Shooting with a digital camera after years of film can be a humbling experience. The gap between snapping shots and actually making photographs is wider than most people realize, and Steve O'Nions found that out the hard way on a street photography day in Liverpool.
Coming to you from Steve O'Nions, this candid video follows O'Nions and his friend Robin through Liverpool's streets, both shooting with the Olympus OM-5 Mark III and a pair of compact zoom lenses: the Olympus 14-42mm power zoom and the Panasonic 35-100mm. O'Nions is typically a film shooter, and he's refreshingly honest about what happens when he trades that workflow for digital convenience. He admits that the instant feedback loop of digital, rather than helping him shoot better, actually pulled him out of the creative mindset he relies on. Instead of moving from shot to shot and trusting his instincts, he kept stopping to review images on the back of the screen, breaking his rhythm every time.
The video gets more interesting when O'Nions starts to dig into why the day felt flat. He wasn't short on subject matter. The Baltic Triangle district of Liverpool is full of derelict doorways, rusted metal, layered graffiti, and the kind of urban decay that practically shoots itself. He even gets genuinely excited when he stumbles across a stretch of worn-out garage doors and patched metalwork, calling it exactly what he came for. But even then, he feels he was representing what was in front of him rather than saying anything with his images. He points to a lack of focus, literally and creatively, as the core problem. Trying to shoot everything meant he committed to nothing.
There's a real argument buried in here about how the tool shapes the photographer. O'Nions suggests that a single focal length on a film camera, something like an Olympus XA2 or even a toy camera like a Holga, would have forced a kind of discipline that the zoom-equipped digital setup didn't. When your options are limited, your decisions become more intentional. He also brought along a Panasonic GF5 converted for 850 nm infrared shooting, though that experiment didn't pan out on the day. The video is less a gear review than a case study in how enthusiasm, subject focus, and shooting habits interact, and how easy it is to come home with a full memory card and almost nothing worth keeping. Check out the video above for the full rundown from O'Nions, including his honest look at the shots that almost worked and what he'd do differently next time.
4 Comments
Yet another photographer blames their tools for their lack of intention and sloppy practice. Sheesh.
It's really hard for me to believe that everything would have changed if he had been carrying a film camera instead of digital. After all, the look through the viewfinder is the same, right? Inspiration doesn't all of a sudden magically appear if you're shooting film instead of digital, or does it? Besides, if a digital camera were the real problem, go back another day, shoot with your film camera and show me how much better your pictures are.
The only redeeming idea from it all is that he speculates that if he had focused on just one theme during the outing (something such as the texture in old dilapidated buildings), he might have come home with a more cohesive body of work. Maybe so; maybe not. Does that mean better photos, or just a few more mundane pictures of the same stuff? But if that's the message here, focusing your mindset or approach on the purpose that you set out to accomplish seems equally possible, no matter whether you're using a film or digital camera.
This article doesn't dive deep into how one might bridge the gap it is focused on. For instance, it doesn't mention that one can simply turn off the "auto-review" on a digital camera to mimic the film experience. It treats the digital workflow as an inescapable force rather than a set of features that can be disabled.
Ultimately, O'Nions' "failure" is a success in education. It proves that a camera is just a box; the discipline—the "muscles" of photography—must be brought by the person behind it, regardless of whether the sensor is made of silicon or silver halide.
I'm sorry but this is total nonesense, saying that using a digital camera makes him less creative than using a film camera. Just turn the rear screen OFF! Don't review any photos at all and you could even limit yourself to just 36 shots if you so wanted but using a film camera does not instantly make you more creative.