If you’ve never shot a roll of film, this article is for you. Too many times, I’ve read or heard photographers tell me the same thing. It often goes like, “I won’t shoot film because it’s not worth the money when digital gives me such a good look.” And that, truly, is missing the entire point. Sometimes photography is about getting to the end result. But many other times, photography is about the process and how you’ve created the photo. Often, that’s significantly more important and making the image in-camera definitely makes you much more of a photographer than a post-processor.
That statement I just said is probably controversial, but shooting a single frame and then spending several hours in Photoshop or Lightroom doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a post-production artist.
Ideally, you will spend equal amounts of time shooting as you do in post-production or even less in post-production. And that brings me to one of my even more controversial beliefs: Ansel Adams wasn’t really a photographer; he was mostly a chemist.
A more balanced approach can be seen with someone like Daido Moriyama, who shoots photos and then brings them to life in post-production.
This is a broader way of saying that shooting film will force you, the photographer, to work more on your in-camera skills. Digital photography lends itself to a very automatic process that minimizes the photographer’s involvement. These days, we use automatic settings on everything. What am I talking about?
Aperture priority is an automatic setting that lets the photographer control only the depth of field and have the camera figure everything out for you so that you can just focus on the moment. But the moment can be captured with any device. It will mean that photographers often overshoot and worry about the results later. With film, that doesn’t happen. You have to be intentional.
The auto ISO setting removes a whole lot of intentionality when shooting. With film, you’re often stuck at a single ISO. I try to shoot digital the same way and I get images that look and act far more film-like. Try shooting everything for a day and night with the ISO set to 400. You’ll see how much the way you shoot changes fundamentally.
Auto white balance makes us just worry about the image later on. But if you lock your white balance to something with more intent, then you won’t have to worry about it all later on.
If you’re a digital photographer, I truly encourage you to go shoot some film and become more intentional about how you shoot photographs. It will make you less of a machine and more of a human being.
Photographers: stop shooting content. Start shooting photographs.