Film Photography Quotes

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

I'm staying with film, and with silver prints, and no Photoshop. That's the way I learned photography: You make your picture in the camera. Now, so much is made in the computer... I'm not anti-digital; I just think, for me, film works better.

I think - I don't know, maybe it's nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be - it's gone. It's going to be gone.

I would love to study photography.

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.

Photography has definitely been my favorite way to remember things. At least for me that’s how my brain processes things, of memories or moments - if I take a picture of it I can remember so many more details. I think it’s about choosing the exact picture in my head that signifies or symbolizes a moment - almost as if you’re using film. It’s almost archaic.

I don't think that digital photography is romantic yet. It's not sympathetic the way that film is.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it - the grain, how it feels, the texture.

I think digital will displace film, yes. We're talking about digital as a thing of the future, but I'm afraid that it's here.

The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.

The experience of using a Rolleiflex camera is very different than using a SLR.

The [35mm] camera is for life and for people, the swift and intense moments of life.

I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film.

In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.

My first pictures are from 1972, and my first proper camera dates back to 1973. During the first year I used my father's camera. It had a flash on it, which I don't like, but I didn't know anything about photography back then, so it was just what I did.

I'm actually a huge fan of digital as well. I appreciate how that technology opens the doors for filmmakers who never had access to that level of quality before. However, I do think film itself sets the standard for quality. You can talk about range, light, sensitive, resolution -- there's something about film that is undeniably beautiful, undeniably organic and natural and real.

Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.

The dynamic range of a digital camera is not that much greater than film, particularly if you push the ASA a little bit.

I think your behavior is different when you work on digital or film. It seems that... I feel most focused if I'm working on film.

35mm film isn't ticking away so it's subconscious - performances are allowed to breathe in a much more real way I think.

Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do. And for me, I just have such a love of the tactile and sensuous quality of a black and white silver gelatin print.

Remember when vacation photos meant toting along a bulky camera?

There's something very satisfying about old cameras because they're ingenious. I mean when you take them apart and actually see, 'Oh, this is how we make photographs,' it's an ingenious thing, but it feels like it's in a way a layman can appreciate, whereas a digital camera, I don't even begin to know what goes into making a digital camera.

I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don't use flash, and with digital I can even work in very bad light. Also, it's a relief not to lose photographs to x-ray machines in airports.

Small, portable digital cameras that exceed the performance of an off-the-shelf Nikon using 35mm slide film are further away from current reality than the proposed NASA manned Mars mission, although I expect both to happen sometime during my lifetime.