Digital vs Film Debate

When I first began learning to take pictures, barely 10 years ago for the first time, film was very much the dominant medium. I had never heard of a digital camera, even in 2000. My first "proper" camera was the Nikon F65, and I still have it to this day. These days, I work exclusively in digital, with my trust workhorse Nikon D80 - but I still use a lot of my old kit.

I don't have much to say on the Digital vs Film debate that hasn't already been said. However, today while sitting in the gallery of the Camera Club, I came across these wise words from the Photograms Annual of 1895:

"It is quite possible that the man who first introduced a T-square or a compass, was looked upon as a charlatan, who succeeded in gaining accurate geometrical forms, by mechanical means, which had been before his time only possible after years of patient study. A few sordid draughtsmen, no doubt, saw a rival endangering their means of livelihood. For any draughtsmen to fear photography is obviously to write himself down incompetent, but now as then, incompetence is peculiarly fluent in defence of the position it has usurped. This attitude, however, belongs to a past order of things, and at present we find critics well able to distinguish between art and artifice, who are willing to credit the photographer with supreme control of the latter, and even to allow him a certain place within the limits of the temple of art itself."

Perhaps such words apply equally to the "old school" Film and the "young pretender" of digital.