Shooting Like Film in a Digital World

This week I was scanning in some prints of my childhood photos to organize in my iPhoto library. I considered the differences between film photography and digital photography. Almost every film photo in our album was shot with an auto setting and a flash, but it was remarkable how well they were exposed and how much integrity each image had. Looking through my digital collections of photos, I could find a few special photos but most of them had much less nostalgic clout than the film pictures.

It is difficult to say whether film prints are more meaningful to me just because they were taken earlier on in my life, or because they are much easier to look at repeatedly, or because the sparsity of film forced us to take better pictures. Probably it is a combination of all of the above.

I wonder if the digital approach to photography is too much. It can be very handy for pro-photographers and people shooting photos of long events to have the capability to shoot hundreds of photos quickly and cheaply. But for the average person recording family memories, digital photos can outdo our needs. How many family events have you had where the photographer obsesses over taking dozens of photos while everyone is forced to smile and blink into the sun? How many batches of photos have you sent friends and family in online albums that they clicked through once and then mostly forgot about? The problem with digital photography is that with the possibility of having hundreds of photos we obsess over quantity instead of quality. I don’t want to see two hundred photos of the same birthday party—I want to see twenty photos that represent it well, and can stick in my memory for years.

I love digital photography, and I like trying to experiment with artistic photos. I like that I can take mess up photos, and I don’t have to stress about paying over ten dollars just to get 24 photos printed. But I think we should understand that photos back in the film days had completely different mentalities behind their existence. Knowing that film was expensive we took a lot of posed photos (which is unfortunate), but we also took a lot of photos that we knew would be good. People think about how they will compose their shots, and how many of each photo they want when they are using film. With digital photography, we tend to treat the photos like one more piece of digital data that will be logged into our massive digital timeline and buried along with everything else. Photos aren’t information, they’re memories. We should treat them that way.

I don’t want anybody to think digital photography is evil. It’s a cost-effective way to record family photos, and makes it much easier to learn photography. It gives us the immediate satisfaction of knowing if a shot was good enough or needs to be retaken. It is easier to share and to store. However, it is important to remember that our photo albums should not be faceless postmodern databases of junk—we should always think about how we want to represent an event before we take the photo. Also, it’s okay to throw out digital photos that are just mediocre or repetitive (at the very least don’t post them on Facebook!). I think we would return to our digital albums more often if we weren’t overwhelmed with the fact that hundreds of photos could compose just one family vacation. In short, if you treat your digital photos like film then you will get better results.

We are the transition generation: our early youth was in film, but our teen years were digital. Photo of me as a young boy.