BRYAN CASH

Film is the only way to do true photography and make beautiful pictures. But this has been forgotten by too many people in this increasingly artificial and senseless culture. The following quotes explain some of why only film emulsions can record the earthy textures, gradations, colors, and depth that create the correct aesthetic.

There was a period from the 1980s to the early 2000s when photomultiplier tube (PMT) drum scanning with analog-to-digital conversion was used in an acceptable way as an intermediate in the process of taking the film recording to printed form with laser-exposed silver gelatin or traditional offset lithography printing (and can still be done in the same way, by those that care about quality and recognize the limits of the usefulness of digital technology), but the original must always be film.

Steven Spielberg has described, “film photography is a chemical miracle”, and I think this portrays well the unique ability of film emulsions to capture images of reality. For any picture that is meant to be beautiful or meaningful, the recording must be made on film.

And a web page on cinematography

Erwin Puts:

Most people assume that digital photography (a huge misnomer) is simply photography by other means than the use of film and chemicals. ... This attitude is not only widespread it is the conventional wisdom worldwide. Being universally accepted does not make it true.
The essence of film-based photography is not only the fact that the mechanism of capturing an image and fixing it in a silver halide grain structure creates a final picture that can hardly be altered. The fundamental issue here is the fact that the laws of physics create the image, in particular by the characteristics of light rays and the interaction between photons and silver halide grains. Photography is writing with light, and fixing the shadows.
Photography is not only intimately linked to the use of film, but in fact depends for its very existence on film.
The scene we want to photograph exists and is real: the scene emits electromagnetic energy that is collected by the lens and is transmitted as wave fronts that are captured on a recording medium consisting of silver halide grain clumps. Image formation then is physical and the image recorded by wave fronts in the emulsion layer is molded and fixed in the structure and distribution of the grain clumps.
Film has a more human texture, an emotional weight that can be seen ... Celluloid imagery is real and it shines through the grain of the film, the subtle colour space and the depth of the image. It is this sense of reality that is the defining characteristic of silver halide photography.
Reality is too valuable to leave it to digital technology to tell us how it looks.

J. Riley Stewart:

Digital photography is the worst thing that could have happened to photography as art.
There was a time when most people who took pictures truly wanted the picture to be “good”.
Digital is a plastic technology. Digital photography is very “digital”. Our eyes don’t see things in digital format, they see things in analog format. So does film, by the way, it responds to light in analog form. With digital image capture we get super crisp lines and sharp transitions between colors. Perhaps the best way of characterizing this effect is “plastic”. Yet our eyes see and interpret lines and colors having smooth transitions. If you want to produce images that most closely mimic what our eyes and brains see, you must capture the subject using an analog technology, not a digital one.

Peter Lindbergh:

Digital photography looks heartless and terrible.

Cellulose triacetate film in 135 (35mm) and 120 (6x6cm, etc.) formats:

New film camera equipment in 2025:

Exposure meters:

Lens filters:

Tripods and heads:

Cable releases:

Loupes:

Light boxes:

Slide mounts:

Slide projectors:

Cotton cloths for cleaning equipment and making pouches:

Glassine or pergamyn paper envelopes, sleeves, and pages for film:

Archival paper envelopes and boxes for film, slides, and prints:

Leather photo albums:

Darkroom, film and print processing equipment:

Darkroom, chemicals:

Darkroom, paper:

Darkroom, enlargers/magnifiers and magnifying/masking frames:

Darkroom, enlarging/magnifying lenses:

Darkroom, enlarger/magnifier electronic timers:

Darkroom, mechanical stopwatches:

Lab-size photographic processing equipment:

Scanning, film scanners using PMT:

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