Is Film Photography Dying Again?

Thomas Heaton, a brilliant landscape photographer from England, recently posted the video at the top, discussing film, digital and AI. 

I grew up shooting film, processing it and printing it in a home darkroom. Black and White developing and printing is an art form.  Ansel Adams masterwork books covered the Negative and the Print.  I had some absolutely magic hours in the darkroom, producing prints that I still admire. I did a very little color processing and printing. Color is much more complicated to do, and honestly exceeded the facilities that had to work with.  

The renaissance of film photography,  for the most part didn't bring with it a renaissance in printing, in fact most "film photographers" send the film off the be processed and scanned, in many cases not even bothering to have the negatives returned to them (it costs extra to have the film returned.)  In essence they are substituting fim as the initial recording media, instead of an SD card. Film is an antique media. They are replacing state of the art, with film, that is then processed and scanned outside of their control. They claim that the processing is then done digitally in PhotoShop or LightRoom. The prints are inkjet prints, for the rare times that an image is printed at all.  Without chemical process and light sensitive paper printing, film photography is just digital photography with film used as the initial recording media. If you are going to process and print digitally, film adds nothing to the process that can't be accomplished digitally. Mood, color, range, even grain can be created in digital prints.  

Listening to Caleb Knueven talk, I learned that Kodak changed Portra film, from its original formula to one that yielded a better scanned image. Think about that.  By the way, Caleb is worth watching. 

There is a romance to using older film cameras. Manual exposure forces you to slow down and be deliberate in setting aperture and shutter speed. Even needle match exposure requires thought and tactile input. There were some amazing cameras made in the 60's and 70's. And lenses that were real glass and amazingly fast and sharp (I still miss my Canon FD series 50mm f/1.4, and 24mm f/2.8 - they don't make them like that anymore.) There is a presence of cameras like the Hasselblad that digital cameras have not matched, and a mystique of Leica, that only Leica has ever mastered. 

I love my modern digital camera. And yes, I can use it in aperture priority,  or shutter speed priority, but the settings are buried in cumbersome digital menus making it painful to do so.  Still the camera captures and stores amazing digital files.  I am not a big post processing person, in fact I seldom do any editing to my photos.  If I want to or need to, I can. 

Thomas closed talking about the threat of AI to photography.  Everytime a "photographer" goes into PhotoShop, or LightRoom, or the menu on their smartphone and digitally alters an image, adding in a person who was not there (my phone has a setting for add me to the image) or even worse taking out something like overhead power lines, AI moves a step up the ladder. Photography should capture a moment in time, and make the best of that moment we can, but when we alter that image in a way that creates an image that never existed, we are moving into a realm of art that is based in photography but it is really computer created art. It is something different. 

The bloom seems to be fading on the rose for the resurgence of film photography.  The cost of film has steadily risen and the prices of 40 and 50 year old film cameras often exceeds what they sold for new.  As cost rises, demand will fall. But for the vast majority of the new generation of "film photographers" they were never really film photographers, they were digital photographers using film for the first step.