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Digital vs. Film For Photojournalistic Wedding Photography
Low Light Advantages
Digital photography has numerous advantages over film photography in situations where it is necessary to shoot in low light. An example of this type of situation often occurs during the wedding ceremony. Often, a wedding ceremony is held in an indoor location with very dim lighting. The use of a flash would either be disturbing to the ceremony, or simply not allowed by the officiant.
High ISO (low light settings) settings on new digital cameras (especially Canon's most recent digital SLRs) can achieve higher quality images with much less noise than their film counterparts can. Secondly, Canon's RAW format combined with the camera's high ISO (3200 ISO) performance can allow you to take good quality images in darker situations than even the highest speed comercially available color films (such as fuji 1600).
What all of this means is that a photojournalist is able utilize available lighting more often than was possible before. This is essential for photojournalistic work, because the use of available light without the use of a flash (artificial light) captures the true ambiance of the actual moment. It often allows the photojournalist to tell the story in a more realistic fashion than even the most expensive flash setup is capable of.
Color Balance Flexibility
Important fact: throughout the day your eyes see many different "colors" of light which are known as light temperatures. For example, normal household lights (tungsten) produce a light that looks more yellow-reddish. In addition, depending on the sun's position in the sky, daylight can vary significantly from early morning, to noon, to late in the day. Although our brains compensate to some degree for these different lighting situations, the color differences become far more obvious (and distracting) when an image is recorded in film, print, or digital form. Digital and film photography both have ways of dealing with this problem, and here is a short explanation of them.
A film photographer's ability to change the color balance on a shot to shot basis is very different than that of a digital photographer. There are three ways of getting accurate color with film. The first is choice of film. Film is available in two main color balances: daylight (5000k), and tungsten (2850k). With either daylight or tungsten based film as your starting point, the only ways to accommodate the thousands of variations of light that happen throughout a wedding, are by using color filters to correct the light to look more like we see it. The filters can either be applied by placing them over the lens while photographing (which is far too time consuming for an event type of situation), or they can be applied by whomever prints the images out (which is the most common way). The only problem is, that no matter how good at color balancing a lab is, this leaves part of the quality of the image up to the judgment of the printer. Although some professional printing services do a fairly good job, I find that by being able to do the color balancing work myself (as is the case with digital photography), I am able to achieve more accurate and consistent results.
Digital photography, with the use of the newly developed raw image file formats, has simplified the process and allowed the photographer to control the results. Digital Raw formats allow the photographer to shoot in any lighting situation, and fairly easily adjust the color balance of each image individually. I find this method produces better quality results than "outsourcing" most of the work after the photography (as is done by most film based wedding studios).
Control
warning: although control over the image process can be a huge benefit when in the hands of an experienced photographer / Photoshop user, all of this control can be a disadvantage to a less knowledgeable photographer. There are plenty of photographers who use digital photography without sufficient knowledge of image optimization (color correction, sharpness, composition, contrast) and in turn it produces lower quality results than if they had used film and sent it off to be processed and printed. In the hands of a knowledgeable photographer/Photoshop user control is a great advantage, but in the hands of a novice/beginner, too much control can be a disaster, so choose your photographer carefully.
Amount of Photography
One of digital photography's primary advantages over film in a photojournalistic situation concerns the amount of photography that can be done without increasing material cost. To keep costs down, film photographers often have to limit the amount that they photograph (consciously or subconsciously), because each image shot adds up the cost of film, processing, and printing. When photographing with digital, a photographer is limited only to the amount of storage they have with them (which in my case is 12+gigabytes). Furthermore, shooting more does not represent a significant increase in cost to the photographer, because he/she can choose to delete (without printing or editing) as many images as is necessary during the editing stage.
Digital photography allows me to take 3 to 4 times as many photos during an entire wedding day than I normally would have with film. I often shoot 800-1200 images during a wedding and delete nearly half of the images during the editing stage. This allows me to capture more spontaneous moments. I will often take 10+ shots of a specific scenario, and edit them down to 1 or 2 of the best. The end result is that the final images, presented to the bride and groom, are more careful selection of the best images from that day.
This increased amount of photography and editing can also be one of the reasons that the cost of digital photography packages is often higher. I personally spend one to two hours editing every hours worth of photography.
Situations where film photography still has an advantage