Firstly photography is about light for without light you see nothing and therefore no subject of interest.Total darkness means abscence of light.
A camera is akin to the human eye but not analogous or equal in sensivity.
The human eye has a dynamic range of 100,000:1 whereas photographic film
and digital image sensor of 10,000:1 .So what you see cannot be fully captured or recordered by man made devices!
The art of photography is to simulate as much as possible what the human eye
percieve using eye,brain perception and properties of light sensitive medium such as photographic film and now digital technology.This includes the perception of 3D or depth/distance or scale of view/ vision or simply perspective.
Personally I would recommend newbies start with digital because it is cheap
and convenient.There are many things that used to be done in the darkroom
that now can be done more efficient ,fast and more powerful in digital photographic software like photoshop/lightroom, etc.
The first thing to learn is
EXPOSURE! Below is a quote from master photographer/artist Ansel Adams' book The negative.You can...I know I'm asking you to do something bad but what to do when we are poor men? You can find this and many others by Ansel and others online.I can't
share a link as I don't want to get CS in trouble over copyright.
In The Negative you learn about visualisation and Image values,exposure,the zone system,darkroom and much more.
To return to your question what you do in digital is similar to film in terms of exposure.The grainyness of digital is not the same as it's digital electronic noise from electronic amplifiers/transistors and other components that manifest as coloured dots/blobs but in actuality the image sensors only record in light values of bright/dark intensity.The colour information is calculated or derived from software image processing in camera in a file known as RAW or Jpeg.
In film it is analogue or simply the light values is interpreted by light sensitive materials like silver halides that depending on ISO (known as ASA rating in those days) the lower the sensivity eg. ISO 100 the finer/smaller the grains of silver halide.This is the real graininess of the crystals of silver halide that you see when photo is printed on photographic paper!
For colour film the 3 coloured filters are sandwiched together in film.
The negative image IS the file.What you get is a film that has different densities of opaqeness to light to pass through thereby different light intensities to expose the photographic paper.
No matter what digital can do to simulate film look it is not the same.
Also note the term white balance for digital and colour temperature for film.
In digital cameras the default setting is AWB (automatic white balance) so people are oblivious to what the camera does in terms of colour balance/how white is white, the colour of light varies at different times of the day.So is the colour of artificial light sources like incandescent bulbs,tungsten,flourescent and now LEDs.Films are balanced for daylight or tungsten.So if you get a colour cast in photos it's because the white balance is wrong or off or using daylight rated film indoors with artificial light sources and vice versa with tungsten film..but you may deliberately like the warm orange colour like incandescent
or candle light to set the mood!
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