Digital Cameras

I know there are a lot of purists out there, people who lament the ground lost from film cameras.  You know who you are.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that position.  Film has an aesthetic and emotional resonance that digital, in its cold 1, 0, 1, 0 perfection, can't match.  But...

Digital technology easily bests film in most other areas.  The resolution on high-end cameras is now larger than 35 mm. film.  And there's no upper limit.  We're limited more in our printing and reproduction capabilities than in image capture.  A 30 megapixel consumer point and shoot can't be too far off.

Digital images can be manipulated much easier than physical negatives.  Programs like Photoshop do everything an artist would normally do in a darkroom, plus a gargantuan amount more.  Granted, physical negatives can be scanned for manipulation digitally, but there's an inherent quality compromise.  Better to capture digitally from the beginning.

Getting prints made is so much easier with digital files.  Instead of having to either develop your images yourself, or drop the film of at a processing center, you can print your images at home.  Or digitally transmit them to a processing center of your choice.  This creates competition, because we aren't limited anymore to just our local processing centers.

Sharing images is clearly much easier as well, with the plethora of online photo sharing sites.

But the real benefit of no film is...no film!  It's expensive, and therefore limiting.  I went on a three week trek across Europe back in 2001, and I took along a relatively simple old film camera.  With only 24 exposures per roll I had to be very choosy about what scenes I captured.  I think in all I shot about 15 rolls of film.  If you figure (and I have no idea if these figures are accurate) six dollars per roll to purchase them, and then eight dollars to process them, you're looking at a grand total of $210.  That's 58 cents per print.  Today you can get prints online for as low as 6 cents per print.  And you're only paying for the images you actually print.  The other thousand images you have sitting on your hard drive didn't cost you a thing.

I can only imagine what images I missed because I didn't have the latitude then that a digital camera would afford me now.  I probably would have come home with many thousands of images instead just the 360 I did.  Of course volume is no substitute for talent...it's anyone's guess if any of those missed images would have been any good.