Digital or traditional - there is no right or wrong and no one medium is intrinsically better than another. The mere existence of one technology does not invalidate the use of another. A digital photograph can be created quicker and cheaper. More aspects of a traditional photograph are made by hand. All of this can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on why and for what purpose a photograph is created.

A digital image is also created by the reaction of light with a piece of light-sensitive material. In this case, the light-sensitive medium is an image sensor which reports the captured image to a computer processor. The result is a sequence of electromagnetic impulses which are stored in the computer's memory and can be written to a magnetic medium. This image is not permanent - it can be wiped without leaving any traces - and requires an additional technological process and computer hardware to be made visible.