Its 2017 people, can we stop talking about it yet?

If you find yourself online in a photography forum somewhere, anywhere these days  (and this happens in just about any of them, I belong to a group on Facebook where the conversations deal more with the art of photography and someone recently posted one of these articles), you might notice a particular opinionated discussion come up.  This discussion keeps coming up again and again and again and for some reason it won’t die (and because it won’t die, articles like this one pop up complaining about them):

Film VS Digital

Why are we still talking about this? I just don’t understand. I thought that the consensus now was that everyone shot with what they shot with because maybe it was what they could afford, maybe it’s what would make them money (if they were a working photographer), or what fulfilled them photographically. At least that’s what I thought. I thought that once digital photography reached a certain maturity in terms of equipment and resolution / color fidelity / output that all the comparisons would cease. That we all agreed that there wasn’t a ‘better’ way to take photos, just a different way.

Everyone would go to their perspective camps and concentrate on the most important part of photography (hint, it isn’t whether you shoot digital or film, or what camera you use…). But it seems like every few months or so, somebody somewhere gets a wild hair up their ass and writes up an article and hits publish, or someone sees an article on this topic from 2, 3, 4 years ago and decides “I want to start something in the forums today, so I’m going to share this. Don’t believe me?  Google “film vs. digital” and check out the comments on some of the articles (always read the comments…).

Then those articles get quoted and re-quoted and shared and shared and shared again. And the arguments start, some backed up by “scientific” data, a lot based on personal experiences, all meant to defend their media of choice. Also to let the other side know just how wrong they are, while separate voices are screaming “Who cares” from the sidelines. It’s our version of politics, Democrats vs. Republicans vs. Libertarians, I honestly believe that if some of the people in these online arguments had this same argument IRL, that blood would be shed.

We at Return to Film use film because we chose to use film, we like shooting on film and shooting with film cameras. That’s just us, that’s what we like. You might like to do that as well, maybe you don’t.  If you don’t, that’s not a big deal, just like it’s not a big deal that we do. It’s the fact that we have a choice is what makes photography great.

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