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I feel I’ve lastly let go of movie pictures – and writing that sentence feels far tougher than I anticipated it to.
For years, I’ve been a real advocate of movie. Not within the trendy, surface-level method the place folks purchase a point-and-shoot, load a roll of Portra 400 and name it a character trait, however within the full, messy, hands-on, deeply rewarding sense.
Film was never just the image for me. It was the ritual, the discipline and the relationship with the process.
But over the past few months, something quietly changed. Without really admitting it to myself at first, I found I was reaching for my digital Leica more than my film camera. The film body would sit there, still loved, still admired, but increasingly left behind.
That realization eventually led me to sell my 1965 Leica M2, which in my opinion, remains one of the finest film cameras ever made. It was a beautiful machine, perfectly mechanical, wonderfully simple and full of soul. So why let it go? The honest answer is sharpness and ease.
Sharpness has always been the quiet reason I kept a digital camera in my kit. Film and digital could both give me the contrast, mood and atmosphere I wanted, especially in black-and-white.
But whenever I compared the images side by side, I found myself leaning toward the digital file. Not because the film images lacked feeling, because they certainly did not, but because the digital images had the clarity and bite I was looking for.
If I had only shot film, I probably would have been perfectly happy because there would have been nothing else to compare it to. But once the comparison was there, I could not unsee it.
Of course, some of this may well have been down to my own process. I often shot Fomapan 400 and developed it in Bellini Monobath, which gave me results I enjoyed, but perhaps not always the full potential of the negative.
The bigger issue, I suspect, was scanning. My Canon CanoScan 9000F Mark II was a perfectly useful tool, but I do not think it ever gave me the true professional resolution I wanted from my negatives – certainly not in the way a pro lab scan or a modern digital camera file could.
So I started looking into camera scanning. I began thinking about copy stands, light sources, macro lenses, film holders and all the extra bits needed to pull the maximum detail from a negative. Then I had one of those lightbulb moments. I stopped and thought: this is going too far. Just use the digital Leica.
That was the moment, really. It was not dramatic. There was no grand goodbye, no emotional final roll, no ceremonial packing away of the darkroom gear. It was just a practical realization that digital photography now suits the way I work, the way I see, and the way I document my life.
It is a bittersweet thing to admit, because film has been part of my photography for years, and consciously stepping away from a system that has worked, inspired and shaped me is never easy in any creative field.
I know some people will say I am decades late to the party. They might be right. Even when shooting my Leica M240 alongside my M2, I often found myself thinking, “Why don’t I just keep using this?”
The answer, for a long time, was romance. Film gave me a sense of craft, patience and tradition that digital could not quite match. But romance can only take you so far when the practical realities of life, work and family start to matter more.
The change became especially clear when photographing my daughter. Being able to quickly take an image, send it to my phone, edit it if needed and share it with family almost instantly has become hugely important to me.
Those small, spontaneous moments do not always wait for a roll to be finished, developed, dried, scanned and processed. Sometimes the value of a photograph is not just in making it, but in being able to share it while the memory is still fresh.
A good example came from one of our family camping trips. We go away every year for a week or more and, on one occasion, I decided to take only my Leica M2.
The images that came back were magical, and I still love them. But it took me another two weeks after the trip, once work and daily life allowed, to develop the film and finally see what I had captured. Had I taken my digital Leica, I could have reviewed, edited, and shared those images as the week unfolded.
More importantly, I would have known what I had already photographed, how I had approached it, and what I wanted to capture next.
That is where digital has won me over again. It is not because film is bad, or dead, or no longer relevant. Far from it. Film remains beautiful, tactile and creatively rewarding.
But digital is simply a better workflow for the way I now shoot and document the world around me. It gives me speed, consistency, sharpness and immediacy, without removing the creative choices that matter most to me.
Will I miss film? Of course I will. I already do. Do I still have rolls waiting to be developed? Yes, about 12 of them. Do I still have film waiting to be shot? Absolutely, there is a whole bag full of it.
So, have I truly given up film forever or am I simply going cold turkey for the time being? That is harder to answer. For now, I am enjoying digital photography again. I am enjoying the ease, the sharpness, the freedom and the simple pleasure of using a camera that fits the rhythm of my life as it is today.
But I also know myself well enough to say that the film may not be finished with me just yet. After all, I still have rolls to shoot – and it would be a terrible waste to leave them to rot.
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If you’re still spellbound by the magic of analog, take a look at the best film cameras along with the best 35mm film to use with them.
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