“I love shooting on film, it slows me down”. Heard that before? It makes me wonder what the person was doing with digital. You don’t have to hold down the shutter button until the memory card is full, you know. And why can’t you take time and care with a digital camera?
I wonder if the influencing factor is cost? Per frame, film can be more expensive than digital. After all, the cost of one more shot in digital is zero. Maybe not though, as Instax is very popular even at a pound a pop.
Maybe it’s the fact that you can’t see immediately what you’ve taken. There is no chimping the camera to see if the exposure, framing, focus etc are right. They have to be what you intended with film, as it’s harder to make adjustments in post.
Perhaps it’s because digital allows you to take multiple shots of things that go fast, then choose the best one. The top end digital cameras can do burst rates way higher than film could. My Pentax MX could, with the proper motordrive, take 5fps. You can easily double that now with digital, or even more. Ilford used to make a special 72 exposure version of HP5 for motor-driven cameras, and some pro cameras could take a 250 exposure back. With digital you can wack in a big memory card and blaze away like a John Woo film.
Maybe that is the difference? Film has less capacity, so you have to take more care. Do you lay a million eggs in order that some survive, or do you nurture one and make sure?
I must say though that I started out with film and I’ve never treated it like it was made of silver. If I wanted to shoot a lot, I did. I might actually take fewer shots on digital, as I can check immediately that I’ve got what I wanted. I was always inclined to bracket the exposure with film, or just to take two shots of the same thing in case my fumbling skills got scratches or dust on one of them (or I found a hole in the emulsion).
Some things do need careful exposure and time though, but I can see no need for a difference in approach between digital and analogue. Perhaps what people mean is that some film cameras lack auto-focus, auto-exposure etc so it takes longer to set them up. But that’s stretching it, because you can go as auto or manual as you want in either medium.
Some things stay still
So I don’t really know. I do know that some film cameras take time to set up and adjust, so that may be the ‘slowing down’. On the other hand, how many options and settings does your digital camera have?
What is slow though, is turning exposed film into pictures. With digital you shoot, pop the card and start work on the computer. I’ve heard people brag about how many shots they take at a wedding or a sports event. If you have to edit all of these, make a selection and then do all the Photoshopping, digital must take nearly as long as developing a film and scanning it. But for the odd few shots, digital is far faster to get to a shareable result. But this makes the ‘slowing down’ of film an undesirable thing.
So, to quote the Hypersensitive Photographers podcast, I think it’s all bollocks. I think people are claiming for film some pseudo-artistic connection with their craft. It’s virtue-signalling. If you want to slow down, think more, take more care, then do just that. It doesn’t matter what type of image recording medium you use. Just stop claiming that you’re so fast you need analogue to slow you down. If you don’t engage your brain normally, what are you up to?
Fup Duck Photography 
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