Analog vs. Digital

 The "Debate" has been raging for a couple of decades and it's a losing battle for the analog side.  

First a matter of perspective, despite growing up a 21st Century Digital Boy, I love and live for analog photography.  The feeling of loading a roll of film into a still camera.  The need to know how to pull focus, setting your aperture and shutter speed, knowing what your f-stop/depth of field is going to be and even when all that's done and you press the shutter, it could still be hours or days before you know you got that shot.  There's something very calming about slowing down your entire process.  Especially when you're limited to 24 or 36 exposures on a 35mm camera.  10-12 if you're shooting medium format.  You become very selective with your shots.  That's nothing at all like modern digital cameras where you literally go through hundreds of shots in a few minutes and sort them all out later.  

Yet, the obverse of that is that professionally, I've gladly accepted how much and how quickly the digital world has taken over the video/film and audio professions.  I saw a comment on a Facebook post where Rian Johnson was starting principle photography on the Knives Out sequel and it was a still shot of a RED camera on an Arri jib arm and one random commenter lamented, "No 35mm?  Oh well."  It's funny people with no knowledge of the film industry or even the workflow necessary for production can whine about something as trivial as the lack of using physical film in 2021.  Digital is here to stay and only the snobbiest of film aficionados would think about complaining of the lack of filmstock. Yes that means Nolan, Tarantino and their ilk.  Yes, I said it.  Likely to the chagrin of a few of my friends who still worship at the Kodak altar.  Holding out for a resurgence of film is a hopeless cause. 
The costs alone are outrageous.  Think back to how much a roll of film used to cost to develop.  That 24-shot roll will probably set you back $8 give or take, yes?  Film is typically shot at a rate of 24 frames per second.  So that 24-exposure roll you developed would equate to about a second of screen time.  $8~ just to develop plus the $8~$12 for the roll of film and you're looking at $15~$20 for one second of film.  Granted, film stock for studios is exchanging on a massive scale so the prices are going to drop.  Consider these costs as a baseline.  How much footage gets shot versus how much actually gets used in a final cut for a film?  
Cost savings in film stock alone is a huge factor in the move towards digital.  And for anyone who wants the film "look", it's really a matter of how good your cinematographer is.  Someone who understands digital and then working with a talented editor to get the look and you're going to end up with a final product that most people could NOT tell the difference.  The few movie houses left that still show films, people love them because of their flaws.  The experience, which again, can be easily recreated in post.  I find it ironic that so many people want the film look for everything that there are hundreds of apps available in the app store that creates these flaws in your photography, scratches, noise, bokeh, to look like film.  And there are even still cameras on the market that are designed and sold as flawed so if you do happen to shoot film, the stills that come out of them and can be printed (or scanned) will already have the soft, out of focus shots, light leaks, scratches on the film backing.  I find it hilarious and ironic that people are now spending time and money to make their photography LOOK like bad photographs our fathers and grandfathers would be embarrassed to show.  

As as for music... 
Allow me to expound but let's take it back a couple decades to the 1980s.  The dawn of the digital age may be considered the 1970s when computers started coming into living rooms across the country.  The room-sized computers like Eniac and the Cray began to give way to smaller micro computers and eventually, personal computers that took up a large part of one's desk at home.  But it fit on furniture inside a home.  That was a HUGE step for computing power to start integrating itself in home use.  And those first few home PCs were fairly limited in use, much like the technology at the time.  Mostly word processing and a few simple tasks were about all they could handle.  Removable media like floppy drives and even magnetic tape drives were agonizingly slow and limited in storage space.  The first 5 1/4" floppy drives could hold at best, 360kb of memory.  As technology improved, the drives reduced in size to 3 1/2" and up to 1.44MB.  For a rough translation, a single photo from the cell phone in your hand would probably take up 400kb~ per photo.  If you were lucky enough to have a hard drive installed on that home system, it might have had a 10MB capacity in the 1980s.  You can't even buy a thumb drive smaller than 32 GB today.  And forget networking anything.  Dial-up modems were agonizingly slow.  14.4, 28.8 in the late 80s/early 90s.  You finally got 56k in 1996.  Remember Napster and how you had to wait most of the night for your favorite MP3 to download?  That was just for a 3-minute song.  Imagine a full-length feature film.  

What's funny is folks still INSIST that vinyl records sound superior to digital.  I'm rolling my eyes even typing that out.  A high enough quality FLAC, WAV, or AIFF file is going to be far better than a vinyl record.  Notice I don't include everyone's favorites, MP3 or Apple's AAC.  And their omission from this discussion is simply because those two file formats are designed to be lossy.  They cut the highs and lows during sampling of the audio recording to compress the file enough for the medium.  Simply put, the highest and lowest sound frequencies are cut off to make the files smaller for storage and transfer.  The former three are sampling at a higher rate and those higher rates are superior to analog.  In fact, most of the sampling rates are actually beyond the average human ear's ability to hear it.  All things being equal, the audio equipment and music track being recorded and played back at their highest quality the media can contain, there's just too much distortion and signal to noise that analog recordings induce.  
A few years ago I had a "discussion" with a vinyl aficionado who insisted the medium was superior to digital.  And his coup d'grace in the argument was that it was BECAUSE of the flawed playback that vinyl was the superior format.  Yes, despite the physical wearing out a needle does to the grooves of a record, you're eventually going to reach a point where the record can no longer play, the ridges in the grooves of the record have been worn smooth.  And this yahoo said that's exactly why it was a better format.  Because every play of the album is going to sound a little different over time whereas digital sounds exactly the same as the day it was recorded.  Literally, recorded.  Most artists are recording and mastering digitally these days anyway, so pressing vinyl is actually downgrading the music but they do it because of so many people like that dude who swears it's a better sound.  
Sometimes you just have to let people continue to think they're right no matter how wrong they really are.  

We are well into the digital age and unless there's a worldwide catastrophe that resets us back to zero, it's not changing anytime soon.  But I will admit, as much as I'm devoted to the digital world, I still hold on to some tactile, physical elements.  I still print photos and hang them on my walls.  I really would like to get back into still photography once I can carve out some time to get back into the swing of things.