Film vs Digital

by William Lulow

A friend of mine recently sent me an article about Eastman Kodak Company stating how they were having some more financial difficulties despite the seeming resurgence of interest in shooting film by quite a few Gen-Z photographers and Hollywood film companies still using film. I actually had stock in the company when I started my photography career because I thought it would be good to invest in a company whose products I always used. 

As a matter of fact, I was always interested in obtaining the sharpest results for my portraits and other images, so I upgraded my equipment to using a 4×5 inch monorail view camera at first, for many of my photographs, even back to the early 1970s when I began to take photography seriously. I had to buy film holders to use for taking the pictures and film hangers to develop the negatives. I invested in quite a few of them. I probably had 30 to 40 holders at one point and 10 hangers, each holding 4 sheets of 4×5″ film. I had 5-gallon developing tanks so that I could process around 40 or so sheets of film at a time. After a while, it was just too cumbersome to use the view camera all the time and especially for portraits even though some of my early successes came from shooting sheet film. But, I finally saved up enough money to buy a Rolleiflex, which was a medium format, twin-lens reflex camera that produced 2 1/4″ x 2 1/4″ images on roll film. But that camera was limited in the number of images it could record on one roll of 120 size film. I could have used the longer 220 rolls, but the processing equipment needed to be changed. I could process about 18 rolls of 120 film at once in my 5-gallon tanks, but I never switched to the 220 type. The 120 film processing allowed me to process 216 frames at once. Then, after all that film was processed, each frame had to be numbered sequentially in order to keep track of them all. Finally, I got tired of loading a new roll after only 12 shots with the Rollei, so I bought a Hasselblad with 4 or 5 film backs, each one of which could hold a roll of 120. That meant I could shoot about 48 shots without having to reload. That worked fairly well. Of course, I had to buy new lenses in addition to the ones I had for my view cameras, which now included a Deardorff Field View which was a flat-bed view camera and packed up smaller than the monorail. As an aside, on a recent trip to Italy, I shot 1,500 digital frames. That would have been 125 rolls of 120 film I would have had to process and print. So there is no contest when it comes to the ease of processing all the shots I make. I have to go through many of the same steps with digital processing but the difference is computers make the post-processing step automatic. You just have to remember where to save everything and how all your frames should be numbered.

It should also be noted here that when someone learned photography before the digital age, most of the lessons were in Black&White and therefore, most of my early imagery was done in monochrome mode. I even use this in my lessons for beginners because B&W is all about shadow and tones of gray. When I was learning the craft, color processing was not easy to do as a DIY project and color labs charged a lot to process color film. Although, I must say, I tried making my own color prints once and it was probably the most realistic color I ever obtained. But it was just too difficult and time consuming to do on a regular basis and certainly not something I would have done for any clients. Today, shooting in color is still difficult because it introduces all kinds of compositional elements and some might say, distractions from the pure form photographs often take.

So, I had lenses for the view cameras, the Hasselblad (medium format) as well as the six lenses I had for my 35mm Nikon F cameras. I am describing all this because, as you might discern, film photography required all this equipment in addition to the tripods and the lighting necessary for a decent sized studio. 

Then came the “digital revolution.” I found myself not wanting to stand in the darkroom to do all the required processing and printing anymore, and because clients needed digital images. So I gradually made the switch to the digital format. My early digital camera was a kind of hybrid Fuji and Kodak version called the Fuji S2 Pro. It used the larger sized digital compact flash cards because the SDHC smaller ones hadn’t been invented yet. Now, I had to have a decent computer fast enough to process the large files and with hard drives large enough to store all my images. This was around 2001 or so and I had to sell my prized Hasselblad and lenses to pay for the new digital camera. I was heart broken to part with it, but it was a necessary step if I was going to keep pace with the new trends. (I was always a commercial photographer concerned with providing clients what they needed as quickly as possible.)

I also decided to learn Adobe Photoshop which was kind of in its infancy around the early to mid 1980s or so. I attended photo shows where the software was demonstrated and taught for about eight years or so until I felt I was comfortable using it for my daily workflow. Suffice it to say that I am still learning the various changes and upgrades that Adobe has added over the years, to the point where I am quite proficient at it for the kinds of portraits and other work I do. 

One of the reasons I went to large format cameras back when I was shooting film was because I wanted to produce the kinds of portraits that had that “pore-revealing” skin tone and sharpness that just wasn’t possible from a 35mm film camera. I also learned that the actual film stock was different for the various sizes of film. 120 Roll film actually was flat, whereas the 35mm version of the same film had a slight curve to it sometimes because of how it was finished in the dryer.

Here are two portraits. Which do you think was shot with film? 

Both have the quality I always wanted for my portrait work. Here’s another one I made of the writer Ira Levin (one of the first jobs I had for Random House publishers):

This has all the quality of the portraits I am known for because it was shot with my 4×5″ Deardorff. I think for this session, I made a total of about 24 exposures. This was the one the publisher chose. Today, when I do a portrait or headshot, I usually shoot about 100 frames from which I edit down to around a dozen or so from which the client(s) can then choose. 

So the digital process has simplified the basic shooting and processing techniques but has kept the consistent quality I always expected from continuous tone materials. There is a difference, and some prefer the continuous tone material. And as one industry tech rep told me years ago, “digital is an entirely different animal than film.” He was right about that because I had to learn all the terms and processes involved with using digital cameras and computers. But, like anything else, if you stick with it long enough they all become second nature. These days, digital cameras and lenses are actually better than anything I used to use for film. The post-production steps are also much easier. It’s kind of like digital x-rays at a dentist’s office. You see the results immediately. When I shot film, I usually used Polaroid materials to make sure all my exposures and the content of the images was the way I wanted them. Today, the immediate results of the digital photography makes this easier, but you have to be willing to deal with small LCD screens on cameras. Some photographers use a program like Capture One to display digital images directly to a laptop, but I find you can’t rely on this for portraits because it interrupts the personal flow of a session.

I will admit however, that I often miss shooting landscapes with my field view cameras, but portraiture is greatly simplified. I also like not having to do darkroom work. At the peak of my proficiency with processing film and making prints, I was often hired as a professional printer. These days, I build in the cost of prints to my shooting fees.

There are a number of folks who still prefer shooting film. They say it promotes more thinking about the types of images you want to make and eliminates the need to shoot thousands of frames just to get the right one. But, I still teach those techniques to students who want to learn digital technology. Digital is just another format for recording what you see. It has to be approached the same way we all did with film. You have to DECIDE what kinds of images you want to make and then go about it as scientifically as you can before you can produce any real creative images of substance.