Is there value in slowing down? Yes. Digital technology has been approached far too often with a "Ready? FIRE!!! Uh, aim? WTF is 'aim'? mentality."
But is using film a solution?
If you think it is, then it is for you.I used film for 45 years. It worked fine. It was all we had. But because I navigated various career opportunities to running the digital side of a very large school portrait lab around 2000, I found parallel replacements to EVERY aspect of film photography I thought I might miss or need.
I was lucky to have the professional learning opportunities of Kodak Professional seminars, Digital Imaging Marketing Association seminars, and Photo Marketing Association International seminars from 1995 to 2010. The film world shrank as the digital world exploded, for all the right reasons. The perspective I gained in the lab and from training photographers to use digital capture instead of film capture has been very gratifying.
I still work with OLD film, by copying it to digital files. But I'll probably never see the inside of a darkroom again. I have zero interest in what, for me, is drudgery.
On the other hand, all the knowledge I gained from decades of film use transferred to digital photography just fine. I get what I want with much finer control, and more quickly, than with film. The advantages of digital bits over chemical atoms for practical imaging applications are far more numerous. The biggest one is that if you have a print, you can show it off in one place at a time, but if you digitize that image, it can be "everywhere all at once," with very little effort. And if you understand the nuances of digital printing, you can make excellent prints on a myriad of papers and other substrates.
If you value slowing down, deliberating, controlling, and thinking about what you're doing, you can train yourself to ignore all or some of the automation that you find on your digital camera. Spend more time planning, lighting, and composing the scenes you're photographing. All the same basic controls are there, just as they were half a century ago. They're just easier to use.
Is there value in slowing down? Yes. Digital techn... (