In praise of film

This article from 2005 from the NYT has an excellent description of the power of a classic film camera.

On the screen was a wide overhead picture of a John Kerry rally last fall in Madison, Wis., which Mr. Burnett shot with a Canon 20D digital camera, the same camera used by thousands of other professionals around the world. Not surprisingly, the picture looks like thousands of others that were shipped around the globe during the campaign.

The colors are bright. Every part of the image is crisp, so crisp that just picking the minuscule figure of Mr. Kerry out of the huge crowd takes a "Where's Waldo?" moment.

And then Mr. Burnett flipped to a photograph taken seconds later with the ancient Speed Graphic. Suddenly, the image took on a luminescent depth. The center of the image, with Mr. Kerry, was clear. Yet soon the crowd along the edges began to float into softer focus on translucent planes of color.

This is exactly what I find, that the crisp beauty of digital is impressive, but the emotive force of film is irreplaceable.

The article goes on to state that

The digital picture pretends to display raw reality. The analog picture is a visualization of human memory.

And that seems to be the strength of it. It's interpretation over realism.