When I'm working overseas, in the wild or on work that demands it (such as fine art), I will always work with film; either black and white or colour tranny. In most remote places there is a limited ability to recharge batteries and maintain an environment suitable for sensitive electronics. Plus my fine art clients seem to prefer to purchase hand crafted prints printed from film! Why? Who knows but it must have something to do with the craft aspect of the whole thing.

Digital cameras are fantastic - they have their place for immediate delivery of commercial work. They are also convenient, fun to work with, and I don't have to carry truckloads of gear.

Digital photography has spawned a massive new IT business ... but it has also created the myth that somehow photographers must move to digital and forego film.

From my perspective, as a professional photographer, it's more important to focus on the quality of work produced than the medium it's produced in.

Digital has democratised photography - anyone can take a well exposed picture. Well composed and creative ...?

I agree that you need to retract this post. The information is incorrect and the conclusions are misleading.

Your point #5 is also misleading because the same thing could be said that "Many" Professional photographers are now shooting digital, and certainly more than a handful could be shown as evidence.

It is unfortunate that this misinformation continues to be spread on the net. You really owe your readers a retraction.

I can't believe that you are saying that lots of professionals are still using film.

It's almost impossible to continue using film for professional shoots. It's too expensive. Processing takes too long. Clients expect the photos immediately and usually sent by email or web. And then they don't want to have to have slides or negs scanned.

Shooting film is a recipe for going out of business.

'save as' re-does the compression again, and therefore loses quality if you aren't choosing quality 12 with progressive sampling in photoshop or something. That means, you open a file, save as something, then open that file, save as, open that file, save as.... you will lose quality every time. If, however, you edit a jpg, save-as, edit the same, and save-as over and over, the original quality never leaves no matter how many sub-files you created from that file. Only subsequent re-openings of "child files" or copies of the original will cause compounding loss.

If, however, you use a .psd file, you can do as many edits/save-as as you want because it is a 'lossless' format saving per-pixel information for every layer. Doing a save-as from the edits on a .psd file is the ideal way of generating new .jpg files from a single photo. Don't create a new .psd, simply open the original and make .psd revisions. You can even make new layer sets for each revision of the original. Not the most space friendly, so remove any revisions not needed. ALWAYS SAVE YOUR ORIGINAL, DO NOT EDIT ON THE BOTTOM LAYER, COPY IT TO A SECOND LAYER! Keep the .jpg or RAW file your started with, these are your gold people. If the .psd gets corrupted, you can always start over from the original.

Of course something as basic as proper exposure still has something to do with it.

"Megapixels/MB and resolution have little to do with image quality", but like it or not in an industry the measure of quality need to be quantified in some sort of unit of standard. The absolute unit of measurement can only be determined by the person assessing the image which is quite subject in my opinion. Like the old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shutterhack/

No. A simple film camera would just have the same amount of resolution as a top-end digital camera, not quality. Megapixels/MB and resolution have little to do with image quality.

Also, just because some top pros won't change that doesn't mean the change isn't happening. How many pro film labs are still in operation in your town? How many have switched to digital services and film is a small portion of their business. How much space does your pro photo store dedicate to film paper and chemicals?

All very telling signs.

Not exactly true. They both tell you fundamentally how many bits of data the image contains therefore its size (this doesn't apply to RAW if you understand what a RAW file is).

For example I need to generate 50-30-15 and 1mb files for our distributors. To do this easily I use a simple formula based on pixel dimension and run a batch operation in either Lightroom or Photoshop.

I know I am working with a 300dpi file at 8 bit so I use a "long edge" pixel dimension to get the correct "uncompressed" MB size

For example:
the Long edge of a 50MB file is always 5150 pix
30MB is 4011 pix
15 MB is 2828 pix
and 1 mb @ 72 DPI is 771 Pix

JPEG loses information after each edit and subsequent save. Merely copying it (Or doing a "save as" or even a plain old "save" without any changes) results in an exact duplicate of the file, with just as much information as the original had.

JPEG is a fine format if you don't plan on doing very much (or any) post processing to the image.