The other day I used a digital camera for the first time in what feels like years. It was a bit of a last minute shoot and I didn’t have much film on hand other than a few rolls of consumer grade 35mm color film. Plus, the weather outside wasn’t great and I didn’t want to chance getting one of my film cameras all wet. Most of my mechanical SLR’s like the Minolta SRT-101 can take a bit of rain, but I wasn’t sure how bad it was going to be so I figured my digital camera could be the sacrificial lamb should the weather go really south.
I had almost forgotten how much of a different working experience a digital camera can be. Especially a higher grade digital SLR with a fairly fast frame rate. There is something about the interface and the style of the camera that just really begs the photographer to just click the shutter. Expose as many frames as possible. Just keep exposing frames until you’ve exhausted all possibilities. In practice, it feels more like sketching with a pencil on scrap paper as opposed to taking a paint brush to canvas. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, just a lot different than working with a medium format camera where I tend to examine a scene carefully before I even bother to measure the light, let alone expose a frame of film.
The funny thing is, when I came home to review the images on the computer, after exposing roughly four hundred images, there are only about five or six that I really like. Which is about the same number of images I usually like after running through about three or four rolls of film. So really ultimately, the end result is about the same in term of quantity that I end the day with.