Hacker News Reader

I'll take a crack at a personal answer to this:

I'm in my mid 30's, and have been into photography since my early teens, but photography was digital from the start for me. I've sold and exhibited my work, but it's a hobby, never my job.

In the last few years, I picked up a pure manual medium format rangefinder and a slide projector. 90+% of what I've shot on film is slides, and I generally don't make a high quality scan of them.

For going out where I know what I want, and go out to shoot something purely focussed on quality and flexibility of the work, I shoot digital. I'll shoot a few hundred photos in a day, and then procrastinate about choosing selections and going through and editing them. For technically complex photography (I shoot both Underwater and Infrared) being able to evaluate results immediately and tweak lets me get results I would be unable to on film.

But I enjoy taking out my film camera when I'm going out casually. The medium format rangefinder workflow makes me think through the photo more. Being limited to 8 shots per roll forces me to be intentional and selective about what I'm shooting. Not having immediate feedback takes away the pressure to check out and iterate on the work, so I can enjoy the time and what I'm doing other than photography, and be more in the moment. The fixed "artifact" of the film makes it feel done in a way digital doesn't - I can't alter a slide beyond basic cropping.

I don't shoot film for colour profile, or even resolution - I shoot it for how it productively artistically constraints me.

Modern technology is just too damn convenient, yes, but, …, but there's a romance, let's call it, to working with a manual film camera, printing in a darkroom, DJing with vinyl on Technics 12xxs, recording on an analogue 2" multitrack tape machine, travelling on a stream train — fill in your own examples — that modern digital technology lacks.

But yes, modern technology is just too damn convenient — I say, having just finished listening to an album on a streaming service, despite having a vinyl copy of it less than a metre away from where I sit, and two working turntables less than a metre away from where I sit.

I agree with you and find it hard to understand the fascination with going backward in terms of fundamental capabilities. I've been in electronic media production technology my whole professional life, starting out with analog tape-based audio and video and progressing through the transition to digital.

Artistically, I understand and highly appreciate the value of making creative choices to utilize historical or nostalgic treatments such as analog sounding hiss or vinyl tracking in audio. In video, I enjoy seeing a director use a "fat" composite video look consistent with 1970s analog recording on a 2-inch Ampex VTR. Yet, having actually started out using that type of equipment as our only way to create, it was a tremendous limitation that reduced our capabilities and the creative choices that were even possible. Spending long hours producing top-notch audio in professional 24-track analog studio only to bring it home on consumer cassette tape was demoralizing. I remember sadly telling my family "This is sounds so much more amazing in the studio off the master tape. I wish you could hear what we made." And I wished I could hear what I made in my car or anywhere other than work.

Photography and videography have followed a similar progression and it's just strange. Today, I capture my photos with a 50 megapixel digital camera with 14 stops of dynamic range and a full lossless workflow (no lossy compression). I capture my audio at 24-bit 96 khz to have plenty of creative headroom in post. Sure, I sometimes creatively choose to use a 1960s lens on that camera or a lovely old studio mic on the front end of my audio workflow because I want that look or sound. But it's a choice I make on a creative spectrum that's 1,000x wider than being stuck with analog generational artifacts being literally "the best" we could manage.

Good photography is so much more than megapixel density of a sensor. In some cases, people don't want the photo to be super sharp (e.g., would show blemishes on a face). Additionally, there are some who make their photos look as much like a painting as possible. Why? Because they aren't going for maximum detail. Instead they're going for a certain look or 'feel'.

Digital photography has done wonders for the average person by way of the smartphone. However, I would argue that except in very few instances, it hasn't necessarily made professional photography better (in terms of the final photo). By the way, I'm not saying that it hasn't brought some improvements to the process (it certainly has). There has been some phenomenal photographs produced before digital ever hit the scene. It has made it perhaps easier for the professional in that they can take more photographs in a specific span of time or have more dials to tune the style, but those things don't make the photographs automatically better.

> "it was a tremendous limitation that reduced our capabilities and the creative choices that were even possible."

A counter argument to this is that the limitations forced better artistship. For instance before music recording studies had autotune and easy overdub or cut-and-paste, musicians had to be able to play things correctly for the whole song.

While I shoot digital and enjoy interpreting raw scene data according to my vision (which sometimes involves emulating film looks to a degree), there’s an objective benefit to negative film compared to digital sensors and that is highlight rolloff.

A pixel accumulates light until hard cutoff point where it doesn’t hold information anymore. Thus probably the most important advice for someone coming from film to digital is that, as a rule, you want to underexpose since blowing out highlights is ruinous (and as a result of underexposition you’ll have to pull up the darks which leads to increased noise).

In contrast, the way grains of negative film are activated by light and result in gradual highlight rolloff makes it possible to make delicate high key shots and generally makes film safer for candid life snaps even if you misjudge exposure.

(Another aspect is that you get a look over which you have no control. It’s as much of a drawback as it is a benefit: you focus on the subject and the scene more than on how you want to make it look in post. Some use expired film for a more unique look.)

It boggles your mind that people find surprise and adventure exciting? Do you also think digital painting has superseded actual brushes?

> You take images hopefully to keep, and wanting to do that with unknown film to save $5 and see what comes out, is... exciting?

Yeah, part of the fun of shooting with film really is not knowing what you caught until later. Expired film can increase the odds that something comes out wrong, but personally I only use it for toy camera photography where the worse something comes out the better it sometimes is and I expect a lot of what I shot won't be worth keeping.

I don't know, I get kind of bored of taking good, documentary pictures. Sometimes I just wanna see something weird, enjoy a process, see what happens

Part of it is social signaling ("I'm cool because I don't follow the mainstream"), part of it is the analog-is-better fallacy (though I don't know enough about photography to know if it applies to film), part of it is nostalgia, and part of it is simply people being curious and quirky.

One of the potential appeals here could be the fact that you can be fully offline with the whole process away from electronics. Which is just such an amazing time. Similarly, I love my Apple Watch, but recently I started wearing old regular watches as it gives me a further way to disconnect.

> But objectively, digital sensors can have their color profiles / output remapped to most film "looks", even adding grain, and of course you're not spending $ on film with every shot and waiting days to get the film back.

Given what I can get a used, very high quality 35mm camera body and lenses for... that's an awful lot of film and development cost before you start coming out ahead there.

I think it's the personalized nature that drives the demand. People do it for the feeling that it's something they uniquely did, that the result of that analog process is theirs alone and couldn't be exactly duplicated. They're not going for quality, they're going for the "I did this" feeling.

I learned on film, I think in the way that fit looks, film looks that way out of the box, digital, I have to go thru extra steps.

As far as the people shooting expired film? that can have a neat unique look all of its own, that said, most old color film if you over expose it (treat an ISO 100 as an ISO 50) you'll get decent results.

Is it wrong to find the result aesthetically pleasing? In short, it's about the art of photography, those expired films are not for archival family photos, and surely it's not about saving $5.

Well, there are still people who make (e.g.) soap by hand, even though you can buy 10 bars of Ivory for five bucks at the store.

They do it because it's a challenging and fun hobby.