Is it worth the effort to learn to shoot film?

For the past 5-6 years the debate has raged whether or not film is dead. Over that time technology has vastly improved and thus the quality of digital has also improved. Another factor has been the improvement of digital workflow that allows post processing to be a bit more efficient.

For the most part, if you are a professional photographer it is likely that you shoot 95%+ digital. There are, of course, exceptions, but this is true for the most part.

A couple of years ago I had a high school student shadow me in the studio for Career Day. She was considering majoring in Photography when she went to college. One of her frustrations in high school was that the Photography I class required them to shoot film and work in the dark room before they could advance to the Photography II class the next semester. The Photography II class moved to using digital and learning Photoshop. She wanted to skip the whole film thing and just head straight into digital.

I guess the way I look at it, learning to shoot film is a good thing. First of all, digital photography (including Photoshop) has it’s roots deep in traditional film photography. Much of what you can do in Photoshop can also be done in a darkroom if you have the skills. Understanding this will make you a stronger photographer and editor. I’m not saying you should become an expert in the darkroom before you move to digital, but I think that if you spend some time to learn the basics of traditional photography, you’ll gain some good habits and skills that will help you in the digital world.

One large advantage in shooting film (especially medium format), is that you learn to see the shot before you shoot it. The reason this happens is that when you are shooting film, you have a finite number of frames available to you. For instance when I shot 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 film, I had 8 shots to a roll of film. I learned to get things right before I tripped the shutter. If I shot 32 photos that’s 4 rolls of film. To process 4 rolls of film would take a couple of hours, plus drying time. And that’s just for the negatives. So you learn not to waste film.

So you ask, “how does that have an effect on digital?”. The payoff comes in post processing and disk management. When you learn to shoot more economically, you shoot fewer photos. Granted in digital, more memory cards are cheap, but your true gain comes after you download the photos to your computer. As a professional photographer, time is money and the more time you spend sorting thru photos and organizing them, the less time you can spend shooting. It’s better to spend your time looking at fewer, higher quality images than it is to go thru hundreds of poor quality images to find a few good ones.

People who learn to shoot digital tend to have a “pray and spray” mentality. In other words, they are likely to shoot lots of photos in hope of getting a few good ones. While that is not always the case, it is usually the majority.

Anyway, I think the idea to take away from all of this is to slow down and look at what you are shooting before you hit the shutter. If you do this, I think the quality of your images will improve and you’ll spend less time staring at your computer monitor. More camera time is more fun and will make you more money.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!

– Ken.