Musings on digital vs analog photography
This morning in the car, my thought process* drifted to my old 35mm camera, and I starting thinking about digital vs analog photography. I suppose part of it originated at my daughter’s birthday party yesterday, when I commented “I like digital over film, I can just take as many photos as I want.” Now, this was while I was shooting 10 or 15 action shots in a row of her tearing tissue paper out of a gift bag, but today it’s got me thinking.
Is digital really better than film? Granted, there’s the obvious arguments in favor of digital: virtually limitless space on your “roll of film”, easier and faster to see end results, easier to share, lots of fun details like EXIF and geotagging. But the neo-luddite part of me (which is definitely tiny but sometimes very loud) remembers how much fun it was when I was dating the lady who later became my wife, and we went to the botanical gardens. I shot 3 or 4 rolls of some 100-speed Kodak film, and most of those shots were pretty good; excellent depth of field, some pseudo-macro shots of flowers (I used a plain old virtually-stock 25-90mm lens), and some excellent long shots of Heather in front of a waterfall. I actually thought about the composition of each shot before I pushed the shutter, and as a result I got some excellent photos. And I actually have memories of taking some of those pictures.
With digital, I remember the event, but I rarely think about the effort I exerted to actually take the picture. It’s more along the lines of “take as many pictures as I can, pick the ones I like, and clean up any problems in Photoshop.” This morning, I’m not sure if that’s the way I always want to think about photography.
* Thought process: I saw a bumper sticker that I couldn’t read, so I thought I’d take a photo of it and blow it up in Photoshop when I got to the office. Then I realized that my windshield was dirty, and I remembered my dad talking to Andy about how blurry photos usually come from dirty lenses. I remember commenting at the time that a flash helps if it’s only a speed-of-the-camera issue. I remembered that even with a flash I still have lots of photos of Nora that have crystal-clear backgrounds and blurry daughter. Which brought me to analog photography, and manually setting my depth of field and focusing on the actual subject.
