I’ve been so invested in my film photography recently that I sometimes forget that I also have a couple digital cameras. I went out last month with my Olympus TG-5. In October, I decided to dust off my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. I hadn’t been out with it since our Juneteenth walk with a friend of ours.
Shooting digitally is, obviously, quite different than shooting on film. Although I enjoy the challenges that come with shooting on film, I also enjoy taking a break and take pictures more reliably with a digital camera. I feel like my experiences with film have helped with my digital photography. I am much more deliberate when taking digital photos since spending so much time with film where you have a limited number of pictures on a roll and are paying for them to get developed. With my digital cameras, I used to take quite a number of shots of the same thing and then pick the one(s) I liked best later. Now, I’m much more likely to take my time and take only one or two shots which certainly saves me a lot of time later.
That said, I do compose differently using a digital camera. Knowing that I have plenty of pixels to play with, I tend to shoot my subject in the center of the frame and then “compose” later while editing.
I believe I’ve mentioned before that I don’t spend a lot of time editing my film photos. There’s not much information in the scans so there’s not a lot I can do. If anything, I may crop and straighten a photo but, usually, that’s about it. Despite digital photos looking really great to start with, I often spend a lot of time editing them trying to get the images the way I want them.
One big benefit of digital photography is that I can edit my photos shortly after taking them and actually remember where I took them. Sometimes I don’t get my film processed and scanned until a month or so after shooting it, and it can be a lot of work reconstructing where I was.
I kept 64 of the pictures I took on my October walk and here are the ones I particularly like.
After the good experiences I had these past 2 months with my digital cameras, I need to remember to include them more often when I go out on a photo walk.
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