The film vs digital debate is a perennial favourite as clickbait for photomags and photo trolls on social media. I began my photography career at the ripe age of five when my father gave me the film equivalent of a point-and-shoot camera—a Kodak Instamatic. At 11, I graduated to a Yeshica 35mm rangefinder which required that I think about film speed, shutter speed, and aperture. The other consideration was cost per exposure as I had to pay for film and developing from my allowance. As a consequence, I was sparing in the formative years of my photographic habits. Whenever I saw something visually interesting, the first question I asked myself was: is this worth the time and money to photograph? Last fall, I took up the Yashica again and found that my old habits persist. With the Yashica in hand, I am a tightwad. It can take me days, even weeks, to shoot a single roll of film.
In the end, I am as happy with the images I make with film as with my DSLR cameras. To me, these formats represent different strategies. The more strategies I use, the more opportunities I give myself to make varied and interesting photographs.
Photography reminds me of reading, another lifelong habit my father introduced when I was five years old. Instead of reading a page, I use photography to read the world. I learned from my father, who was a reading clinician (literacy guru), that you get more from a page not by choosing a specific strategy and sticking to it but by applying different strategies at different times as may seem appropriate in the circumstances. Skimming, slow reading, reading aloud, note-taking, summarizing, reading in short bursts, reading for hours at a time. All have their place and reveal different things in a text. The same is true when “reading” the world through a viewfinder. Film, digital. Black-and-white, colour. Cropped sensor, full frame. Tripod, shooting from the hip. Filters. Different focal lengths. Matte, glossy. There is no right or wrong way to do things. There is only the question of how you choose to read the world in a given moment.
