Is Film “Faster” than Digital?

Seems like a silly question. Digital is immediate, at least you get feedback immediately. How could it possibly be faster to develop and scan film than it is to pop a card in your computer and download files?

The other day I ran into a photographer I’ve met just once before.  We’d attended the same event three weeks earlier.  Talking about the event, I said I’d had a great time and gotten some pretty decent shots out of it. She too enjoyed the event, but she’d not yet had time to process any of the images. It was a shame, but she’d just been too busy. On impulse I told her I bet she took hundreds of shots at that event and perhaps the thought of dealing with all of those files is what was holding her up. She had indeed taken a couple of hundred shots and they were sitting on a card or computer, waiting for her to work her way through them. (I’d shot 5 rolls of 10 medium format and felt absolutely extravagant at that.)

I didn’t think at the time to ask her about other events she’d been shooting, or how many images she had in the cue before that event, or how many had been added after. I think it’s safe to guess that we’re talking about thousands of images over the course of a few weeks.  I’m sure every digital shooter has experienced this, virtual tons of images to slog through, at least half of which you can toss at first glance. Weeding through those images to find the relative handful that captured something meaningful…further trimming down because you got 4 very similar frames of each of those few meaningful images.  Then, it’s time to process those remaining winners. That’s an intimidating amount of work for a casual event you weren’t being paid to shoot. No wonder I’d beat her time by three weeks.

I don’t mean to revisit the old film vs. digital thing. That’s an individual creative/practical/financial decision and your choice is as valid as mine. My point here is that there is something a digital shooter might be able to learn from the film shooter’s methods.  It’s easy to lull yourself in to the thought that pushing the button on a DSLR is free, so you might as well make sure you have the shot.  Remember that every time you push that button, you are committing yourself to the time it takes to put that image through your workflow.  That can very quickly get to be expensive in terms of your time. I tend to think there’s a creative price to pay as well, but that’s a subject for another time.

I find it ironic that the digital shooter often justifies so many frames with the desire to “be sure” they got the shot. Heck, they can look on the LCD and have a pretty good idea if they got that shot or not. That’s an obvious and huge advantage to digital. Why not take advantage of it?

Think of all the film shooters that came before you. Were they so much better than you that, with no way of seeing their work on the spot, they still managed to come away with the images? Or, had they just learned the peace of mind and confidence that says, “I know what I’m doing, the odds are I got that shot…time to move on?”

Comments

[K. Praslowicz]

I hate slogging through images during editing so much. So much that even shooting 35mm I find to be too much. It seems to me that every time I do spend more then a frame on a single moment, I rarely gain anything by shooting more than once. Unless of course the second shot is because something very noticeably unwanted happened at the moment of shutter release. Stray head in front of the lens or other such things.

I've just adapted to a mostly one-scene on-shot shooting mentality. Either it got it, or I didn't. Makes editing a breeze.

[Nike Air Max]

We are thrilled to work with Mounted Memories to celebrate this unprecedented event.I have never read such a wonderful article and I am coming back tomorrow to continue reading.

[Ben]

I find that unless I'm shooting something very on purpose (like I'm getting paid to do so) it's just so much easier (and probably more fun) for me to shoot it on film. I'd rather take a minute to run some film in the sink and scan it than to edit each RAW file, save them in usable sizes, etc.