Film versus Digital, the endless debate
Digital imaging is threatening to bump film photography to the realm of imaging purists, retro tech enthusiasts, and romantics – if it hasn’t already.
While cheap, easy, and convenient, digital imaging has much more potential for (over) manipulation. Journalists manipulate images to make a point rather than shed light on the truth. HDR exposures portray a beautiful world that doesn’t exist. An unattainable standard of beauty that can’t be met without computer enhancement fills our media.
I prefer shooting film, partly for the lack of instantaneous feedback (I compose better when I can’t see the picture immediately after I take it) but mostly for the lack of manipulation and post-processing. I do the odd crop job, dust removal or tweak the overall contrast, but I try to stick to those actions only on my film prints. My vision isn’t fine art photography – most of my images would best be described as “Lomography” or more properly “non-photography” – captured images of odd colors, shapes or shadows that catch my eye as they pass by.
My artistic bent and desire to keep photos “real” is, ironically, part of the allure (digital) cameraphones have to me. I have my cameraphone with me always. I use it to capture those moments as they pass by
Since I email photos directly from my cameraphone, there’s no possibility of post-processing the photo into something it’s not. No cropping. No exposure controls. No manipulation. No photoshop actions. No fake Lomo, fake Holga, or HDR processing. Just the subject, as I saw it.
I use Posterous to publish photos to low resolution (my lo-fi photo site) and cross-post them here. The photos never touch my computer, and I’m not tempted to process them in any way. The pictures appear on my site almost instantaneously, and it’s cheaper/easier than film development/scanning/posting.
I’ll focus on cameraphone shots for another week or so, then get the urge to waste some film.
You don’t think your work is fine art? I disagree. It may be a semantic difference, but as you describe it (and as I’ve seen it) it’s all about the fine art aspects: the plays of light and color, selection of thematic elements, the exploratory and experimental nature, your intimacy with the process—all these suggest fine art photography to me.
What I don’t see your work as is photoillustration or photojournalism. It’s rarely about creating a clear view of the subject(s) of the photo. You focus on aspects and make choices that directly reflect a point in time or some formal relationship, and often one created by your ability to create a rectangle in your mind’s eye.
I appreciate your resistance to post-processing. Believe it or not, I hate post-processing in digital photography. I have a process that changes the nature of the image, but before I do that, I rarely do any exposure or color balance manipulation. In very infrequent cases I’ll crop or do minor rotation, but whenever I do so it is with a sense that I am covering up a failure in the original photograph.