How Analog Photography Can Improve Your Digital Photography Skills
In an age dominated by digital photography, where instant feedback and infinite storage make taking pictures easier than ever, analog photography might seem like a relic of the past.
In an age dominated by digital photography, where instant feedback and infinite storage make taking pictures easier than ever, analog photography might seem like a relic of the past. However, shooting on film can actually sharpen your skills as a digital photographer in ways you might not expect. The slower, more deliberate process of analog photography forces you to develop a deeper understanding of exposure, composition, and lighting skills that directly translate to digital photography.
1. Mastering Exposure Without a Screen
One of the biggest advantages of digital photography is the instant feedback from an LCD screen. While convenient, this can lead to bad habits, such as constantly “chimping” (checking the screen after every shot) instead of trusting your knowledge of exposure. Film photography removes this safety net, requiring you to carefully consider your settings before pressing the shutter.
By using film, you become more attuned to the exposure triangle—aperture, shutter speed, and ISO because mistakes can’t be fixed in post-production as easily. This forces you to truly understand how light interacts with your camera, making your digital exposures more precise and intentional.
2. Becoming More Thoughtful with Composition
In the digital world, you can shoot thousands of frames without worrying about film costs. While this flexibility has its advantages, it can also lead to careless shooting. Since film limits you to a finite number of exposures per roll, each frame becomes more valuable, encouraging you to slow down and think carefully about composition before taking the shot.
This practice can improve your digital photography by making you more mindful of framing, leading lines, and balance. Instead of relying on cropping in post-processing, you learn to compose your shots properly in-camera an essential skill for any serious photographer.
3. Understanding Dynamic Range and Light Handling
Film has a unique way of capturing light, often handling highlights and shadows more gracefully than digital sensors. By working with film, you develop a better understanding of how different types of light affect your images, from soft diffused light to harsh midday sun.
When you transition back to digital, this knowledge helps you expose your shots more effectively, especially in challenging lighting conditions. You’ll also gain a greater appreciation for dynamic range and how to recover details in shadows and highlights without over-processing your images.
4. Enhancing Post-Processing Skills
Since film requires either a darkroom or scanning for digitization, you naturally become more involved in the development process. This hands-on experience translates well to digital post-processing, giving you a stronger foundation in color grading, contrast adjustments, and tonal balance.
Film’s natural imperfections grain, color shifts, and unique rendering also teach you to embrace subtle flaws in photography, rather than relying too heavily on digital perfection. This can lead to a more organic and artistic editing style when working with digital files.
5. Developing Patience and Discipline
Perhaps the most overlooked benefit of shooting film is the patience it instills. Unlike digital photography, where results are immediate, film forces you to wait. You might not see your images for days or weeks, which builds discipline and anticipation.
This patience translates into digital work by making you more deliberate and less reliant on instant gratification. Instead of firing off hundreds of shots and hoping for a good one, you’ll approach photography with a more intentional mindset, leading to stronger images overall.
Conclusion: A Timeless Skill for the Digital Age
While digital photography is the dominant medium today, film photography remains a valuable tool for refining your skills. By forcing you to slow down, master exposure, and think critically about composition, shooting on film can make you a better digital photographer.
So, if you’re looking to improve your photography, consider picking up a film camera. You might be surprised at how much it enhances your digital work and you’ll develop a deeper appreciation for the art of photography along the way.
Why You Need To Back Up Your Photos
As photographers photos are extremely crucial to us and if you are not backing up your photos, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
As photographers photos are extremely crucial to us and if you are not backing up your photos, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
Reasons For Backing Up
Save Yourself from feeling depressed.
Imagine that you have thousands of images and your hard drive was to crash suddenly, just picture the deviating emotions you would experience knowing your photos are gone forever.
Photos are a part of who we are as photographers.
Also, photos are part of who we are as photographers, so losing a photo is like losing a part of our identity.
Photos are captured moments in time.
Not to mention that our photos are capturing moments of our lives that we don’t want to forget.
Don't become a part of a horror story.
I have heard countless horror stories were someone lost their collections of photos and were completely devastated. Do you want to be one of them?
Suggestions For Backing Up
I have heard it said that photographers need to be backing up their photos to at least two different locations, this could be two separate hard drives or one local hard drive and one in the cloud. I feel that the more copies of your work you have, the less chance of you losing your precious photos.
Remote Storage
Also, you might want to consider keeping one of your hard drives in a different location, such as having one at home and one at your office. In case there were to be some kind of disaster at one of those locations, you would still be able to obtain your other hard drive.
Cloud Storage
Also, it is a good idea to look into a cloud storage solution for keeping your photos backed up. One I used to use quite frequently was Shoebox, but unfortunately, they went out of business. The one I currently use is Google Drive, but I know a lot of photographers like Backblaze. One of the benefits of having a cloud storage backup is that, you can access it from anywhere and that it is usually backed up to a remote location, in case a natural disaster were to hit your area, you would be comfortable knowing you have that cloud backup.
How to Backup
Backup Software
There are software programs you can buy, that mirror your hard drives so when you add something new to one hard drive, it gets copied to the other one as well. Some hard drives also come with free software that allows you to do this. The one I currently use is Carbon Copy Cloner. Note this software is only for Mac.
RAID Hard Drives
Synology is a company that allows for RAID backups of your files, but can be somewhat expensive if don’t have that many photos or are just a hobbyist. As far as cloud backups go, the company you choose to go with will most likely have software for your computer that runs in the background for syncing your files to their cloud service.
Lightroom CC Backups
The good news is that if you’re using Adobe Lightroom CC it can automatically store your files in Adobe’s Cloud. Note that this does not happen for the classic version of Lightroom. Also, I will include a video, on how to select a destination to back up your photos in Lightroom Classic, that I hope you will find helpful.
Video On Backing Up In Lightroom CC Classic
Note the video is based on Lightroom 5, but will also work with newer versions of Lightroom as well.
Share Time
If you have found this post useful please feel free to share and comment on this post. Also, what are some of your strategies for backing up your photos? Please feel free to share by commenting below.