I have been a photographer longer than a programmer–if I really ever was that.  I took my first pictures before the age of 8.  So I have a similar experience of adapting to new ways in both technical fields in my terza eta.

Last month I attended the Nightscaper Photo Conference in Farmington, New Mexico.  I had discovered this group of avid night sky photographers five years ago and attended their 2021 conference.  Attendance back then was diminished by the impact of Covid, but the enthusiasm of the presenters was not.  Now, in 2026, I was pleased to be among the over 200 attendees, and to learn from presenters with even greater enthusiasm for this odd activity.  

It was an inspiring experience, but as I listened to the techniques and tools described by these intrepid photographers, I realized that this specialized hobby that I have pursued since before the turn of the century had completely changed.  I am partly responsible, having contributed to the transition from film to digital photography, but I did not anticipate the dramatic flourishing of creative work that has resulted.

In fact, I have struggled to keep up with the rapid pace of change and the latest advancements.  My film cameras had basically three controls:  shutter speed, lens aperture, and focus; four, if you had an exotic zoom lens and could change the focal length.  Modern digital cameras range from having almost zero settings, like the ones in our phones, to having controls that require hundreds of menu items and configurations, as found on my newest mirrorless camera, a Canon EOS R6ii.  It has taken some time for me to adapt to all these new controls (and I will never utilize most of them).

I have found that my years of shooting on film, with mechanical cameras, has resulted in some “interesting” behaviors and practices that I exhibit.  Here are some of my film holdovers:

• Unawareness that I can change the ISO, the sensitivity of the camera to light, with each shot.  With film, this was set by the film’s “speed”, and once loaded, there was no changing it until the next roll of film.
  
  
• A reluctance to set the ISO higher than 800.  This was the highest speed available for film, and it was terribly grainy.  Modern digital cameras can go five full stops beyond, to ISO 25,600.
  
  
• Every photograph I take is saved (no deletions ever).  I kept all my film negatives and slides and stored them.  This is a holdover from a scientist’s practice of never destroying data.
  
  
• Memory cards are treated as if they are film negatives.  The images are copied onto working disks and then the cards themselves are kept in storage.  Many photographers reuse their cards after copying, especially as their costs have risen.
  
  
• I am still reluctant to take many test exposures, thinking of them as excessive or wasteful, even though the memory costs are trivial, and I no longer have a limit of 24 or 36 frames.  This same attitude sometimes causes me to cut short my video shots prematurely, worried that I will run out of film (memory).  This causes me to sometimes miss the best part of the action.
  
  
• Blends?  What are blends?  Combining frames of different exposures or focus depth or stacking to reduce noise was very difficult with film.  Modern tools make it easy.
  
  

These attitudes and practices must seem odd to a young photographer who may never have loaded a roll of film into the back of a camera.  But they have apparently become hard-coded in me, and I must work to overcome them.  Attending the Nightscaper Conference and engaging with today’s generation of photographers was really helpful in getting past my hangups and recognizing a vast horizon of creative potential for my future digital work!

We have now moved completely into the world of digital photography and there’s no turning back.  My past film work is becoming historical alongside Daguerreotypes and tintypes.  I call my old film startrail pictures “classic”, but maybe “vintage” is the right word.  I also like the words “analog photography” and “silver halide”.  I doubt that film will vanish entirely, and it might even make a comeback someday, much like vinyl records and “instant” cameras (ala Polaroid, and now Fujifilm).

In the meantime, I have kept my mechanical cameras, and I keep a stash of film in my freezer, waiting for the day when a grandchild or other interested budding photographer wants to load a roll of film across the camera’s focal plane onto its take-up spool, to experiment with taking pictures the way their ancestors did.