I think a significant proportion of old photographers are as you suggest, wedded to what they know. The neat thing about film is all of the ways one can push and burn and so forth, when one thoroughly understands the process. It really is artistry and to be good at it takes a tremendous amount of experience and a really good eye. Folks who have that knack will see their creativity and artistry decline when shifting to digital and Photoshop.

On the other hand, younger people who have never learned darkroom techniques are not burdened with preconceptions concerning digital imagery. They ust whup-out the Photoshop and let fly with all of the tools available. It kills us old farts to see them do things in a few minutes that would take a darkroom photographer days to get accomplished.

For what I do in aerial obliques, digital is just fine. We call it ephemeral data collection--things that have extreme value but only for a short period of time. Say, 4 meters of saltwater pushed into a freshwater marsh that stays in-place for a few hours or a day. If you don't get a salinometer into the water, you better get a picture or nobody will ever know what happened and saltwater can have effects that linger for decades. Without the knowledge of how it got there, the extent and duration, you're just guessing when you see a dead area 20 years later.

So after hurricanes we fly about 100 - 200ft off the surface and take photos out of the open window. At a higher altitude there are satellites and aircraft capturing vertical imagery, but without a ground visit, you're often left to guess what it is you think you see. So we use low-altitude oblique photos in lieu of a visit to a particular site--what we call ground-truthing.

Now as far as high-end aerial imagery, no question that film is still superior in 3 respects:

1. Better spectral resolution, ie more and better colors.
2. Better spatial resolution at any given altitude and any given lense system. (but this is changing)
3. Stereoscopy is much better with film. In fact, digital stereo is just not especially useful for high res work.

Digital is much more consistent across a frame and between frames (for frame-type cameras. There is another sensor system, a scanner such as Leica's ADS-40 that uses a completely different technique. It has a continuous scan sweeping perpendicular to the flight path).

Digital geometric and chromatic corrections are farm simpler and quicker.

Digital duplication is exact.

Digital images get squirted into a computer with little effort.

At this time for our very specialized purposes, scanned film is the best accommodation for getting data into a GIS--our final product. We are just beginning to shift from optical stereoscopes to digital stereometry, so I can't say anything at this point about the accuracy on the digital stereo side. What we do is use the optical stereoscope and a computer simultaneously looking through the stereoscope to get an understanding of spatial relations then drawing the map onscreen. It's kind of kludgy, but we still haven't enough confidence in the computer to surplus the stereoscopes.

I realize that this is probably not what you were asking, so I'll just sort of give you my bottom line.

I'm going digital.

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