A place for film in the digital age

Digital cameras maybe versatile, inexpensive and flexible but old-fashioned film cameras are holding their own


Digital cameras are increasingly cheap, ever more versatile and about to boot film cameras out of first place in the market. But where does this revolution leave film? If you have a choice of film or digital, is there any reason to go with chemicals instead of a computer chip?

For most consumer users, the answer is no. Film has some real problems – most important, you can't tell if you blew the shot until you get the film developed – to which digital is immune.

And digital has also caught up to film in terms of resolution; a digicam with three million pixels of resolution (megapixels) or more can produce pictures indistinguishable from film output, especially if the prints are made on professional gear at a photo store, or ordered online.

But there are also areas in which digital has some catching up to do with film. For most home photographers, they don't outweigh the benefits of a digital camera, but they are things to keep in mind.

The most obvious, especially on older cameras, is shooting speed.

Any decent film camera offers essentially zero 'latency': Press the shutter, and what's in the viewfinder is preserved on the negative. Many digicams lack that responsiveness.

You also have to wait between shots for a digital camera to write photos to the memory card. Shot-to-shot speed has improved on newer models, many of which also let you take two or three shots in succession before they are written to the card.

I got a perfect demonstration of that digital weakness recently, when I used a Canon S100 at a friend's wedding. The bride and her father danced a waltz, and the camera could not keep up as they whirled around the room. I wound up aiming where I thought they would be in the next second, hoping that both his face and hers would appear in one of the shots. I think one photo out of 10 may have worked out.

Newer models perform better, especially if you already have the camera focused on the subject, but moving targets remain a problem. "There's still a way to improve,'' said Bill Giordano, a marketing manager for Nikon.

White balance – ensuring that snow, for instance, doesn't look blue, gray or yellow – can be another weak point of digital photography.

Many digicams offer picture-taking modes that fix balance by overexposing the shot slightly, but you need to find the right menu option to enable them. And unlike film cameras, which have had a fairly standard interface for decades, digital cameras remain all over the map in terms of the design of their controls.

White-balance glitches can often be fixed with photo-editing programmes, but that genre of software has plenty of usability issues of its own.

Many higher-end digital cameras provide the flexibility and control of a single-lens-reflex film camera, but one critical aspect, aperture – the adjustable size of the opening through which light passes to the film or digital sensor – often falls short.

Photographers play with aperture (that's what they're discussing when they mutter about "f-stops'' to adjust how much of a shot is in focus). A small aperture ensures that the entire scene is in focus, as in an Ansel Adams landscape. A wide aperture will shorten the "depth of field''; many portraits are shot that way.

Digital cameras have had no problem with the smaller end of the aperture scale, but the much smaller size of their sensors, compared with film, has made it hard to provide a shallow depth of field to the photographer.

For those and other reasons, some people who work with photos for a living still prefer film. (The Washington Post shoots a lot of photos with digital hardware, especially on deadline assignments such as sports stories, but the majority of pictures here are still taken on film.)

Neal Freed, president of Freed Photography in Bethesda, Maryland, said his wedding photographers tend to stick with film.

"Digital's single biggest weakness ... is holding detail in the highlights,'' he said, explaining how the details on a wedding gown can wash out in digital images.

He also said digital is less forgiving overall than film in tricky lighting. Philip Brookman, the Corcoran Gallery of Art's senior curator for photography and media arts, has his own complaint with the output of digital cameras. "I think that digital images have a flatness to them, and you can see the difference if you're looking for it,'' he said.

But artists are experimenting with digital cameras anyway, and some results have already shown up on the walls of the Corcoran's galleries. "Not so many yet,'' Brookman said.

For people who don't photograph for a living or for art's sake, however, one thing is clear: A digital camera will let you learn from each shot and give you the chance to keep shooting until you get it right. Then you'll have a much easier time sharing the results.

The real-time feedback of a digital camera's LCD readout also means that you'll never suffer the belated realisation, as I did two years ago, that you didn't load the film right on a hike through Yosemite. Film may be dying, but photography looks to be in its best shape ever.


© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service