I’ve found there to be very little–if any–difference between shooting film vs. digital. With film, you pick your camera, then pick your film based on how it responds to contrasts and colors. They are two distinct choices. With digital, you have to blend the two. You have to pick your camera taking its sensor into consideration. Fortunately today’s sensors are way ahead of where they were even 5 years ago, so you can get fantastic color/contrast response from mid-grade cameras today.
The quintessential difference between the two media lies not in the acquisition, but the distribution. So long as the sensor/film picks up the detail, it can be pulled and printed. The trick is doing it. In the film world, you’re at the mercy of filters, dodging, burning, and other tricks. If you’re just dropping off your film to be returned on 4x6 prints, you’re in even less control. But even in the best case scenario, all is based solely on the performance of the paper you’re printing on. In the digital world, you’re actually at that same mercy. The paper (or printer) will be the ultimate determination of what the image looks like. With a digital darkroom (either using a digital image to start, or scanning a slide/negative), you’ve got much more creative control to match the process to the output. I’ve got a collection of 60+ year old large-format negatives which are chock full of detail not seen in the black-and-white prints that were made from them. In the digital world, I can pull that information out without spending 3 hours in the darkroom on a single print. I can then tweak the image’s contrast properties to match the printer which will ultimately be printing them for maximum effect. (I can also pre-select a specific profile to apply to all images if I wanted to, instead of having to do everything manually.)
On the other side of the coin, the weakness of electronic distribution is that you have absolutely no control over how your image will be displayed anywhere else. Every monitor is different. What looks well-balanced in terms of light and shadow on my screen may look ultra-contrasty on yours. There’s a big discrepancy between my monitors and my wife’s. Hers displays brighter, so what looks over-exposed on hers looks fine on mine. Whose is right? Also, different software may shade the image one way or another. On my computer, an image displayed through Firefox doesn’t have the saturation as the same image displayed on Safari. It is entirely possible to condemn the performance of a camera based solely on the performance of the monitor–much like condemning a film based solely on the resulting print.
I will say there are some properties of film that I have yet to mimic with a digital camera. I loved shooting Ectachrome 400 for nighttime time exposures. There was just something about its performance that I have yet to be able to duplicate doing time exposures with a digital camera. But since that’s one item out of 300 others that favor digital, I think I can live with the sacrifice. 
Later,
K
