Don’t get me wrong, I shot film for many years. I’m not patient enough anymore for analog. The serendipity of it is fascinating, but I prefer the instant reward of digital.

This is one reason why there’s a resurgence of interest in analog pictures.įilm photography is inconvenient. Film photography is imperfect-it has flaws-and, because of that, it is rewarding. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and when you fortuitously stumble upon something interesting, there’s a lot of joy in that. Occasionally you accidentally and unknowingly discovery something extraordinary. There are a lot of variables that can affect the outcome, which are sometimes out of your control. You don’t know what you have until you have it sometime later. With film photography, mistakes happen fairly frequently. Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. I think, also, that creativity is rarely born out of perfectionism. For example, if you are working hard to create perfect pictures, you will not create very many images. Pulitzer-Prize winning author John Updike stated, “Perfectionism is the enemy of creation.” I think that statement is true in multiple aspects. Perfect pictures can be perfectly boring. Sometimes I think that digital photography is too good, too flawless, too sterile. Perfect pictures are prevalent today-a wonder of contemporary photography, no doubt. You can get extremely clean, sharp, bright, and vibrant pictures with extraordinary dynamic range that just wasn’t possible in the film era. You can manipulate the images as much as you’d like in software to achieve any aesthetic that you can dream of. You can review your pictures immediately after they’re captured-no waiting for rolls of film to come back from the lab. An unedited JPEG from a Fujifilm X100V using my Xpro ’62 recipe.ĭigital photography is convenient.

Picture style canon vintage