10 things digital photographers can learn from film
1.Simplifying focus - Auto focus is much slower than not focusing
Just because we have auto focus, it is not necessarily the fastest way to focus. The lost art of zone focusing is to use a narrow aperture and set it to the hyper focal distance. This is much easier to do with vintage lenses with lots of distance scale markings. Lenses for modern digital cameras are not as easy to manipulate for zone focusing.
For example, I use f11 and set infinity to the “11” mark on my Rollei 35 lens for walking around cities. Anything 3 meters and further will be in acceptable focus - a picture is ready to be taken at any time.
Zone focus can be a great way to set and forget a camera setting.
Rollei 35 zone focussed from 3m to infinity at f11.
2.Simplifying exposure - sunny 16 and other rules
Many vintage cameras lack light meters. External light meters can be used, but that is one more gadget to carry around and slow you down.
Using some exposure rules-of-thumb means that you can worry less about settings and more about making a compelling image.
Just use the sunny-16 rule - this rule suggests using f16 and shutter speed of 1/ISO in full sun. Drop one or two stops for cloudy conditions. This is an exact equivalent of shutter or aperture priority depending on how you reduce the light hitting your film.
This method is preferable to your camera's reflected light meter (if it has one) because you are essentially using an ambient reading, and you can ignore the apparent brightness of the subject (e.g. a bright white building, or black cat).
With indoor light at night, I find I can shoot ISO 400 film at the equivalent of f2.0 at a 60th.
3.Simplifying exposure - fixing ISO
I can always guess my exposure settings quickly because I fix my ISO at 400 and only have to think about shutter speed and aperture. The sunny 16 rule is useful, and after a while it all becomes second nature. See more tips on being an exposure expert here. Less fiddling with settings means more time concentrating on the picture.
400 speed film used to be considered a grainy compromise for low-light shooting. But film quality improved, and digital sensors can exhale images at 400 ISO without any noticeable noise. You could theoretically have cleaner images at 100 ISO, but in practice there is very little benefit.
4.Using the right tool for the job (no digital equivalents)
With digital, the upfront cost of a camera is high, so we usually only get one. Often we expect a single camera to do many different types of work. But chefs don't use the same knife to slice an onion and cleave poultry. It is a good job knives haven't gone digital.
With film, the cameras are low cost and so having a few different systems is not all that unreasonable.
For the cost of a full-frame (35mm) digital camera, you could get a Hasselblad 500 for portraits, an Intrepid large format for landscapes and a Rollei 35 for street shooting. Plenty of cash left for film, especially if you stick to black and white and develop at home.
With professionals casting out their small, medium and large format rigs for digital, the used market is full of once prohibitively expensive gear going for a song.
We might look back on the early 21st century as the true golden age for film photography! This much film fun has never been available to the average amateur before.
I’d pick a Rollei 35 for the street and the Hasselblad 500 for studio portraits, but not the other way around
5.compromises of using a small body (can be worth it)
In the digital world you can’t have your cake and eat it - everything is a compromise. If you want a full frame sensor you expect a camera of a certain size, even considering the slight size decrease of the mirrorless bodies (though this is counteracted by an increase in lens size, because physics).
In the film world, 35mm film was squeezed into compact SLRs like the Olympus OM, and then even smaller fixed lens cameras like the Olympus XA and the Rollei 35.
There’s usually a compromise, like loosing interchangeable lenses, or having a smaller format image like half-frame on 35mm film.
6.Lenses must be higher quality with smaller sensor sizes
The box brownie brought photography to the masses in the way that we mistakenly attribute to the iPhone. It was cheap, made of cardboard and had a simple one or two element lens. It might have had a relatively low quality lens, but this was made up for my shooting huge 6x9 inch frames.
With smaller image formats, the resolving power of the lens becomes more and more important. Oscar Barack at Leica determined that the 36mm x 24mm frame was the smallest that could produce an acceptable enlarged print. Leica made high quality lenses because they HAD TO, not because they wanted to be a premium company, at least not in the beginning. They had to sell the idea of image quality to those who thought they could only get it using medium and large format cameras.
This still plays out today with cell phone cameras. The lens is small and made as cheaply as possible which is why cell phone image quality was so bad for so long. Increasing the resolution of the small sensors only exaggerated this problem. Recently, the lens quality improved and software is utilized to interpolate details and shallow depth of field is simulated by brute-force rather than physics.
7.Don’t fall in love with a brand
The idea that it’s Canon vs Nikon, or Hasselblad vs Phase One is quite silly. You might have a preference, but the differences are so small its hardly worth thinking about. If you subscribed to only buying the best, you’d switch brands every time a new camera is released. You don’t have Fender guitarists vs Gibson guitarist. In fact, guitarists are likely to have a collection including both to get a wider range of sound.
The large format photographers early last century were in a really cool situation - there were no proprietary lens mounts. You could put a lens from any manufacturer on a lens board and it was guaranteed to work with your camera body because the aperture and the shutter were build directly into the lens. Schneider, Rodenstock, Nikon, Fuji. You could pick the 150mm Nikon and the 210mm Fuji because you saw the benefits of each, not because you are blindly loyal to a brand. I wish it were still like this.
I get it though - sticking to one brand allows for a more streamlined workflow. You need two bodies on a job and you’d like all your lenses to work with both. And you definitely need to stick with one brand for lighting so you can use one trigger to control them all.
Brands are not your personal identity. Just like with political parties, if you blindly agree with one about everything, your personal identity gets replaced with a pre-packaged one that someone else controls.
Canon vs Nikon. No need to get too attached.
8.Camera/negative/print - a photograph is made from all three components
The modern version might be camera/editing/publish online or print. Either way a photograph is not just the part where we press the shutter button. That’s nothing. It needs processing and just like life on social media, it doesn’t really exist unless it is shared and viewed by others.
The main thing here is that there is an end product that was clear in the film days - it was a print. I’d argue that in this digital era, it still is. At the very least it is an image published online or shown to the viewer on a screen, even if that viewer is yourself.
When you think like this is changes everything. If you know the frame aspect ratio you’ll use for your print, then you’ll tailor your composition that way when you press the shutter. If you know you are shooting for a LinkedIn profile picture, you’ll consider the body language and background simplicity you need when the shutter button is pressed.
Critically a photograph is not some 0s and 1s hidden on a hard drive somewhere. Even if it has been edited, it is still not accessible to the rest of the world. That’s like having flour in your pantry. Processed, but sill not the bread we want others to enjoy.
Make bread, let others enjoy it.
9.lower aperture lenses have Advantages too!
The downside of the YouTube era is that reviewers give the impression that there is an ideal. With lenses you might always want the one with the widest aperture or closest focus distance or fastest autofocus. All of these features add bulk.
I used to think that am f2.8 or f1.4 was super desirable and that an f3.5 was a waste of time and aimed at the lower end of the market.
When I started looking at the history and range of film cameras I realized how wrong I was. Take the collapsible 50mm f3.5 available for the earlier screw-mount Leicas. These lenses are TINY and when collapsed allows the camera to be put in a relatively small pocket. It really is amazing.
When you move to a 50mm f1.8 like this Pentax/Pentacon lens, you find it is considerably larger, and then you add autofocus like this canon 50mm 1.8, it is a little larger still. You might want the wider lens, you might want the autofocus, but you equally might want a small lens for street or vacation photography. I love that there is a choice.
From the left: A leica 50mm f3.5, a Pentacon 50mm f1.8, and an autofocus Canon 50mm f1.8
10.Film is a choice, not just an alternative
I shoot a lot of film, but I still shoot digital for family pictures, sporting events and sometimes when I travel. I see my digital camera as another specialized tool - it shoots colour and high frames per second giving it a specific usefulness like a Hasselblad 500 takes great portraits or a Leica M is discrete for the streets.
Also, digital is often the right choice for a professional photographer even in situations where film would otherwise be superior. Time is money, and so is film. A wedding may look beautiful on film, but digital allows a quicker delivery of the images to the client.
Do you have any lessons from the film days that still hold true today? Let me know in the comments below.
