The Quince Theory of Film vs. Digital

Most articles like this one compare film to digital like apples to apples. It’s not. Some try apples to oranges instead — still, no. Have you ever heard of a quince?

If so, please share your recipes, because there’s a quince tree in my garden.

If you haven’t, Quince is the frumpy sibling of apples and pears. It used to be everywhere in this country. It requires cooking to be worth eating at all. It’s been mostly passed over for more practical fruit, but it’s still out there if you know where to look, and lately it’s picked up a cult following that reminds me of modern-day film photography. You hear it described as indescribable, “like nothing else.” There’s even a line of thinking that quince, not apple, was the actual forbidden fruit.

I digress. But this is closer to what’s actually going on when you compare film and digital. They aren’t two flavors of the same fruit. They’re two genetically related trees that appeal to two very different people.

How We Got Here

Film wasn’t rare or special for the first hundred years of photography — it was quince in 19th century America, everywhere and unremarkable. It was just what a camera did.

Then digital (the apples) showed up, and film became the slow, expensive option nobody wanted. Camera shops couldn’t give away a Rolleiflex medium format. Somehow, twenty years later, I’m buying one for a premium because it’s “classic” and “vintage.”

I’ve lived on both sides of that swing. More on that later.

The Quick Answer

If you’re short on time, here’s the version you need to make a decision:

Film makes pictures that are softer — round edges, smooth transitions between light and dark. Film feels, and is, slower. The pictures read like a pause in time. Film is limited, too, and with no more than thirty-six frames on a roll, the pictures that make the cut are more intentional.

Rough guide, if it helps:

• Want something that feels soft, timeless, and like it already belongs in that shoebox of photos from your attic? Film.
• Want your photos delivered this week? Anxious to catch the exact perfect moment, maybe have that flyaway hair cleaned up too? Digital.
• Want an apple to be safe, but curious about that indescribably singular quince jam all the hipster gardeners are talking about? Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. Keep reading — the rest of this was written for you.

If you’re hiring me, I shoot film and digital, more film than digital, but never both at once. We always choose collaboratively before we start.

Where Digital Just Wins

Let’s start here and use deductive reasoning. If digital isn’t the clear winner, if we’re not obviously in one of the categories below, I’ll always opt for film.

Here’s where digital is the right call, full stop:

Toddler close-ups. Every eyelash, every gap-toothed grin, exactly when it happens. Autofocus beats my reflexes with manual focus 99.7% of the time. Approximately.

Real darkness. Past a certain point, no amount of fast glass and pushed film can see what the sensor sees on my modern Fuji digital cameras. Think barn-party dancing after your Beltane Ranch wedding.

Saving a moment the light didn’t cooperate with. Flat gray June gloom, a kid’s face half in deep shadow — digital gives me room to go back in and add punch or rescue detail. With film, as my toddler likes to say, “what happens, it happens.”

When you need it fast. Film takes the scenic route through a lab, typically via the Lagunitas Post Office. Pay me enough and digital can be in your inbox by the end of the week.

A safety net that costs nothing. Most digital cameras write to two cards at once. Free backup, no extra thought required.

Where Film Has an Edge

Full disclosure: I’m a quince guy. I’m not going to hide behind the mystique, but I’m also not going to pretend I’m neutral.

Part of that is the quince effect itself — the delight of an email from the lab holding not-yet-previewed scans, not unlike that first taste of jam after a week of a quince ripening on the windowsill. Part of it is the solid, they-don’t-build-them-like-this-anymore feel of a heavy old Nikon F5.

But there are technical realities underneath the feeling, too. A few hard facts:

Grains are round. The grain that makes up a film image is round. Digital pixels are square. That’s a real, physical reason film reads as softer.

Bright, harsh midday sun. Film has more dynamic range than digital, holding onto highlight detail a sensor tends to blow out. Film simply looks better at high noon.

Inspiration in limitation. With twelve or thirty-six frames instead of a thousand, you shoot differently. More intention, less spray and pray.

Color consistency. Film is a recipe, refined by experts over decades. A roll of Kodak Gold shot today looks a lot like one shot in 1988, the year I was born. When people call film “timeless” this is why.

Archiving. Film hands you back both digital scans and physical negatives. Negatives, it turns out, are a more stable place to keep a memory than a hard drive.

No Hybrid — Learned The Hard Way

I used to sell a Vintage Film Add-On. A couple rolls of Kodak stacked on top of a normal digital session. $300 for the “best of both worlds.” I’ve seen a fancy wedding photographer charge $2500 for the same. An apple, plus a spoonful of quince jam on the side.

I remember one family in particular. Good light, happy kids, an easy hour together at the beach. When the gallery went up, they favorited dozens of digital photos. Not one film shot got a heart on it.

I don’t blame them. The film photos looked like second thoughts — blurrier versions of pictures I’d already given them in focus, in high resolution, ten minutes earlier. They weren’t bad because film is bad. They were bad because I was distracted.

An hour with a family is barely enough time to get it right on one medium. Splitting my attention across two didn’t give them the best of both worlds. It gave them half an apple and some quince jam that wasn’t quite finished cooking.

That’s the real problem with hybrid, as most photographers sell it — shooting everything twice, hoping one version lands, calling it a bonus. Often it’s not a bonus. It’s a hedge. An unwillingness to decide. I know this because I used to do it.

So here’s what I actually do now.

For sessions like family portraits, and most of the Inspiration Series — an hour, a morning — I shoot one medium, and we choose it together. Very few exceptions, no add-ons, no second thoughts.

For longer days — weddings, overnight trips — one medium is the foundation, and it’s almost always 35mm film. But a full day crosses light and moments that are best met with an open mind and a digital camera in the bag. We know the exceptions ahead of time: night around the campfire, a ring exchange that needs a longer lens than what’s loaded on the film camera.

These are decisions made before the day starts, not improvised in the middle of it. This isn’t hybrid, as I see it. It isn’t an add-on — I don’t charge more. It’s just pulling out the right tool when I need it most.

History

I came to film the way a lot of people my age did: standing over a tray of chemicals in a high school darkroom, watching an image rise up out of blank paper like it was being summoned.

That darkroom got turned into a computer lab the year after I graduated. I went to college with a digital camera and didn’t look back for a decade — jumped on the bandwagon like everyone else. I was too young to think much about it.

What pulled me back was my grandfather’s old Pentax (he was a frugal man, not a Nikon guy), which came to me around 2014, in a leather hardcase covered in yellowed travel stickers — one from a Nairobi hotel that’s since flaked off. I still use Grandpa’s bag.

Around the same time, I won a lottery permit to float the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon — the kind of permit people apply for years before their number ever comes up. Something told me to bring the Pentax.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I fiddled with that camera between rapids, on the wet rubber floor of the raft I was rowing, for twenty-five days at the bottom of a canyon that doesn’t let cell signal or much of anything else in. One of my favorite frames from that trip is of a couple friends cooking breakfast. You can’t even see the canyon walls in it.

What you can see is the steam off the hot water kettle, feel the cold of the desert morning. It draws you into the low morning light and the soft sounds of camp coming to life. Otherworldly, exactly what that hour felt like at the bottom of the world.

I’ve tried to explain the Canyon trip to people who weren’t there. The quirky film shots from that Pentax do it better than I can. And I don’t think a digital version of the same frame would have come close.

What keeps me shooting film now isn’t nostalgia. It’s that I like the pictures it makes. I like the limitation of thirty-six frames, and I find some version of a flow state in the constant search for the right moment to click the shutter.

I also love having fewer decisions to make after the fact. Less time in front of a computer color-correcting, or choosing between a thousand nearly-identical frames. This means more time for the things that actually make me better at this — taking classes, reading Ansel Adams on technique, taking on personal creative projects to inspire growth.

We don’t talk much about the importance of this space, but it’s essential to making pictures for you.

If you want the deeper version of the film argument — the real case for it, made by someone who’s spent a career thinking about it — Jonathan Canlas’s Film Is Not Dead is worth your time. I’m not selling you that book, and it’s not an affiliate link. But if you’ve made it this far, you might like it.