The ongoing moment

As someone who practices photography I have watched the proliferation of digital images with interest.

Digital imagery has changed the practice of taking photos. With 36 frames of 35 mm film you took time considering an image. Film was deemed expensive and the exposures finite. With digital the initial outlay on the camera and memory card was the sole expense .

I bought my first digital camera ten years ago. My Fuji compact seemed extraordinary at the time.You could change ISO and save over 100 exposures on a card. You could shoot colour or black and white simultaneously and manipulate the images on a computer. It was a new world.

Shortly after I purchased a Canon DSLR which presented greater possibilities. I soon built up a hard drive of pixels from my travels and my attempts at fine art.Three years ago I traded in my Canon for a professional grade DSLR. With the lens it cost as much as a second hand car. The images it produced were technically brilliant - colour rendition, sharpness and resolution were a revelation. You could produce poster size prints with no loss of detail.

But the camera felt remote and technical . I was conscious I held a computer with a lens attached. At the same time I bought an old professional film camera on e bay - they were very cheap with the move from film to digital. Along with the digital SLR I continued to shoot B & W film.

There are technical boring reasons why B & W film is superior to digital cameras . Another unexpected reason is cost - shooting film can be cheaper than digital. This at first seems counter intuitive but the depreciation on professional digital cameras is vertiginous . Practitioners are endlessly seduced by the siren song of the camera manufacturers to upgrade . They lose money on every upgrade. When you upgrade a film camera you simply purchase a different film stock.

I have digressed. I was considering the proliferation of digital images on Facebook, Flickr et all. The critic John Berger said that photography took its power from capturing or crystallising a moment. When digital images become ubiquitous, almost continuous and random have they any meaning?.In part maybe that is the attraction of film - you have to consider an exposure before pressing the shutter. You cannot look at the picture then and there (a practice in digital imaging called chimping) and take another.

I am not a Luddite - modern digital cameras are amazing . For colour, sport and street photography they are superior to a film camera. But I cannot say I love them. I love Ilford Delta film.