Did Photography Lose Something When It Turned Digital? – A Look Back

I will say it slowly, twenty-five years. What’s twenty five years I hear you cry? It’s been twenty-five years since I bought my first digital camera. At the time I was shooting my film-based images on a Nikon F100. The F100 was a beautiful camera, perhaps equivalent to the Nikon D800 and Z7 in that it sat just below the flagship professional cameras.

However, the drum beat of digital, although faint, was getting louder. At the time, I was working as a cruise ship photographer and I could already see the benefits of a digital workflow (It took at least another 10 years for digital to become mainstream on cruise ships). With an amazing round-the-world cruise in front of me, I decided to dip my toes in the digital waters.

The last trip before the world cruise saw the ship docking in Gibraltar, a tiny slice of duty-free UK, where camera prices were, on the whole, a little cheaper than the motherland. So with a wad of sterling in my pocket, I wandered Gibraltar’s electronic stores before settling on an Olympus Camedia C-2000Z. Let me run you through the headlines.

Sunrise image of the port of Gibraltar
Gibraltar's Duty-Free electronics enticed me into digital. By Jason Row Photography

A Digital Powerhouse

For the times it really was. The DSLR had yet to make an appearance, at least in the sub $10k arena, so small compact digital cameras were the only options for the less wealthy, digital guinea pigs. It may be hard to believe but Olympus were the industry leaders in the prosumer digital arena from the mid-90s. The Camedia C2000Z was met with great reviews from magazines and even fledgling photography websites such as DPReview.

The specs might shock relative newcomers to photography but they were state of the art then. The headline was the 2.1mp CCD sensor giving a 1600×1200 pixel resolution. Images were written to a wafer thin SmartMedia card, quite slowly as I recall.

Close shot of an Olympus OM2 film camera
Olympus were amongst the first to transition from film to digital. By Goh Rhy Yan

On the rear of the camera was a tiny LCD which was pretty hard to see in any type of daylight. It also sucked the life out of the batteries. Composing the image was best done the traditional way, through an optical viewfinder.

Talking of batteries, it took 4xAAs and you would need plenty of them in reserve. The camera had autofocus but like all the other elements of picture taking with it, it was slow, so very slow. It was, however, my, and many others, first foray into the brave new world of digital.

The Digital Deniers

Remember when Mirrorless was the new kid on the block? I wrote a few articles about the fact that mirrorless would become the new normal. Some of the comments were quite juicy. Now imagine mirrorless denial and multiply it by a factor of 10.

To me, and many others it was quite clear right at the very beginning that digital would take over photography. In 2000, I predicted it would be 5 years before digital became mainstream, that was pretty accurate.

However, there was a veritable stream of vitriol from some sectors of photography. Digital would never replace film, you're not a proper photographer if you use digital, all the similar tropes you hear today when a new technology arrives. Smartphones are not proper cameras, anyone?

A roll of Kodak Ektar film with an old lens
Digital? It will never take off. By Caleb Woods

A lot of the vitriol was aimed at the perceived reduction in skill requirements to shoot digital. That, to a certain extent, was justified, however, it was a positive not a negative. Digital opened the way for a huge new generation of photographers, all bringing their own creativity to the medium. Those newcomers that really enjoyed taking digital images would go on to learn all the skill sets that film photographers kept banging on about.

The DSLR Arrives

If there was a point where all but the most ardent digital deniers had second thoughts, it was the release of the Canon EOS D30 in 2000. It was arguably the first “affordable” DSLR. The first digital camera that looked pretty much like the old film cameras we were used to, and operated like them also.

It sold like hotcakes, to progressive film photographers and to photographic newcomers. It was closely followed by offerings from Contax, Nikon, and Fujifilm (in Nikon bodies) The digital era had arrived, but film was still hanging on.

A Eurofighter Typhoon shot on a Nikon D100 in 2002
Taken in 2002 on a Nikon D100, this image still stands up today. By Jason Row Photography

HDR – Don’t Forget Your Sunglasses

One of the many tropes that film photographers trotted out in the early days was that digital could never replicate the “film look”. We now know that not to be true, certain manufacturers go out of their way to make cameras “film-like like” However, the argument was not helped by the mass adoption of HDR photography in the early 2000s.

Its rise seemed to tie into the rise of social media and the dopamine hit of likes and shares. The more garish an image, the more it got liked. A whole cottage software industry grew up around HDR, with a plethora of tools to help you merge your HDR images.

HDR has blossomed into a very powerful tool in modern photography but it’s early days did little to appease the “classical” photographic fraternity

Digital Film And Scanners

Flick through the pages of any photographic magazine in the early 2000s and you would see endless adverts and reviews for scanners. Whilst the Canon EOS D30 was a lot cheaper than previous DSLRs it was still well beyond the reach of many.

Hence the film to digital era was born. There were all sorts of scanners available. Flatbeds for prints, flatbeds with film adapters, dedicated film scanners, and hugely expensive drum scanners. Film photographers had massive catalogs of transparencies and negatives, all of which needed transferring to hard drives. For those of us who attempted it, it was a slow, soul destroying process. Wait for four negatives to scan, rinse, and repeat. You didn’t grow a beard waiting for the scans to finish, your beard turned grey.

A large pile of Kodachrome slides
The transition from film to digital was not an easy one. By Jo Gala

As an attempt to lure in budget film photographers to digital, one company floated the idea of a digital film canister. You would put this in the back of your film camera in much the same way you would a roll of film.

The idea bombed so hard that I could barely find a reference to it anywhere. It was revived in 2016 with the I’m Back crowdfunding project. That also bombed but has not deterred them from trying again.

The early days of digital were like the Wild West. Prospectors throwing up ideas, some of which would stick, others that would wither away and die. In the end, it was actually the mainstream film camera manufacturers that really drove the birth of the digital era. Olympus with its compact cameras, then Canon and Nikon with their DSLRs.

They were, without a doubt, exciting times and have led to the amazing era of photography that we are living through today. Who knows where we will be in another 25 years.

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Jason has more than 35 years of experience as a professional photographer, videographer and stock shooter. You can get to know him better here.

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