There’s essentially nothing that you could do with film, that you can’t do better with digital. It may cost some money, but all the capabilities are there and in most cases vastly better with digital.
But it’s vastly more fufilling to understand the chemistry involved in film and use that to your creative advantage. Low light in digital gives you noise, low light in film gives you grain. YMMV.
Exactly. It’s a process to luxuriate in. Those digital types don’t appreciate process.
Except that currently with digital you can produce low light images with ridiculously low levels of noise, far lower than the amount of grain you see with film. Digital continues to improve; film, at this point, is pretty static.
Then again, I’m OCD so my love of process can be taken to excess.
I love process, too, and the first part of my photo career was with a wet darkroom. Lemme tell you, I don’t miss it one bit.
ETA: OK, maybe I sometimes do miss the sense of mystery after snapping the shutter before developing the photograph. That delayed gratification. That is kind of nice. And if you’re printing it yourself, that sort of “extra” feeling of creation. (But much of that is me romanticizing it in retrospect. It sure as hell wasn’t that much fun coming home smelling of developer and blix or fixer and stop bath.) Still, what I can do now with digital is stuff I didn’t imagine possible back in the film days, especially when it comes to low-light photography.
Um, you guys are using film/CCDs that are far too fast. With ASA 32 film and a tiny aperture you don’t worry about grain.
Then again, to an extent I’m making a virtue out of necessity. With digital I work at taking the best photos I can using the elderly crap I can afford. I love how many shots I can fit in a memory card and not worry about paying to get them all printed out. And I love having a darkroom that fits in my hand.
You know how many times I’ve taken subsequent shots because I didn’t like the look of the first one; I mean it was okay but nothing super special but after looking at it & tweaking the settings, I had a great shot.
You know how many times, between laps of a race, I had to debate if I should burn the last couple of pics & rewind that roll & put in a fresh one or should I not waste my money & shoot it out, knowing I’d miss some of the later action? The huge capacity & cost ($0) of a digital image makes that moot.
I take a 'ell of a lot more pics now than I ever did with film because there’s no cost (once the body & lenses are purchased). I couldn’t afford it.
No, we like grain. Not all the time, but sometimes it is what is right.
I bet you love the smell of books and the crackle in records.
Total number of photos I took in all of my film years? Hundreds. Total number of digital photos I have taken? Tens of thousands.
Well, yeah. Especially the records because I remember where each pop and crackle came from.
I’m glad I got the Sony running because I want shots of the aides I like and the one who looks like Sarah Silverman ( “That’s Sarah Silverman? But she’s beautiful.” Her point was lost on me just as mine was lost on her. ) is due any day now ( “You call that PREGNANT?!” ) . And my FIL’s Minolta Freedom Tele is acting stupid.
I have too many cameras.
Even when money was no object because the employer/client was paying for all your film this always took a bit of calculation with high-action type events like sports (and even came into play with weddings) as you were limited to about 38-ish shots on a roll of 36 exposure file (you usually got a couple extra frames out of it.) So if you’re close to the end of the roll of film and you sense a high-action moment is coming up soon, you have to make the calculation of whether to risk quickly rewinding and changing your roll of film so you have a fresh thirty-some frames to shoot through the action (and possibly miss it if it happens while you’re changing film, even if you’re a pro and fast at at), or to just be really judicious with your shutter and hope you don’t run out of film before you’ve shot through the action and reaction.
I totally do not miss having to be aware at all times at how far through a roll of film I was and timing film changes so as not to miss out on action.
I want to get that Minolta running because back in the day Minolta and Leica shared almost everything in that camera (the Leica CF was prettier with Leitz lenses) and it’s as close as I’ll get to owning a Leica.
Daughter didn’t get my cameras over here before I was locked down. She’ll hide an edible in the battery compartment of a Fuji A170. A nice P&S from the late Oughties.
I forgot I’m a total camera nerd sometimes.
And a compulsive poster, but hey, it’s your thread 
I’m totally bored and happy to share it. Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be suicidal too. 