By: Sharon Cutajar
The choice between digital or film cameras is an extremely personal choice. Digital technology has made photography cheaper in the long run and easier than ever before.
There is an instant gratification with using a digital camera to take photographs. You can shoot the image, review, and know immediately what needs to be changed. This can be a lifesaver with landscape photography; imagine being in a once in a lifetime location or having an especially delicate light. If you have made a mistake with film photography, you may not discover it until the roll has been developed. With digital, you know instantly.
Digital cameras are also useful if you are a beginner. If you can identify a problem with your photograph instantly, you can then go ahead and correct it, or at least try to. With film there must be a development stage, and by then, you may have forgotten what settings you used, and what the problem was.
Also the developing is cheaper and easier, provided you have a computer and printer. Images can be downloaded, emailed and adjusted on programmes such as Adobe Photoshop in an instant. They can be printed cheaply in a professional or online lab, or you can print them at home on photo paper. There is no need to print every image, just the best of the bunch.
The downside to digital?
Firstly there is the issue of preservation; there are many tales of hard drives crashing or being stolen, or of CDs that held thousands of images being damaged. Unlike film, where there is the negative to rely on, digital images are intangible and most of the time, stored on computers.
The answer to this is to always create back ups of your work. Another good idea is to upload them onto an online server or photo sharing site - this means that if all your computers broke and you sat on all of your CDs, a copy of the images still exist in cyber space.
With a digital camera you have to be careful that you do not spend so much time editing an image, or deleting unsuitable ones that you forget to actually spend time taking a good picture. It is always worth keeping images you think are poor at the time and take a good look at them on a full screen monitor as you cannot always see the small details on the camera’s LCD screen.
Another important point with digital cameras is that there is a ‘magnification’ factor. This means that if you use a film lens with a digital camera, you may not necessarily get the image you expect. This is because digital SLRs have a smaller sensor than that of a 35mm film camera negative (which is 24×36mm). So using a film lens which covers the 24 x 36mm format on a digital SLR which has a 15 x 22mm sensor effectively makes the image slightly cropped, or appears longer in focal length (more of a telephoto look!).
Different brands have different multiplication factors. With a Nikon, you need to multiply the lens length, which is written on the lens (we will learn more about this later) by 1.5, with a Canon it is multiplied by1.6. You can check online or with the manufacturer of your camera to see what you need to multiply your lens length by.
This is more of a problem with wide-angle lenses for digital cameras, as a 28mm wide angle becomes smaller once the multiplication sum has been done. There are new, made for digital lenses being released to address the wide angle issue, but for now, they are expensive to purchase.
When it comes to film cameras, there are still those that prefer the look of film images to digital. This is a personal preference, although film purists say they love to zoom into an image and see the grains of silver as opposed to a mush of pixels!
With a film camera, there is the excitement of receiving a set of prints back and seeing how well you did. If you have a manual SLR camera, which does not require heavy rechargeable batteries, there is the benefit of not having to carry spare power sources, as digital photographers have to do. You can easily go to a local store and buy standard fit batteries for your film SLR camera.
Memory cards, which digital photographers must buy to store their images on, can become corrupt without notice, which means that their images are irretrievable. There is unlikely to be this problem with film, although developing labs do make mistakes and develop a roll badly.
Also, when you are choosing a roll of film, you must pick an ISO rating (more on this later). If you have a roll that has 36 frames and the weather conditions suddenly change, you cannot just swap the film over to a more suitable type - you have to finish the entire roll first.
Summary.
To be realistic, at the time of writing (2008), digital is the way that many photographers are turning and the way the consumer market is going. Digital offers instant feedback and is easy to edit and easy to share. Film takes longer to process and processing charges are going up since it is less profitable for companies to run labs. Film is unpredictable and although the element of surprise can be nice, in a professional environment you may not have the second chance if your shots do not work out. A digital set up may cost more initially (since you would need a computer), so consider both pros and cons before deciding.