I just want to make photographs

I watched a YouTube video recently in which the presenter set out to give us the hard truth about the state of photography.

Apparently, digital is better than film. Not just a bit better, but better by pretty much any measurement you care to apply.

He also suggested that film technology had effectively reached a plateau by around 1990.

It got me thinking.

I'm not going to argue that my Nikon F75 loaded with FP4 Plus is technically superior to a modern digital camera. It plainly isn't. Give me a modern digital camera and a few minutes with a spreadsheet and I suspect digital will win most of the contests.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I've always found the digital versus film argument slightly odd. You don't hear painters arguing that another artist's work is somehow inferior because they painted on wood rather than canvas.

Nobody looks at a painting and says, "That's very nice, but imagine how much better it would have been if he'd used the latest canvas technology."

Different mediums have different characteristics. That's the whole point.

And photography should be allowed the same freedom.

There's a good example within film itself.

Kodak introduced T-Max. Ilford developed the Delta Professional range. Both represented newer film technology than the traditional emulsions that had gone before them.

But nobody points at someone shooting Tri-X or HP5 Plus and laughs.

Nobody says, "You're still using that old film? T-Max exists, you know."

Because we understand that the films are different.

Tri-X has its character. HP5 Plus has its character. Delta has its character. T-Max has its character. You choose the film because of what it gives you, not simply because it happens to contain the newest technology.

So why does the argument suddenly change when we put a digital sensor into the camera?

There is another part of the "film plateaued in 1990" argument that interests me, too.

Did film actually reach the limits of what was possible?

Or did we simply stop looking?

From the 1990s onwards, enormous amounts of money were poured into developing digital imaging. Sensors, processors, storage, noise reduction, autofocus, image processing — generation after generation of engineers were given huge budgets to make digital photography better.

Film didn't get anything like that.

The market was moving away from it. The investment followed the market.

So perhaps film really had reached its technological limits.

But perhaps it hadn't.

Perhaps if the photographic industry had spent the next forty years putting the same sort of money and research into silver-halide technology, we'd have seen films that were dramatically different from those available in 1980.

Finer grain. Faster films. Better reciprocity. Greater latitude. Better colour. Who knows?

We'll never know.

And that's the important bit.

We can't point to the lack of progress in film after 1990 and conclude that film had reached the limits of what was technologically possible.

All we can say is that the incentive to find out largely disappeared.

But even that isn't really my main argument.

I'm not particularly interested in declaring a winner.

Digital is an extraordinary technology. It is more convenient, more flexible and, by almost any technical measurement, considerably more capable than the film cameras I use.

So what?

Photography isn't a competition to see which medium can produce the highest number on a specification sheet.

I shoot film because I like what film gives me.

Someone else shoots digital because they like what digital gives them.

Someone else might shoot wet plate, Polaroid or something I've never even heard of.

They're all valid.

A painter doesn't need to use the "best" medium.

Neither does a photographer.

Perhaps photography is one of the few art forms where we're expected to choose our medium by reading the specification sheet.

I'm quite happy to ignore it.

I just want to make photographs I like..