Before we go any further in our series on digital photography, we need to discuss one nagging question: what are the pros and cons of digital versus film? Notice I didn’t say “answer” the question, because there are as many answers as there are people. Let’s look at some facets of photography, viewed from a film and digital light.

The power to make mistakes. Take a digital photo, review it on the camera’s built-in screen. Don’t like it? Maybe Little Joey had his eyes closed again. No problem. Erase it, and take it again. Obviously, with film, you won’t discover Joey’s closed eyes until after developing. Once you buy the digital camera and an infinitely reusable memory card, every picture you take is effectively free (until you print it, of course). In fact, the cost of a 64 MB memory card is roughly equivalent to buying and developing about ten 36-exposure rolls of 35mm film. The instant feedback available on whether you “got the shot” or not is a big plus for digital.

Price. Although digital camera prices are falling rapidly, feature-for-feature you still can’t beat film cameras. A higher-end consumer 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) film camera, around $500, is easily half the cost of its digital counterpart, even with the previously mentioned zero film cost of the digital. Although you can get a lot of digital camera for $500, you won’t find near the features of a film camera.

Flexibility. The rise of personal computers, the internet, and low-cost, high quality scanners and photo printers gives photographers many more options for manipulating and distributing their work. Let’s look at taking advantage of the “digital lifestyle” from both perspectives.

If you shoot on film, emailing Baby Joey’s first steps to Grandad takes a few more steps (and dollars). When you take your film in to be developed, you can have it put onto a PhotoCD (generally not in one hour, though). Or, you can buy a scanner and scan the prints or the negatives yourself. Either way, more time, money and effort.

If you capture that Baby Joey moment digitally, you simply plug the camera into the computer, push a few keys, and Grandad sees the first steps in minutes (assuming Grandad has email, and you didn’t send him the original 2 MB photo file through his slow dial-up connection – but that’s another article…).

If you shoot on film, you’ll get good prints and spend extra time and money “going digital”. If you shoot digital, you’ll spend extra time and money getting good prints. It’s a trade-off, and the direction you go is based upon your level of “digital-ness”.

Finally, printing and storage. When you have film developed at the local whatever, you’re pretty much stuck with paying for all the shots on the roll – even the bad ones. I’ll bet I could throw away close to one-third of the hundreds of photo prints I have in shoeboxes. You know what I’m talking about. That photo of the deer in the meadow – actually a fuzzy brown dot in a field of green. Or Little Joey with the top half of his head cut off (not literally, of course). And even if I cull through them and put them in albums, I don’t even know where all the albums are.

Contrast this with digital photos. When I transfer them from my camera to the computer, my iPhoto software remembers the date I shot them and what camera settings I used, makes them look better, crops and resizes them, removes unsightly blemishes, and even records them onto CDs for safekeeping.

Next time we’ll talk about what features to look for in a digital camera. Until then, stay in focus!

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski