Is Digital Ruining Your Photography?

My Olympus OM-1 can fire at enormously high frame rates while still allowing auto focus to work from frame to frame. Add a wide angle fast lens and with light allowing set the aperture to F/8 to F/11 and the shutter speed to !/500 to 1/1000 with the ISO on auto you are guaranteed to capture just about anything you shoot.

The image will be in perfect focus and the exposure will be spot on. Of course you’ll have again an enormous number of frames to choose from but most of them will be just about perfect.

And so why do some of us shoot black and white film with 50-year-old vintage cameras and lenses that produce soft dreamy images?

It’s a mystery worth thinking about.

Paul Reid is an award-winning professional photographer. He shoots a lot of street photography. And while he shoots a lot with Leica digital cameras he expresses his love of film and his desire to shoot more in this YouTube review of his work: “A Yeat of Monochrome Photography – My Best Work of 2025“.

Paul is a world-class photographer and teacher (and yes he does run street photography workshops) and his images are stunning. But look closer. Take your time and stop the video and notice that not all of his images are tack sharp and he occassionally just misses hitting the focus. Sometimes his exposures are a little aggressive for my taste.

I mean if he was shooting with my OM-1 I’d expect more technically perfect work from such an accomplished expert.

And that’s the trick dear friends.

Black and white film photography especially when using a vintage 50-year-old Nikkormat (which was what I shot the Oakville Ontario Polar Bear Dip) and an equally old 24mm F/2.8 lens produces a significantly less perfect image technically but perfection isn’t the point,

There’s a magic that old film cameras can bring when shooting black and white film.

Sure part of it is the difference in film and digital images.There is a difference in dynamic range and the fact that film reveals grain where digital depends on noise to approximate the same look (but never actually succeeds in my opinion).

Old film cameras like Nikon FM2s or FEs or Canon AE-1s or Pentax Spotmatics can be had from Japan in near mint condition for $200 Cdn.

Film is readily available from local photography shops. Best of all for a minor investment in tanks and reels you can develop your own film in a bathroom or kitchen sink. Then you can scan it (I used a Plustek 8200i 35mm film scanner) into your digital darkroom photo editor and print it using a Canon photo printer (I use a Pixma IP8720 because I got it on sale for $200 but I’d recommend either the Pro 200 or Pro 310) you’ll print your own real photograph that you can display on a wall.

There’s a night and day difference from viewing images being projected by a lit computer screen as viewing images printed and hanging on your wall.

And while you can shoot digital all day long, it’s the individual image shot on film and developed and printed by you that reveals the magic of photography.