Why Are Some Photographers Choosing to Go back In Time?

Not every idea is golden, and not all camera systems are destined to become legends. Digital photography has always grown by leaps and stumbles.

Yesterday’s fresh feature inevitably becomes tomorrow’s standard issue. Each successive photographic breakthrough rests atop the foundations that came before. This is the natural way of things.

At the heart of any digital camera body is its sensor. No matter if it’s CCD, CMOS, Bayer, X-Trans, cropped or full-frame, it’s the sensor that puts the digits in digital imaging. 

Entire corporations rise and fall on the performance of their camera sensors. The Megapixel Wars still rage. Full-frame versus APS-C partisanship continues to cleave families in two.

By its very nature, the organic progression of digital cameras would dictate that any older model should be immediately cast aside by respectable photographers in favor of the shiniest new build. In many ways, this is still the norm.

Despite this, a quiet anomaly has grown within the greater photographic community in recent years. Call it niche, call it a fad, but it’s there all the same. More and more otherwise accomplished photographers are choosing to travel back in digital camera time.

Older, simpler, less advanced digital camera technology has become popular. Some of these cameras are now favored over their cutting-edge modern counterparts, even by professionals.

How can this be? Why are more and more photographers, new and old, amateur and pro, seemingly turning to outdated camera tech?

My friends, allow me to present a hypothesis.

The “Close to Film” Hypothesis

Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

With that single line, ol’ Newton made it clear that his own scholarly advancements were achieved through studying and applying the work that came before him.

So, where did it all start for digital camera sensors? What were the engineers looking at as a baseline when the first commercially available digital cameras were manufactured in the late 1980s?

Just as Newton had his giants, I argued that early digital camera technology stood on the shoulders of photographic film, specifically 135-format film (commonly known as 35mm). 

Stay with me here.

Early digital sensors were built around metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) technology, with CCD sensors being based on MOS capacitors while their CMOS cousins were based on MOSFET (MOS field-effect transistor) amplifiers. I apologize for that headache-inducing sentence.

Naturally, these primogenitor camera sensors produced images carrying unintentional visual characteristics, largely due to the physical components of the sensors themselves. 

As digital cameras continued to evolve between the late 1990s and mid-2000s, more and more manufacturers refined their proprietary sensors and processors.

Camera makers recognized the interpretation of colors and contrasts, shadow and highlight behavior, it all had to be anchored into orbit around some well-established aesthetic star. 

The visual aesthetic of the digital images their cameras produced needed to revolve around something the greater consumer market already knew. What did the consumer market already know? What was the entire picture-taking world using at the time to make still photos? That’s right: film.

This is why some photographers have concluded that vintage digital camera sensors purportedly carry a little something “extra.” 

Many say there’s just a bit of well — something — that makes digital photos from these cameras look less digital. This brings us headlong into another facet of the “close to film” hypothesis: what does it mean for a photograph to look “less digital"?

Poisoned by Film?

Regardless of personal tastes, it’s difficult to deny the impact of the so-called “film Renaissance” on modern digital photography. The “film look” is King, at least in the jungle of social media. 

With filters, presets, recipes, and grain simulations, you can find ways to give your digital photos and footage an “analog” kiss around every corner of the internet.

So, which came first? Are more and more photographers turning to old digital cameras because their sensors truly do offer something unique or is it all psychological? 

Would anyone consider using these admittedly technologically inferior cameras if the growing trend of popular digital photography never leaned towards lo-fi? The answer is… a bit of both.

Search my name on Google and you’ll quickly find I’m one of those damn, dirty film guys. Not exclusively, but 95% of my personal work from the past decade swims up from a tub of murky chemicals. 

I also proudly join the ranks of those who believe select digital cameras truly do produce a “more fertile image.”

Despite my own marrow-deep love of photographic film, it is the opinion of this author that there exists no true “film look.” This is a dangerous position and has resulted in no less than four death threats from the North American Portra Lovers League.

No matter the film stock, there are generally far too many variables at hand preventing each and every sheet or roll from being identical enough in color, grain, and tone. 

Age of the developing chemicals, age and storage condition of the film, developing time and agitation, the phase of the moon, ancient ancestral curses, you name it, so many things come into play when determining the final visuals of film. 

To say that any digital sensor simply “looks more like’’ film is a misrepresentation of the complexity of the issue. I feel it is certainly true that the closer a digital camera’s manufacture date falls relative to the prevalence of film use, the more “filmy” the images do tend to appear.

However, this supposed appearance can be due to many factors, namely the lower resolution of these sensors compared to their modern counterparts. 

From the Mid-2000s with Love

My beloved Fuji X-Pro 1 is my death-row digital camera. It just is. 

It’s my favorite digital body of all time, and I’ll dig my grave at the feet of that first-generation Fujifilm X-Trans sensor. 

Still, that sensor is a 16-megapixel APS-C. The X-Pro 1 focuses slightly faster than a boiled carrot. It produces remarkably crisp photos (frighteningly so, depending on the lens) with the best color I could ever dream of, but it simply can’t compete in terms of overall performance with some of my other cameras, such as the 42.4-megapixel full-frame beast that is my Sony a7R III.

Does that make the Sony inherently better than my Fuji? On paper, definitely yes. In my heart and in my opinion, certainly not.

Apples for apples, or pixels for pixels, I should say that I just prefer the photos my X-Pro 1 takes over my a7R III. This proclivity still holds true when shooting the same lens with both cameras.

And that perfectly sums up the reasoning behind my hypothesis on why certain photographers prefer digital photos made by older digital cameras: you have to enjoy less. You have to appreciate simplicity. You have to look with a certain kind of eye.

A Game of Sensors

There’s no denying that older digital cameras are coming back into fashion, at least amongst a niche contingent of photographers. The exact reasons why are buried in a small bronze box somewhere in Atlantis next to my lost youth.

Cameras like the EPSON R-D1 rangefinder have become photographic unicorns, fetching prices approaching Leica in some circles. 

The tiny Casio Exilim S100 point-and-shoot with its ceramic lens element has become an ultra-meta badge of underground street shooters. The list goes on as more and more photographers begin to incorporate older digital cameras back into their personal and professional photography. Fstoppers own Zhen Siang Yang just wrote a beautiful love story after resurrecting his first-gen Ricoh GR.

It could well be that my hypothesis is unprovable, but the most interesting ones always are. Do older digital camera sensors hold their appeal because they were cast from a more film-centric mold, or is the entire idea completely manufactured?

What’s certain is that there remains nothing more human, indicative of this affliction shared by many creative-type people, than to be forever searching for meaning in the inexplicable. 

Do these old digital camera sensors have something different, or are they just anachronisms from a time before our ascent from photographic darkness? When do flaws cross over to character?

You, Me, Us

As photographers, we are unique amongst artists. We exist in a weird symbiosis with the tools of our trade. Our cameras are an extension of ourselves, one being wholly useless without the other.

In the end, it might well be true that the best camera really is the one you have on you, but for some the best camera is the one that bridges the gulf between personal feeling and external expression. 

If that camera is a $5 local thrift store point-and-shoot from 2002, great. If it’s a $10,000 medium format mirrorless rig straight from Sweden — wonderful.

Some cameras just sing to us. Never be afraid to hear the music.