Twenty years ago, I had a professor who told us of some research around the difference between the way the brain interprets the difference between analog audio vinyl and a CD that’s relevant here.

He explained that while your ear can’t tell the difference between the two, the brain can. Digital media is composed of bits — 1’s and 0’s in strings of 8, 12, 16 usually, maybe 32 but for music and photo not more. Those strings of digits represent everything that we know how to reproduce on a screen, a speaker, or via a printer, however imperfectly.

With both music and photography, you are capturing energy that are inherently fluid waves in the form of photons of light and sound waves.

Imagine a perfect analog sine wave that flows up and down and is perfectly smooth. Now imagine making vertical and horizontal slices to make that wave conform to bits and bytes. It’s all 90 degree angles moving up and down when you zoom in.

I’m using the audio example because it’s easy to illustrate but you can do the same thing easily if you zoom into Photoshop — you can see the individual pixels. It’s harder to zoom in at a granular level to an analog photo and show you digitally without representing the same digital grain because we’re looking at it on a computer. If you use a microscope to zoom into an analog photo, it will have softness and imperfection, but it will not have perfectly square 90° edges.

There are other physical differences people might talk about like dynamic range etc., but as a professional photographer for more than a decade I think there is a certain je ne sais quoi, an essence that defies classification of description. The soul of it. When light and the energy of a scene hits a film stock, I believe it makes not just a physical but also a metaphysical imprint of energy upon it that gets lost or severely degraded via digital imagery.