Digital vs. Film - The Great Non-Debate

Lately there have been some spectacular exchanges on RFF regarding the process of producing photographic images; film vs. digital. It arose out of a post wherein the writer (a pro who uses digital for work and 35mm for pleasure) put forward the question of anyone of whether anyone had experienced new freedoms switching from casual shooting 35/120/other film with a rangefinder to a digital SLR. As usual, polemic rages. The (film?) purists have come out and condemned digital as "robotic" or "de-humanized". Often this sentiment is couched in a thinly-veiled assault containing the assertion that anyone choosing digital over film for 'real art' is engaging in mountebankery. The answering volleys are interesting. They fall into two groups. One holds that film is dead, the other puts forth the idea that, gosh, we can all choose our own path and be happy in that choice.
The background to this is a strange quirk in the way people view technology: they often identify the technology with legitimacy of endeavor, and then confuse the form with content. The original post was asking specific questions about how he was working with process and it turned into a debate about validity. Artists vs. folks who take pictures of their cameras.

Shooting film is a mechanical-photo-chemical process. At its simplest, you compose, set the aperture (if you can), and trip the shutter (if you have one). The film is processed either by machine or hand and, with the exception of slide film, a negative is produced. Light is shone through the negative onto photo-sensitive paper and, the paper processed, reveals another negative - of a negative. Integers at work. It is, relative to some forms of digital workflow, a time consuming process. There are tangents: contact sheets, proofs, retouching, et al, but that is really the core process.

Working in digital is very different, sort of. The mechanical side is very similar: lens, aperture, shutter. At the film plane there is a sensor instead of film. A small on-board computer interprets the analog output of the sensor converts it into digital, and then further into some machine-readable format such as tiff, or the more ubiquitous jpg. Pro cameras will allow you to work in RAW which isn't really a file format but ultimately you wind up with some kind of viewable format that can be printed on paper leaving you with the same final product: a hard-copy image. All of the other stuff, auto-focus, auto-exposure, dodging, burning, etc, have their equivalent in either process.

Without going into excruciating detail about the finer points of the differences, it takes the same basic requirement to produce an image in either process - conceptualization. Without the idea behind the final image, neither of these processes are of any value. This applies to any visual form, not just photography. A Leica M3 with a Elmarit 50/2 will not take the picture for you any more than a Nikon D3 will, any more than the most expensive custom-made pigments and horsehair brushes will paint a canvas for you. And this is where the debate goes off the rails. Somehow, greater effort in rendering some aspect of technique is equated with greater legitimacy of a particular form and thus somehow gives it greater value. This simply speaks to a lack of awareness on the part of partisan advocates and applies to any form. Simply put, you can burn and dodge in digital also. It's done differently, but that's not anything but a technique. It has nothing to do with the final image any more than how many hairs were in Leonardo's brush when he painted the Mona Lisa. All of this is to miss the point. While the original poster was discussing process, he was talking about how one process or another and, in fact, the change from one (film) to the other (digital) got him to view the content and the process of working with the content differently.

A sidebar to this is the "goddamn plastic crap" sentiment directed towards some of the new camera bodies. This one is interesting. I watched a guy drop a Manfrotto monopod the other day. Aluminum. It went down a crevasse. Bent. After retrieving it, he tried to bend it back into shape. It sort of worked but now he can't collapse it. We went to the camera store and he replaced it. With a composite plastic-graphite one. It cost about 6 times as much. This next part is crazy - in nearly the same spot on the hills above town, he dropped the "goddamn plastic crap" (okay, Manfrotto plastic crap) only this time, it went all the way to the bottom. Cartwheeling off the cliff all the way. With his G6 attached to it. Three hundred feet of scrabble later, we found it. Monopod in fine shape with the odd scuff on the handle. The G6 is missing the ring cover for the lens adapter, and there is a crack in the battery door, but otherwise it's fine. I don't think that even my Russian Leica copy, the venerable FED, which you can use to drive nails, would have survived. We scrabbled back up the hill. Took more pictures.

There is an incredible wealth of photography available on the web. It's incredible. Flickr, the galleries at photo.net and Rangefinder Forum are awash with amazing work. There is, admittedly, a huge amount of crap. But there is so much good stuff that is absolutely worth looking at. It's much more fun than reading posts like this one. I'll probably never post a picture of my camera - because, to quote Ken Rockwell, "The camera doesn't matter". The arts reflect our society back to us. The artists are the oracles in our communities. We should try and see what they are seeing, hear what they are saying. Our survival depends on us understanding what they are trying to show us.

That's E.B. applying make up for a fellow actor. Backstage at the Guild Hall Theatre, November 2007.