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Film - My First Love

Well, I shoot on both; it’s just that shooting on B&W film is a love affair; it evokes nostalgia. For most people, a film camera seems like an anachronism. But in a very profound sense, it is the opposite; film cameras remain the ultimate refinement of photographic technology. Used correctly, a mechanical camera portrays your subject ‘faithfully’ from the moment you trigger the shutter to your final darkroom handprint. Whereas DSLR cameras record automatically, faster and easier because they’re driven by algorithms.

Although artistic skill still matters, the number of variables involved in digital photography have been engineered to make ‘capturing’ simpler. To me it makes digital photography feel cold and artificial — the digital photographer could be considered more ‘operator’ than an artist because in effect, digital algorithms almost ‘own’ the image captured.

Shooting on film is more dignifying and allows one to learn from odd ‘mistakes’. Paradoxically, this in itself is liberating because you’re only as good as your last photograph – best you remember this when shooting on film stock.
Photoshopping does not ‘liberate’; it patches, heals, clones, and transforms your image. So too are B&W digitized filters, in that they rob the photographer of a lot of photographic decision-making while on location.
The art of shooting then printing from B&W film will never be fully replaced by digital algorithms.

The Artist as Photographer