Photography is an art form, but like any art form, there are a lot of skills involved. Many of these skills translate from film to digital, but others do not. Film has always been an expensive media for photography. I remember freezing rolls of exposed Kodachrome for that day I could finally afford to get my film developed. Sometimes this was a lot. I could shoot a “brick” (20 rolls) of 36 exposure Kodachrome in one weekend, chasing trains on Tehachipi Pass or Feather River Canyon. This is not to say I couldn’t be frugal. When I got into wedding photography, I’d shoot 5 rolls of 220 and 5 rolls of 120 film (150 frames of 6×7 in my Mamiya RB-67 Pro S). Ask any modern wedding photographer how many images he shoots at a wedding these days.
I quickly learned how to nail composition and exposure. I credit my father, a lifelong amateur photographer, for pointing out my mistakes so I could learn from them, and part of that was, I’m sure, that he wanted me to get the most out of the precious resource film was. In the beginning, he was paying for it! Film is (or as I see it, should be) a slow, deliberate exercise. With film, only a fool would “spray and pray.” And then there’s the delayed satisfaction of seeing your prints or slides when they finally came back from the processor (well, we did have 1-hour processing… if you didn’t shoot slide film. My Kodachromes typically took a week to be processed + the time they were spent in my freezer waiting until I could afford to have them processed).
So I shoot film mostly for the nostalgia, but also for the discipline of waiting for photos that can’t be “chimped” microseconds after exposure.