Enough Already!

Pete Myers talks about his love of Leica film cameras, and raises some valid points on the film vs digital battleground.

This site is about digital photography - I wear my Bias out in the open, I love the convenience of digital.

But that doesn't mean film is bad. In fact, quite the opposite.

I've never got to the the high end of film work - I have my aged Pentax KX, the camera I learned on, and that still gets taken out for a shoot once in a while. On film, I tend to shoot black and white, and I lack the resources to get it processed anywhere other than a generic lab. I tend to use Ilford XP5 film which takes to generic lab processing quite nicely.

There's a discipline, almost a purity attached to film photography - you have to be aware of how the scene will look, build it in your mind before you fire off the shot. You can't check it over, and delete it after the fact - good or bad, it's permanent.

I really got started doing photography, taking photos for the student newspaper, back in my college days. I was using the Pentax, and black and white then, and that's where I first developed (heh) the joy of photography - taking good photos, in limited time windows, under pressure, and around my real job (ie, being a student). It was fun, and it was great learning, but it was hard.

I'm not anti-digital - in fact, far from it. But I'm also not anti-film. Like Pete Myers, I think the perfect camera is one that doesn't intrude, that's complex enough to do the job and no more. A camera that doesn't get in the way of what I see, but instead helps me record it faithfully.

One day, I might just have to pick up a Leica... but I think I'll wait until I can get a good digital from them.