if you woke up after a 200 year coma and were 18 ...

Slow day around the house?

 

I think you would be exactly as likely to use a film camera as any random 18-year-old from today.

That is, you would have to make the same decision as anyone else as to whether or not to ditch digital in favor of film. And I don't think hailing from 1868 is going to change your chances of choosing film.

 

This question reminds me of a similar one that brings Mozart into the 1980s (when synthesizers were a new type of musical instrument) and asks would he use a synthesizer? There is a similar implication in both this and that proposition that there is something superior about the first iteration of a technology, and that the most recent iteration is automatically inferior. In this case film, in that case acoustic instruments. To prefer film when digital is available seems to me like preferring the horse drawn cart to the automobile. For me one of the chief advantages of digital is the elimination of the film processing time delay.

 

I would go back to 1949 and buy a chest full of REAL Kodachrome and assassinate Steve Jobs when he was a kid

From a 1868 view, never running out of film.................. Digital D5

 

Ah, but there's an idea. Might the time delay be considered desirable by this antiquated 18-year-old? Maybe he is depressed by the sudden acceleration of his life and wished to take it more slowly.

 

Hard to say for sure but I'd probably go with digital.

 

Digital or both.

Nothing says you can't have more than one camera, and nothing says those cameras need to be of any given kind.

 

I’ve wondered similar things but never seem to know what I would think or do.

In general I try to go with the flow. Not easy at times but that’s what I’d probably do.

But at 18 there were only a few things I was really interested in so I’d probably flirt with a girl, look for some food, and try to soup up a horse-drawn buggy. In that order. Cameras and photography wouldn’t even be of interest.

 

Depends on what my motivation to use a camera was before I fell asleep. If I was shooting portraits I would now go for a digi cam. If just for personal use to document my life, a cellphone.

If I were an artist then it's a toss up. I would probably be all enthused about how convenient a digi slr and inkjet or photolab prints are so would go for that.

 

A digital would requires to understand how to use a computer, analogue would be way more easier to understand from scratch.

I'd be doing street photography with a Spotmatic, from the back of a horse. No way I'll get aboard one of your stinky horseless carriage!

 

I see film and digital being two separate technologies, not one (digital) being a more advanced iteration of the other (film).

Advancements in both film and digital technologies have advanced independently over the last 20 years.

That is totally subjective. Many prefer film for many reasons and do not see the digital image as being superior at all. Although I use digital cameras, the immediacy of getting the image is of no importance whatsoever. Likewise, with film, the delay between tripping the shutter and getting the negative (or print) is of no consequence. Again, totally subjective.

 

Born in 1850, I would have no idea how to begin to use a PC (for post processing, much less anything else like web surfing to learn to do post processing), so I would choose a film camera because it is like the daguerreotype which was invented in 1839. And although I went into suspended animation in 1868, the f/stop concept had already been invented a year earlier.

 

I miss APUG already

 

I would still want a Rolleiflex TLR. And Kodak Panatomic-X.

I have four of the former (also a Rolleicord) so am well set for this life. Also 100+ rolls (mostly 120) left of the latter. Which may, with luck and careful shooting, see me out.

Being now too old to go around lugging my 5x7 Home Portrait Graflex, I realise and have accepted that like wiltw (#14), I too went into a sort of cultural induced coma, in my case in 1975. Until 2010, when I awoke long enough to buy a Nikon D90, then a D700. So yes, each medium has its place. Different strokes for different folks, as we used to say in high school, a few centuries ago.

Quiet days are great for fun threads. At least not of the "what is a filter?" sort.

Helios84 (#15), I agree +100! Digital may someday be recognised for what it is, one of the scourges of the 21st century and a major blow to photography as a respected visual art.

But then many said this about the Benz horseless carriage and the Berliner talking machine...

 

Mobile. To watch them without yoga pants.

 

If I had spent 200 years in a coma as an 18 year old, and then woke up, I would probably be thinking more about women/girls than cameras.

 

+1!!

 

Well, film wasn't invented until the 1880s, so probably photography was seen as cumbersome and/or expensive to most people in 1868 when glass plates were still in use. I would imagine that digital would have more of an appeal, since it would seem so easy and accessible (and probably because that's what all the kids today are using). Would you want to go back to cast iron stoves for cooking, hand washing your clothes, or having no electricity in the home? I worked in a museum set in the 1860s and did the activities people used to do back then as part of my job, and I can tell you it was not an easy life (unless you were super rich).

 

I like your prose and imagination above all else.

 

But I've never used digital, preferring to stay with film ever since I started photography in the 80s (the 1980s that is, not the 1880s), and yet as a mode of transport I choose an automobile over a horse drawn cart any day of the week. As you say in the USA, go figure!

 

I'd imagine I'd use the digital camera 'cause it was new, but after a while I would get sick of staring at the computer and go back to film.....

 

If I wanted to make pictures that supported the reasons why the invention of photography was so cherished, so desired, I'd find no use in digital technology.

Making pictures out of light-sensitive materials is, these days, a minority activity that continues to celebrate why the discovery of photography was so stunning in the first half of the nineteenth century. It certainly wasn't because photography generated highly detailed pictures of plausible worlds. Ernest Meissonier was already producing huge paintings full of micro-detail. Durer as early as the 16th century made steel engravings that required a magnifying glass to see all that was in them. No, the impact of photography lay in its power to make pictures directly without the filter of the artist's eye, mind, and hand.

Before "photography" two early names for the process were Physautotype - literally copy by nature herself, and Phusalethotype - literally true copy from nature. Those curious terms still fit well with photography, as such, even these days. By contrast modern digital picture-making methods can't, even in principle, generate Physautotypes and Phusalethotypes. By the time a megapixel sensor has smashed an optical image into particles of information "nature herself" has left the scene. When these bits and bytes are churned arbitrarily in a computer the concept of "true copy" need not apply. And finally when a robot painter spits ink on paper (or a monitor displays dots of light) and assembles a picture the link to nature can be completely optional, arbitrary, or absent.

Way down in the engine room of basic principles modern digital techniques are no more than good ol' painting and drawing updated with new robot-assisted methods and tools. One can admire paintings, drawings, and digi-graphs but none of these media guarantee what is depicted is true in the sense that points in the picture have an obligatory one-to-one correspondence to points in the subject matter. Sure, the picture maker can claim truthfulness and we can choose to believe them but we can't use the picture to test their claim.

So, for me, it's Physautotypes, Phusalethotypes, photographs in other words...always.

 

Based on my 19th century photography experiences, the film camera would be more familiar and comprehensible to me, so I think I'd opt for the film camera rather than the digital camera.