digital, digital, all is digital.

early years

why film is dead

are digital prints better?

it's the lens and the person behind it that matters

early years

I was 11. I hung blankets up at the bathroom window and stuffed towels under the door. I prepared the chemicals, turned off the light and, with trembling fingers, see-sawed the film back and forth in an inverted arch through a pudding basin containing developer. It was nearly fifty years ago but I remember every detail like it was yesterday. The camera was an old folding bellows Kodak I had been given. The film was 120 roll Ilford FP3. I used Ilford ID11 developer with a vinegar stop bath and some home mixed sodium metabisulphite crystals as a fix. I also remember the agony of waiting for the fix to work before I could rinse the film, turn on the light and inspect the negatives - if this went wrong I would have wasted a month's worth of trudging through the rain delivering papers before I could afford more chemicals and another film.

The negatives - of my cat mostly - were fine, and every evening, while saving up for some printing-out-paper and developer, I would take the them carefully out of their home made paper sleeves and examine them through a magnifying glass for sharpness, grain, and all the other things I had read about for so long in so many library books.

Much later in life, as a teacher, I vicariously revisited that early thrill by teaching children how to process their own films and prints.

So why do I say that film is dead and digital is king? Am I not I denying others my early experiences which taught me so much about photography (and about maths, chemistry, light, optics, animal behaviour and human nature)? Read on. Or back to top.

why film is dead

To the child with curiosity, an old computer, a cheap digital camera and a cut-price image manipulation programme are every bit as exciting as my early experiences with film and darkroom. And while I dreamed of Leicas and Rolleis and electronic flash and telephoto lenses, today's young enthusiast dreams of digital SLRs, DVD burners, Pentium processors and Photoshop CS.

And (big and) they don't have any processing costs! Which enables them to experiment with composition, camera settings, and so on, in a way my limited budget never allowed. Results are instant. You can see what you did wrong and put it right, there and then. It is possible to teach yourself photography - the only way to learn really - in a fraction of the time.

By allowing pecunious amateurs the luxury of experimenting freely without incuring costs, other than the initial investment in equipment and the occasional A4 print to go on the wall, we free ourselves to concentrate on what matters - producing good photographs.

So much for the serious amateur photographer. What about the snapper?

Go into your local Boots the chemist and look around. If it is like mine (a small shop in a small town) then you will see a large percentage of the floor space given over to film developing and printing machines with two trained members of staff in attendance.

Recently however a small machine, smaller than a drinks vending machine, has appeared. You take the digital media out of your camera, insert it into the machine, choose the pictures you would like to print then adjust their colour, contrast, brightness and crop them. Press a button. 60 seconds later you have your prints: prints which are usually better than anything you can get from the huge film processing machines behind the counter.

Now answer truthfully. When you go into Boots in two years time, will the wet processing still be there? Of course not.

Look at the advantages of the digital vending machine over film processing for someone without a computer and photo-printer or the skills or inclination to use them:

• You only print the photos you like
• You can control the processing to get the effect you intended
• You get them immeadiately
• You can save them to a CD
• You can return again and again for re-prints
• Storage of the "negatives" is easy

And the professional? - the person who earns his living by photography?

Have a look next time you see a photographer at a wedding, on the news snapping celebrities or at work in the advertising studio - digital every one. They can't afford not to.

There will always be a place for film of course, and certain specialised applications and "art" photography still use film. And there will always be those to whom the process is more important than the result, who will continue to use film, and good luck to them.

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