I’ve been into photography for over thirty years. I’ve owned more cameras than I care to admit — from early Nikons to the latest mirrorless systems, from 35mm to 8×10 large format. I’ve watched this industry evolve through every major shift: autofocus, digital sensors, mirrorless bodies, computational photography. I’ve embraced most of it. I shoot a Nikon Z8. I own Leica digital glass. I’m not a technophobe, and I’m not here to tell you that film is objectively better than digital.
But I went back to medium format film. Deliberately. And I think the reasons why matter more now than they would have even five years ago.
The Moment I Knew Something Had Changed
A few years ago, I started noticing something strange in the photography spaces I follow. Headshots that looked perfect, too perfect. Portraits where the skin had no texture, the eyes had no story, and the light fell in ways that didn’t quite make physical sense. Product photos for businesses that looked like they’d been conjured rather than captured.
They had been. AI-generated images were flooding every corner of visual media, and most people couldn’t tell the difference. Some people celebrated this. I found it deeply unsettling, not because the technology isn’t impressive, but because it revealed how disconnected we’ve become from what a photograph actually is.
A photograph is a record of light that existed in a real place, at a real moment, falling on a real subject. That’s it. That’s the entire point. The second you remove that connection to reality, you don’t have a photograph anymore. You have an illustration. There’s nothing wrong with illustrations, but let’s stop pretending they’re the same thing.
AI Images Are Not Photography
There’s a talking point I keep hearing: “Why even be a photographer when AI can generate any image you want?” The people saying this are telling on themselves. They’re admitting they never understood what photography was in the first place.
Photography has never been about producing a visually pleasing rectangle. It’s about being somewhere, seeing something, and making a set of deliberate decisions — where to stand, what to include in the frame, when to press the shutter — that preserve a moment exactly as it existed. The constraints are the craft. The fact that you had to be there is the entire value proposition.
An AI can generate a portrait of a woman in a white dress standing in a golden field at sunset. It can make her look flawless. But that woman doesn’t exist. That field doesn’t exist. That sunset never happened. There is no moment being preserved, no decision being honored, no truth being told. It is, in the most literal sense of the word, fake.
And here’s what the “AI will replace photographers” crowd doesn’t seem to grasp: people are already catching on. Businesses that used AI-generated headshots are discovering that clients find them off-putting once they realize what they’re looking at. There’s a growing backlash, an uncanny valley of trust. When your professional headshot is revealed to be fabricated, what does that say about your authenticity as a person or a brand? It says you’re comfortable presenting something false as real. That’s not a message any serious professional wants to send.
AI-generated imagery isn’t the future of professional photography. It’s a fad dressed up as a revolution. It will find its place in concept art, rapid prototyping, and social media ephemera. But for anything that requires trust, authenticity, or emotional weight — portraits, weddings, editorial, fine art — the real photograph isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s about to become more valuable than it’s been in decades.
Why Medium Format Film, Specifically
So if I’m making the case for real photography over AI fabrication, why not just shoot digital? Why go back to film, and medium format film at that?
Because film does something digital cannot: it produces a physical, verifiable, unalterable record of the moment the shutter fired.
When I expose a frame of Kodak Portra 400 on my Hasselblad 500cm, light passes through a real lens and physically changes the molecular structure of silver halide crystals suspended in gelatin on a strip of celluloid. That chemical transformation is the image. It exists as a tangible object I can hold up to the light and see with my naked eye. No software rendered it. No algorithm interpreted it. No file can be corrupted, manipulated, or called into question.
A negative is proof. It’s proof that I was standing in a specific place, at a specific time, with a specific person in front of my lens. In an era where any digital image can be questioned — “Is that Photoshopped? Is that AI?” — a film negative is the most honest document a photographer can produce. You can hold it, examine it, and verify it. Try doing that with a JPEG.
This matters more than ever. As AI-generated images become indistinguishable from digital photographs, the authenticity crisis is only going to deepen. People will increasingly want to know: Is this real? Film answers that question before it’s even asked.
The Tangible Object
There’s another dimension to this that goes beyond authenticity, and it’s more personal. In thirty-plus years of shooting, I’ve accumulated terabytes of digital files spread across hard drives, cloud accounts, and memory cards. If I’m honest, most of those images live in a kind of digital purgatory — technically accessible but rarely seen, never printed, never held.
My negatives are different. They sit in archival sleeves in a filing cabinet. I can pull one out, hold it up to a window, and be transported instantly to the moment I made it. There’s a physicality to that experience that a thumbnail on a screen will never replicate. The negative has weight, texture, and presence. It occupies space in the real world the way the memory it represents occupies space in my mind.
And when I take that negative into my darkroom and produce a silver gelatin print — or better yet, a platinum palladium print — I’m holding an object that will outlast me. A well-made silver print can survive for centuries. A platinum print, even longer. These aren’t files that depend on future technology to be readable. They’re objects. They’re permanent. In a world that’s increasingly ephemeral and virtual, there’s something profoundly grounding about creating things that will endure.
The Discipline of Twelve Frames
A roll of 120 film gives you twelve exposures on a 6×6 camera like the Hasselblad 500cm, or ten on a 6×7 like the Pentax 67. Twelve chances. That’s it.
This constraint fundamentally changes how you work. You don’t spray and pray. You don’t fire off two hundred frames hoping that statistics will hand you a keeper. You slow down. You study the light. You wait for the expression. You think about every element in the frame before you commit. And when you press the shutter, you mean it.
I’ve found that this discipline has made me a better photographer across every format I shoot, digital included. The limitations of medium format film don’t hold you back — they sharpen you. Every frame costs money, takes time to develop, and can’t be reviewed on the back of the camera. So you learn to see with more clarity and intention than you ever needed when the cost of a bad frame was zero.
Twelve frames from a session where you were fully present and deliberate will always be worth more than five hundred frames from a session where you were letting the camera do the thinking.
This Isn’t Nostalgia
I want to be clear about something: I didn’t go back to medium format film because I’m chasing some romanticized past. I’m not interested in being a purist or a gatekeeper. I still shoot digital. I still process files in Lightroom. I use the tools that serve the work.
But I went back to film because the present moment demands it. We’re living through an authenticity crisis in visual media. AI is generating millions of fake images every day. Digital files can be altered beyond recognition in seconds. Trust in what we see is eroding.
Medium format film is my answer to that erosion. It’s slow in a world that’s too fast. It’s real in a world that’s increasingly synthetic. It’s permanent in a world that’s disposable. And it produces images with a depth, tonality, and soul that thirty years of digital advancement still hasn’t replicated.
The negative doesn’t lie. And in 2026, that might be the most radical thing a photographer can offer.
Ken is a photographer and the founder of MediumFormatPhotography.com. He shoots across formats from 35mm to 8×10 large format and maintains a traditional darkroom for silver gelatin and platinum palladium printing.
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