Digital Makes Better Photographers
This MetaFilter post points to a BBC pop-tech column giving a few reasons why digital makes people into better photographers. Out of five reasons, only two sort of touch on the reason (at least as how I see it), and not in the correct way: yes, experiment and shoot-at-will. You’ll get a lot of pictures, some good, some interesting, though perhaps more in a million monkeys way than anything else.
No, the main reason is that digital gives instant feedback: you can tell much more quickly that you’ve composed badly, or missed the exposure, something you can only guess at with film. You quickly get the hang of exposing more correctly on the first shot, composing on the fly, moving for better lighting, and so on. It’s sort of like learning to use a piece of software: it’s better to play around with it (presumably with a manual) than to try and learn it without touching a computer.
Oh, I used an older version of Grimm’s Basic Book of Photography to learn about F-stops for my manual film camera. It’s a very good book. I don’t have the hang of all the details, but at least I have a good idea about what the dials do.
Actually, that brings up a different point: with my Nikon FM10, I feel I have very fine control over the image, in terms of twiddling all the dials the way I want. With the digital, I don’t feel I have much control at all. Yes, many of the same functions are available through various menus, but they’re a pain to get to; the process is simply clumsy. Basically, it’s a snapshot camera, with all the limitations of a snapshot camera. I shouldn’t be complaining about it, because it is what it is. However, you can’t really learn how photography without the ability to twiddle the dials, so to speak. So, even though I have instant feedback with my Sony digital, it’s not as useful as it could be. There’s feedback, but there’s nothing to be done about the feedback. At most, one can discard obviously bad images.