Until Max was born in June of 2008, I shot film only. I switched because I knew I'd be tempted to shoot myself out of house and home if I stayed with film. Cost savings aside, I must admit that I'm already enjoying being able to see the results of my experiments so immediately. I used to have to wait weeks or months (or even years) before seeing the processed film.

Regardless, for many reasons, film remains my favorite-- I've loved many different emulsions (both slides and color and black and white negative films). I have to say that the fact that many of my favorites have recently gone extinct in the digital age doesn't make me any fonder of digital photography.

My favorite slide films are Velvia 50, Provia 100f, and Kodak Color Infrared (recently extinct). My favorite color negative films are Kodak Gold 100 and Fuji 800 (and long-gone but gorgeous Kodak Gold 25). My favorite BW films are Kodak High Speed Infra Red (unbelievably, Kdak let this go extinct), Ilford Delta 100, Ilford XPII400 and Kodak CN400 (both of which are really color negative films that only "see" BW), and Kodak T-Max 3200. I love the incredible sensitivity of this last film, but miss the unmistakable and irreplaceable grain of its precedent, Kodak Recording Film. At this point, I shoot 35mm SLR only, because I've found the format to be most responsive to my spontaneous style, diverse film needs, and technical stylistic effects.

I'd not shot digital cameras previously (except for fun), because even at this point, in my opinion, they are still not up to film quality. For those who insist on equating a silver grain on film to a pixel, the digital equivalent of 100 speed 35mm slide film would be a 100mb tif file-- that's a long ways away (of course, the organic contours of film are much more attractive than a pixel-- in my mind they are incomparable). My new Nikon D300 can only create a file about one-fourth that large.

Similarly, as an old-fashioned darkroom aficionado, I HATE the presence of digital artifacts in prints (clipping, over-sharpening, bad paste jobs, etc etc etc). Most people, and many exhibiting artists it seems, either don't see or don't care about these flaws. Consequently, in my opinion, the overall quality standards for exhibited photography have been coming down a lot recently. Plus, there's something about the honesty of in-the-moment reality captured on film that we are losing in the era of digital composites.

Sadly, access to color darkrooms (for both slides and negatives) is quickly disappearing. I still have a large inventory of C-prints (traditionally-enlarged color neg) and Silver Gelatin (bw neg) prints from my rabid printing days, but looking forward, it is almost inescapable that color images will need to be reproduced through some digital medium.

Fortunately, most slide (and occasional black and white and color negative) films lend themselves to high-quality scans. Since I personally don't like the dots of ink-jet prints, or Giclee prints (big, expensive ink-jet prints), I use the continuous-tone Lambda print process. Lambda prints are exactly the same as traditional C-prints, except that a laser is used instead of an enlarger to project the image onto old-fashioned color print paper, which is run through old-fashioned color chemistry.

One advantage of this process over enlargement is that it offers sharper edge-to-edge printing, especially for very large prints. In my opinion, the overall sharpness of the images (from 35mm film) is roughly equivalent for 11x14 or larger prints. Lambda prints are very archivally stable and have been tested at 60 years before any noticeable fading occurs (and longer, of course, if properly displayed under UV glass)..

I do not alter the composition of any digital file, and pride myself on ensuring that it is impossible to tell the digital origin of the final fine print.