The question is whether your journey into photography begins with a digital or a traditional film camera. Ask anyone who’s ever wanted to get into photography or taken a photography course – even if their enthusiasm only ever led them to the purchase of a camera that’s been collecting dust in a desk drawer – and just watch as that person instantaneously becomes an incredibly vocal authority on the subject.
The photography world is full of preachers. Everyone has an opinion about everything: best lens; best brand; best places to shoot, and what medium you should choose when you first learn photography or take a photography course. From hipsters who tell you you should shoot analogue (and who you shouldn’t listen to), to seasoned professionals who will also tell you to start off analogue (and who you should listen to), opinions in the photo community are loud, strong, and very conflicting (although evidently not so much between those hipsters and pros – but never mind that).
Chances are pretty good you already have a digital camera, and even if you don’t, your phone does. But there’s a very big difference between taking holiday snaps and selfies to deciding you want to get serious about photography. And just to be very clear, this is not a discussion over whether you should dish out a fortune on a classic Leica Noctcolux or the latest full-frame digital SLR. Because whatever medium you decide to start with, please (for god’s sake) don’t choose an expensive camera; lenses are worth a lot more.
Both the film and digital crowd have some very convincing arguments in their favour. And here we’re going to talk a little about why, despite all the obvious benefits of a DSLR, it might be better for you to develop your skills with an analogue camera.
Photography’s founding fathers shot film. Film has been around a lot longer than its teenaged digital cousin, and if you really want to master an art (any) you learn from the greats. There’s no question about why they didn’t shoot digital; it didn’t exist, but what is important is that they mastered the medium available to them. They learned how to manipulate light in just the right way, they learned to frame the story they wanted to tell, and they understood exactly what it meant to be patient in a time when unlimited takes weren’t an option. If you choose to shoot film or have old negatives that you want to give a new lease of life, you may want to consider using slide scanning to have them digitized. This is a good method of preserving them as if they deteriorate or become damaged, you’ll also have high-quality copies too.
An SLR may not offer all the pyrotechnics of a DSLR but what film does offer is the chance to go through every step of the photographic process, from learning about the camera’s fundamental mechanisms to spending hours in a darkroom learning to develop only the photos that matter most to you. Much of the creative process used to occur in the darkroom, but nowadays that craft is largely left to some smart hardware and software. That’s ok up to a point, but if you want to understand your limits as an artist, and then stretch them, you won’t be able to do this if you leave that artful process up to a piece of machinery.
Furthermore, honing your abilities with film requires an extra degree of care, attention and love. OK, that’s mainly because it costs more, but if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes: when you invest in rolls of film and hours in the darkroom, every image counts. This can be limiting – it might stop you from taking creative risks – but it will also put you more closely in touch with the essential nuts and bolts of photography, encouraging you to pay far more attention to how you set up each shot, to the various environmental factors in fluctuation about you, and to what it is you aim for each shot to achieve. You’ll spend hours analysing each image in a way that you simply can’t when you’ve been snapping away dozens, maybe hundreds, of photos at a time with a digital camera.
Learning photography with film is really understanding what it is to create and understand an image from scratch, and if you’re a beginner, is there really any other way?
