Old School and Digital Photography, These Things Are the Same

I grew up with cameras. Even before I could ride my bike without the training wheels on, I was already taking photos with my own camera.

At the time, this meant loading film into the camera, determining what exposure was needed, setting focus, aperture, and shutter speed. 

Composing and deciding when to actually click the shutter release. 

Winding the film to the next frame. Winding all the way after shooting (120, 127, 126) or rewinding (135). Sending off the film to be developed (color chromes) or going to our darkroom (B&W). 

Choosing which few of the negs to print or which slides to put in the Carousel. Then, finally, showing the prints or slides to friends and family.

Yeah, those were the days...

I learned photography back in the late 1960s, was an avid hobbyist throughout my school years, and got my first paying gig at the age of sixteen. By the 1980s, I was teaching photography as well as shooting weddings, portraits, and doing industrial jobs. I stayed involved in the profession even while running my own remodeling business for over twenty years. 

During the 1980s, I was very much intrigued by the possibilities of Digital Photography, but I was sure it would stay in the fringes of practical use. In the late 1990s, it was becoming obvious that Digital was going to stay and improve to the point where it might overtake film photography for certain uses. In 2001, I bought my first Digital camera. Come 2007, and my entire working bag of photo equipment was now Digital.

Now, even my phone can be used as a fairly good camera.

So, nice history lesson. 

Yes, but also an eye opener as I look back through my years of experience. Because all those things I learned from my earliest use of mechanical photography machines, I'm still using in one way or another.

Let's look at some of them:

Loading film. No celluloid or paper films, but we do have to decide what ISO (used be ASA) to set. Are we going to use JPEG or RAW? If JPEG, fine resolution or lower? All of this corresponds to choosing a film. Even what camera we use can fit in this category. Are we using our large sensor camera with lots of MPs available, or a smaller (maybe even P&S) sensor camera? We can even convert to B&W and we may be exposing with that end result in mind.

Which leads to setting exposure. Modern cameras can do all that you, you can do it all yourself, or choose somewhere in between. The built in programs of today are awesome, but if we learn some photographic exposure basics, we can use semi-automatic and even full manual modes to our advantage.

Composition and the Decisive Moment are still things all photographers should study and practice. Snapshots are great, but if we want to explore our Art, we need to master these Photography Basics.

Developing, printing, sharing... We still have many decisions to make concerning our images we just captured. Are we going to "develop" them with our image manipulation software? (Photoshop, GIMP, ACDSee, Lightroom, etc...) Most images benefit from some development, enhancing, cropping. Here, we can change from color to B&W, make minor adjustment tweaks to colors, exposure, cropping. 

We can make major changes to whatever our mind's eye sees. Such processes as HDR, panoramas, anti-ghosting are very accessible to us. In a film and paper darkroom, this was both time consuming and complicated. Some programs even let us mimic certain darkroom methods such as dodging as burning in. 

Social media is the sharing method of choice for millions of snapshots. Digital files can be sold online to be used in ad campaigns, to make hard copy prints, or be used in any other number of different ways.

So... should all serious digital photographers go back to using film to learn photography the way we older film users learned? It couldn't hurt. With many classic 35mm film systems going for very low prices on sites like Adorama and eBay, it won't break the bank if we dabble. 

However, all these photographic basics can be learned without going back to older (or newer) film cameras. Just take the time to actually learn what is going on in your camera and computer. Then, a whole new world of art just might open up for you.

Enjoy!