Once you look, once you see the difference between digital and film photographs, then you may very well become unhappy with your digital photos. This means you may not want to look. I advise that you don’t look – that you don’t learn to SEE, the difference between film and digital. The realization that you spent WAY too much money on digital equipment could be more than one can take.
I can’t believe that I couldn’t see the banding in my digital photos long ago. I’m looking at photos that I took years ago, and seeing glaring imperfections. People want to speak of photography on the level of “fine art?” Fine art, is a work WITHOUT blemish, without flaw. Fine ART deals with excellence, not mediocrity, not democracy, not equality; but rather inequality.
There are real physical differences between digital and film – they are NOT equal. Cheaper, faster, and easier are NOT adjectives that are used to describe quality. These speak to UTILITY, rather than QUALITY. Just like FACTS and OPINIONS (Doxa), people today confuse the two.
There is an objective reality that lies outside of our subjective opinion. What are the physical differences between film and digital? With film, photons make a literal impression, a dent in the light-sensitive emulsion. Just like an old record where the actual sound impregnates itself onto the disk, film is a literal documentation of a moment in time.
Digital is quite literally a simulation, an interpretation of reality; not a literal representation. What is all the digital editing for? In part, digital editing software is to correct all the mistakes in this INTERPRETATION. Digital gets reality wrong – film, does not. Rather than spending time being creative, I continually find myself wasting time having to correct all the mistakes, and in the end, I still have a digital photograph.