Here’s Shoebox’s humorous take on the difference between film and digital photography.

Taking Pictures: Film vs Digital [Shoebox via Laughing Squid]

Another sign of the times (and bad news for film-photography enthusiasts): one of the most prestigious photo competitions in the world no longer accepts film photographs. Earlier this week Nikon published a “call for entries” for its 34th Nikon Photo Contest. Here’s what the entry guidelines say about “Eligible Works”:

Image data files created with digital cameras (including medium- and large-format cameras). Images that have been retouched using software or by other means will be accepted. Both color and monochrome images will be accepted. (Scans of photographs taken with film cameras are not eligible.)

The contest has been held since 1969 to “provide an opportunity for photographers around the world to communicate and to enrich photographic culture for professionals and amateurs alike.”
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Lost Memories is a beautiful 3-minute-long short film by Francois Ferracci that imagines a future in which cameras can share images with the world as soon as they’re shot — oh wait, that’s now — and can beam holographic photographs into the air for easy uploading or editing. In such a futuristic world, would analog photography still have any role to play?

Paris, 2020. A beautiful couple, a city over-saturated by holograms and digital stream. A polaroid camera. Tomorrow will never be the same.

It’s a thought-provoking story that might make you think twice about both photographic mediums and data backups.
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You probably know that, like computers, digital cameras depreciate pretty rapidly — especially when a replacement model is announced every 2 or 3 years. A sad truth about digital cameras is that the digital sensor inside DSLRs cause them to be more expensive than comparable film SLRs when purchased new, yet less valuable further down the road when purchased used. Ken Rockwell calls this “digital rot“, and writes,

Digital Rot means that a camera’s digital guts rot-out its value in just a few years because you can’t remove the digital guts. Sadly, Digital Rot is a disease shared by all digital cameras.

Buy a film camera and you can shoot it for a lifetime. Buy an expensive digital camera, and you only get a few years out of it before its value rots away.

A “new in box” Nikon F5 film SLR just sold for $1,350 on eBay yesterday. How much do you think a “new in box” 2.7 megapixel Nikon D1 (a camera that cost $5,000 in 2000) would sell for today?