, and we will get into that later) still use a lot of film for their needs. The best thing is transparency film, which is not the same as negative film. I believe that in the next few years they will change to using digital format for their needs too. There are photo buyers who already accept submission in digital format. Eventually people will use digital photography for the most part. It's easy to "transport" or to send places and it's very easy to duplicate. You won't need to guard that original transparency like precious gold.

Digital media has its pluses too. One immediate upside is that you can actually see your results (small ones, in size) right after you have taken the picture on your camera's LCD. You can delete them if you don't like them and make some space for future, better results, right there on the spot. With the development of faster and bigger storage media (CF, SD cards etc.) space becomes cheaper. So you will be able to store more of your successes or missed photos for later reviewing and make the final call of that stays and what goes on your computer where you will be able to see much more details of your work.

A drawback for digital photography is that in order to take high quality pictures you will need an expensive camera, although companies come up with more and more accessible cameras that take up to 1o megapixels images. Megapixels have to do with the size of your printable image. You can of course use post processing for enlarging an image, but computers will have to do a lot of guessing in order to actually change that file and make it bigger (add more pixels).

All in all for starters, even if interested in the high quality photography I would use digital. Even if (some) artists still use film, I believe it is possible to achieve great results with digital cameras. Then I say digital, I mean SLR. I will hardly even talk about point and shoot cameras since they are more the consumer side of photography. (Take pictures of the kids to send to their grandparents) Not only because you can use interchangable lenses, but you have more control of the settings (exposure, aperture, metering, etc.)

I will not explain here in details how everything works. The web is full of this kind of stuff. I will treat this more as a personal experience with photography. The slideshow you see to the right of this text is created by photographs taken by me using a digital SLR camera. Most of them are experiments. I would consider them experiments. We'll see what comes out of it. Enjoy.