Film vs. Digital (Not What You Think!)

To yesterday's "I Feel Old" post, Steve Jacob wrote:

I bought my first SLR in 1981. I bought my first digital camera in 1999. It's now 2019. I have officially been a digital photographer for longer than I was a film photographer. It just doesn't seem like it because time passes so much faster when you get older.

Interesting thing to look at, I thought.

I caught the photography bug but good in 1980 when my Mom's first cousin's wife asked me to do a portrait of their family (we summered with them so I knew them well), and by 1982, after two years of being frankly obsessed with photography, I had enrolled in photography school. Although I used a digital camera for the first time in 1997 (a loan from Agfa of venerated memory), I didn't own my first digital camera until 2003. But I gave up my darkroom in 2000 so I hadn't done any developing or printing since then (the film I exposed in 2000–2003 I never developed. It's still in a box in the barn).

But actually I'd been pretty interested in photography since 7th grade (age 12) when I shot six 12-exposure rolls of Kodak Instamatic film on a class trip to Washington D.C. I did another six-roll project, with an SLR this time and 36-exposure rolls of 35mm, on a European trip when I was 14, and had a show in the dining room of my high school when I was 16. So really, I was a film photographer from 1969 to 2000, 31 years, and I would have to go till 2034 before I equal that in digital.

So my numbers are 31 and 16: 31 years with film (1969–2000), 16 with digital (2003–2019).

How about you? You don't need to give us the rundown; just the numbers will do. Plus any comment you might care to make.

I'm going to be disappointed if there aren't at least a few people whose first number is zero—and I'm curious to see whether there's anyone whose second number is zero!

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Jacob)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Fritz: "Fifty-four and 16."

Dennis: "Zero and 16. Not counting some use of disposable cameras on family trips and whatnot. Got a Canon point-and-shoot in 2003, been at it with a variety of equipment since with a lean period between 2014–2018."

Bill Pearce: "Thirty-one, 20. The first number includes the transition years, where I shot film and had a lab scan it so I could use PS as needed and then place in publications. I miss the direct to-the-point nature of film. For the last ten or 15 years of my film career, I went out with a Hasselblad and a couple of rolls of film and never even used a light meter. The tyranny of menus was never a problem. I have seen no evidence that all the micro adjusments and the 'flexibility' of bloated camera menus have improved photos the slightest bit."

Bob Curtis: "Sixty-five and zero."

Mike replies: Hard core!

Peter: "It's interesting the assumption is that people start in film and move to digital—maybe reflective of the age of the readers here (older), whereas many millennials start in digital and move to film. As an oldster myself: 12 (film), two (digital), 12 (film)."

Sixblockseast: "About 16 and 14 for me. Transitioned to digital around 2005 with a Canon point-and-shoot, made my way to Samsung mirrorless in 2012 or so, and now Fuji since 2016, so I actually never owned a true DSLR! I do not miss film one bit, especially not the widely varying quality of retail developers/printers."

Greg: "Sixteen analog and 17 digital All my digital photos are sorted, backed up multiple times and sorted in different locations as well as tagged for fast searching (under 1 minute if I have the right key words). Scanning the slides and negatives I have left is this Winter's project."

Doug Vaughn: "Film 26, digital 19, film again 5."

Henning Wulff (partial comment): "I have glass plates that my grandfather shot as well as slides, so he made that transition."

Joost: "Film: 0-ish, Digital: 15. Though I've at times done some analog shooting, as a kid with my parents camera, later for fun, no more than 300 exposures. I did develop and print most of those myself. The feedback-loop for analog was just too long for me."

David Bateman (partial comment): "Seven digital, then two film, now eight digital."

Comments

[Sylvain G.]

Film : from 1995, very sporadically
Digital : 2004 from dsc-W1

And that's surprising numbers : probably about a thousand exposures of film vs well over 150.000 digital photographs

Film : 24 years
Digital : 15 years

[Christian Ahn]

Really interesting question. I never thought about it, but notice now that it is interesting for me as I had a break. So it is:

13/21, split like this:

Film: about 10 years
Break: about 5 years
Film: 3 years
Digital: 21 years

I got a very simple 35mm Ricoh for my tenth birthday and was a quite ambitious shooter for about ten years (with limited talent). After high school, my interest almost completely vanished.

About 5 years later, in 1995, I got married and one year later, our son was born and I started taking pictures again, first for 3 years with a zoom-for-all film camera (I think it was Pentax).

But then I got very early into the digital business (coming more from the computer angle, at the time studying computer science) in May 1998 (!) with an HP PhotoSmart with (at the time amazing) 0,3 megapixels (640x480). After that I quickly focused on digital and never looked back (currently shooting with a Olympus OM-D E-M10 MarkII). And honestly, I don't think I would ever move back to film. Too much hassle...

[Michael Perini]

50 and 12 although the transition is a bit blurred.
Got a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye for my 10 th birthday (which was 1957)
I dove fully into digital in 2007
My Wife had a Sony Mavica that shot to mini CD's maybe 2005.
My Daughter got a Nikon D70 in '05 (I think) and I did use that.
So my numbers could swing a year or two depending on how you measure my beginning with digital.

[Isaac]

I remember using a Hanimex fixed focus point and shoot on a school trip to New Caledonia and taking a Pentax Espio something-or-other the the Indy 300,but my first and favourite camera memories are of playing with a Trip and my grandfather's Nikormat...

I may have had a 110 beast when I was growing up but my first camera that I know was mine was a Canon A200 which was a 20th birthday gift. My grandfather gave me the Nikormat in about 2004 and I've used it since. Didn't really start digital photography until 2009 with the first of 2 dodgy D90s and continue to do both so say 22 film and 17 digital I guess. I much prefer film though, I love shooting slides...

[ColinM]

I got serious about photography with film around 1969, kept going on and off until 2005 and very little since. The Rolleiflex and the Pentaxes just sit on the shelves looking pretty nowadays. Started with digital in 2001 to today with m43 gear.

So 36 years film and 18 years digital, with 5 years of both together.

[Kjell Harald Andersen]

16y film, 15y digital

Kjell

[John Kauk]

I’ve got 25 years with film, 19 with digital. Started in 1975 as a high school graduate, and over the last few years moved from Canon to Fujifilm.

[Erie Van Veen]

34 years of frustration with film and 21 years of bliss with digital.

[Andre Y]

15 film, 19 digital for me. The film number is non-contiguous as I've taken up film again the last few years, but not seriously enough to displace digital so I discounted the time a bit.

[Inkphot]

I started at age 10 so 43 for film and 17 for digital, with a cross over period in the "oughties" of about 3 years.

[Collin J Örthner]

Started with 110 at age 7 and have used all formats up to 8x10, which still gets used, although mostly 35mm and 120 for film now. Currently a Fuji GFX50s and Sigma Quattro DP0 and DP2 for digital.

[Collin J Örthner]

I didn't give you numbers. LOL 47/18

[Adrian Malloch]

21 and 18, though betweeen 1994 and 2001 I was shooting with film in the camera, processed in C41 and then through a Kodak scanner to a digitised workflow initially with Photoshop 3 and then its successors – a standard practice for newspaper production over that time. That hybrid workflow in the uncanny-valley between the darkroom the computer was an ideal environment to learn about and teach myself the benefits and failings of digital, so much so that when I went freelance in 2004 much of my initial income was teaching digital workflow to high performing advertising and commercial photographers whose previous total experience of processing was dropping their film off at the lab. A huge learning curve for them. Not just digital, but also: colour theory, crafting an image from a 'negative', exposing for the highlights in camera, basic computer use, managing and storing digital files, monitor and environment calibration, backing up and so much more.

[Gibeault Marc]

Twenty-two and 21

[Christopher Morrow]

48 and 15. Kodak Box Brownie was my first film camera (photographed Alfred Hitchcock with it, and still have the prints), and funny thing is, I can't remember exactly which digital camera I started with (probably a Canon G1). Now I shoot with a Nikon D850 and a Leica Q2 (I know, shoot me.)

[Alan]

Fell in love with my Nikkormat when I opened the box in 1975 and smelled my own new camera. Did that with Nikon many times until 2001 when I gave up the darkroom and succumbed to the megapixel. So I have 26 and 18 with about 100000 film images and 400000 digital. Enough to peruse for a few generations. And a few good ones.

[Jon Peterson]

Film, ​31 (1974​-2005-ish)
Digital, 17 (2002-2019)

My dad had given my elder brother a cheapo camera for Christmas, and I was a bit miffed at being left out. The fact that I'm legally blind didn't feel like much of an obstacle to me! At any rate, after sufficient pestering my father let me play around with his old Exakta VX - and I was hooked. My first darkroom was under the stairs (about as much room as Harry Potter had), then when my brother left for college I converted our bedroom to a darkroom. Never did have plumbing!

Digital happened when I finally realized I was never going to have another darkroom - and, I must admit, when I had​ pretty much​ stopped using my lovely Contax AX. The results were always beautiful, but the rig was just too dang heavy, so I rarely dragged it out. ​So, with few pictures of my youngest son (now 18, and leaving for college in a month), I got a compact digital (Leica (ne Panasonic) DigiLux 1). I never did grow to like that camera, but I did use it! After many happy years with Pentax gear, I'm now a happy Fuji X-T2 user. Though I may supplement with a smaller camera...

[C.R. Marshall]

It depends on how you count it. In terms of experience, Film: 15 years being serious (sort of), Digital: 15 years. The 15 years of film shooting was split between my 20's and my 40's with about a decade and a half in the middle where I pursued other interests, so you could count it as 30:15 if you want it chronologically.

I sold off the last of my film cameras this month. I just wasn't using them and I cannot see ever going back.

CRM

[Richard Kingston]

I use a digital camera to document things I'm taking apart, or to capture things I'm going to sell online. But for photos I care about I still shoot exclusively on film, cause I like mechanical things. So I guess we'll make that 34/0?

[Alessandra]

Film 25
Digital 17
Some overlapping

[Gary Nylander]

45 and 19 years.

I started shooting and processing film on a more serious note when I was about 16 years of age. Two years later I started my career as a newspaper photographer. I started shooting digital in November of 2001. Although my equipment (Nikon D1H) was supplied by the paper I worked for at the time. I am no longer working in the newspaper business, these days I shoot both film and digital, although I a sliding over to more digital photography including my own personal work.

[Mim]

I'm a few months shy of 20:20 with no overlap between film and digital.

I became besotted photography aged 5 when my uncle showed me how to print photos in his darkroom. But I figure the years between 5 and 12 don't really count since I didn't own a camera until my 12th birthday.

I switched to digital two decades later when planning an extended trip to Europe and realised that I could buy a decent digital camera for less than my projected film and processing budget for the trip.

[sebastian]

film: since 1977, with a short break in the early 2000s
digital: since 2000.

that makes film for roughly 39 years, digital for roughly 18 years, mostly in parallel.

[Ernest Zarate]

For Sarge’s graph:

Film: 36 year
Digital: 17 years

[Marco Venturini Autieri]

Film: 36 years; digital: 14 years!

[Roger Overall]

Film: 25 (1979-2004)
Digital: 15 (2004-)

[Eric Schoch]

I started with film with Minolta cameras in 1974, essentially stopped using film with my first Nikon DSLR in 2002. So 28 years of film and 17 digital for me. But I'm slowly assembling the necessary components for an 8x10 view camera, so a return to some fun experiments with film is on the horizon.

[Kev]

30 (still occasionally use 120 roll film) and 20 (overlaps with the 30, after 10 yrs of only film)

[Tam]

You makes an interesting delineation in noting that, while you really caught the photography bug in 1980, you'd been taking pictures for nearly a dozen years before that.

That resonated with me, because while I started working in a photo lab in '90 and all my "serious photography stuff" happened between 1990 and 1993, I grew up with a camera around.

Dad worked in camera stores most of my childhood, and the first film I remember exposing was a roll of black and white Instamatic film on a field trip to the U-505 in first grade. I'd received the little GAF, with its very Seventies woodgrain trim for birthday or Christmas, and most of that first roll consisted of badly flash-burned pictures of the back of the classmate ahead of me in line as we shuffled through the submarine display at the museum.

In high school I'd graduated to some simple 35mm so I could bore people with vacation slides, and I took a darkroom class, but the only time I would have labeled photography as a hobby was that stretch from '90 through the very beginning of '93. Those were the years I had access to free processing, as well as employee discounts on film and printing. It's easy to forget, these days, that each press of the shutter button used to have an actual price tag.

Similarly, while I got my first digital camera in 2001, I wouldn't have described photography as any sort of hobby. I labored along with a series of point-and-shoots until taking the plunge on a couple of cheap used Rebel bodies in 2013.

But then I also started dabbling with film again back in 2015...

So that's twenty-two years with film, with maybe seven of it serious, and eighteen with digital, and six of that being serious.

[Tom Bell]

1964 I think my Dad bought me Diana Camera when I was 10
1970 Praktica ...then Spotmatic/ MESuper/ LX. .... SO 45 years!
Pentas 1st DS ... slowly and with some regets moved to Fuji and Panasonic M43 ... total 15 years ...

I will have to get to 95 I realise to reach equilibrium!

Tom

[JON LEATHERWOOD]

55 film, 19 digital

Started with my Aunt Lena’s hand-me-down Brownie Hawkeye 127 TLR, still using a 4x5 and a Hasselblad. Got a 3mp Sony in 2000, then an Oly E-500, now I’m using Fuji’s and a Pana G85.

[Andy Munro]

39 years film, 20 years Digital. And yes, there is a hard demarcation where I swapped from film to digital even though digital wasn't anywhere near good enough to start with.

[Richard]

56 film; 18 digital. Much more digital now, but still shoot film, mostly b&w

[Ragnar Hartman]

Film = 40yrs (darkroom 30+)
Digital = 20yrs

[james Imbrogno]

28 years Film-99% Large Format
16 years Digital 99% MF Haven't shot film since 2003.

[Ed Bacher]

Film: 41 years (a few more if you count before I started developing my own)
Digital: 14 years.
By volume, most of the pictures I take now are digital (from my phone), but still doing a bit of film now and then.

[David. Vatovec]

10 years film and 12 years digital now, with some overlap ...

[Eric Fraga]

28 (film) and 18 (digital), approximately and ignoring early years with Kodak Instamatic.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Mine overlap. 43 years of some film, 37 years of "serious" film, 19 years of mostly digital, 25 years of digital printing.

[Julian]

Like a lot of posters here, I started in photography when I was given an Instamatic as a kid. As a student, I started shooting with a 'proper' 35mm camera, let it drop as I got older (except for holidays) and then started taking it a lot more seriously in my forties. I was a bit of a film holdout, buying my first digital camera (a Sony A900 that I still use) in 2012. So here are my numbers:

51 film, 7 digital.

[Greg Wostrel]

Lets see:
Film - 30+ years (determining the first time and the last time is a little hard. I estimate the last time I shot film was around 2005-ish)

Digital - 24 years. Started in about '95 (Leaf DCB on a Sinar 4x5) and hardly looked back.

TBH, I don't see the attraction to film/analog at all. Yes, it was fun and a little like magic, back in the day, and I did all sorts of stuff with all sorts of formats. I have prints on my wall that are original fiber prints from negatives, inkjet prints from scanned negatives, inkjet prints from original digital, photographic prints made from digital originals - and NO ONE can tell the difference, I'm confident. I can barely tell the difference and that because I know which ones they are.

One of the things I LOVE about digital is the ability to make the image look like anything you want. Its particularly wonderful with the Fujifilm X-T2 that I am using now. The ability to do film emulation on the raw files in Lightroom (or to jpegs right in the camera) is fabulous and the look is dead on. I know because I shot all the films myself in years past.

Anyway... digital is the way to go for me. Unless I could get my hands on an old SX70 and some film. Or maybe a Pentax 6x7 with a polaroid back. Something about the producing a one of a kind piece of artwork (polaroids) appeals to me (a little)

:-)

[Mike Johnston]

25 film 19 digital
Mike Johnston

[Jeff Hohner]

30:17
...although I returned to shooting film predominantly between 2009-11, so my film/digital ratio is more like 32:15.