Fascinating that the film v digital debate can generate so much heat. The moment I went digital - it must be nearly four years ago - my Nikon FE SLRs became expensive paperweights. I have no desire to return to the palaver of film developing and printing and waiting hours or days (or maybe a couple of weeks with send-away Kodachrome) to see how the pix turned out. It's digital all the way now...
You can learn the basics of photography with either film or digital, but I can't see any logical reason to invest in film cameras, and maybe a darkroom set-up, only to go digital in a year or two. There may always been a niche market for the kind of qualify you get get out of a 5x4 or 10x8in view camera; for smaller formats digital overtook film a few years back.
Digital hasn't stopped people taking bad pictures; there are more bad pix produced every day than at any time in the 150-year history of photography. Encouraged by camera manufacturers, lot of people are fixated with their gear. Cameras become almost like fetish objects. When I run photo workshops, a lot of participants spend their time fiddling with their cameras... which means that they barely see the landscape they are trying to photograph. And they don't understand how their cameras work, which means that every new feature and programme just adds another layer of incomprehension. The cameras are too complicated (for what is actually a fairly simple job), and the manuals are no better.
I try to get workshop participants to simplify the whole process, to get back to the basics of photography, but those camera adverts - new! improved!! more features!!! - are far more persuasive...
You can learn the basics of photography with either film or digital, but I can't see any logical reason to invest in film cameras, and maybe a darkroom set-up, only to go digital in a year or two. There may always been a niche market for the kind of qualify you get get out of a 5x4 or 10x8in view camera; for smaller formats digital overtook film a few years back.
Digital hasn't stopped people taking bad pictures; there are more bad pix produced every day than at any time in the 150-year history of photography. Encouraged by camera manufacturers, lot of people are fixated with their gear. Cameras become almost like fetish objects. When I run photo workshops, a lot of participants spend their time fiddling with their cameras... which means that they barely see the landscape they are trying to photograph. And they don't understand how their cameras work, which means that every new feature and programme just adds another layer of incomprehension. The cameras are too complicated (for what is actually a fairly simple job), and the manuals are no better.
I try to get workshop participants to simplify the whole process, to get back to the basics of photography, but those camera adverts - new! improved!! more features!!! - are far more persuasive...