Film or Digital Photography?

Photography has always been one of my passions.  This started when I got my first camera (an Imperial Lark) at age nine.

I read with interest an article in the Japan Times on one fashion photographer's lament about the move from film to digital photography.  He is none to pleased about it.

Here's an excerpt:

NEW YORK – Sante D’Orazio, a photographer at the heart of the supermodel era, believes the switch to digital cameras means greater detail than ever before, but the loss of something more important: beauty. 

“The sense of emotion is gone. It creates a detachment from the subject. The character of the personality is gone,” D’Orazio said of the digital production chain and its torrent of perfect, heavily-edited pictures. 

“That’s the danger of post-production in digital. People kill anatomy. They have no sense of anatomy. The sense of realism takes away from the sensuality.”

He may have a point.  While I like digital photography for its detail, I also like the colors that come from film.

Below are two pictures of the Asahi Beer Hall in Tokyo.  The first one I took in 2005 using my old Olympus OM-1 35mm film camera (that I occasionally still use):

The next one is from by my Canon digital camera in 2010:

The digital image may be truer to the actual scene, but the film image has more of an (for lack of a better description) artistic (like the blending of paint colors) feel to it.  What do you think?  Is he right?  Which do you prefer?  Film or digital?

To read the full article, go here.