Film or Digital

Why has there been so much interest in black and white film photography when digital is so much easier to use and so much improved when it comes to quality of the images?

The simple answer is dynamic range.

So what’s dynamic range and why is it important? The simple answer actually lies in our eyes. When we look at sometime like a landscape our eyes are capable of capturing a wide range of shades of grey ranging from the deepest blacks to the whitest whites. This ability to capture such an amount of dynamic range affects colour photography as much as black and white but it’s black and white film photography where photographers can realize some amazing differences in the overall look of their images.

This definition comes from the Internet: Dynamic range describes the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of an image, from pure black to brightest white. The best digital cameras capture only half as much range as the human eye.

(This scan is just a placeholder of an image I shot with a 35mm film camera. I’m working on getting the scanner to work. LOL)

In other words when you look at the world around you your eyes can see a much greater range of tones of grey again from pure black to absolute white. The best film camera can’t do that well and as said the best digital camera can only capture about half the range.

It means what we see through our own eyes isn’t what we get when we view our film or worse digital images. This is the reason that the early masters of especially landscape photography like Ansel Adams shot in black and white (even when colour became available) and also shot on large format 4″X5″ or 8″X10″ view film cameras (which produced superior quality images compared to smaller formats like 2 and 1/4 square (popular with wedding photographers at the time) or 35mm (favoured by street photographers).

If we were shooting images of our vacation or the kids or the cat or the dog then our new digital cameras do just fine. However if we want the best possible quality and the ability to produce large almost flawless prints then film still has the edge.

One problem of course is finding quality film whether black and white or the more expensive colour. And while there are labs that will process and print your images it’s very easy to develop your own black and white film and scan the negatives into your digital darkroom.