Does film scanning defeat the purpose of shooting film?

Scanning film by photographing it with a DSLR sounds kind of sub-optimal....

Anyway, there is still a difference. Film acts in a different way when it's exposed to light than a digital sensor does. E.g. burnt out highlights often look terrible in digital photos, but film degrades much more gracefully in such situations.

Using a DSLR to make a digital copy of the film negative or print is not the best way to achieve this, not by a long shot. High quality? I don't think so. Try having your negatives scanned at a local photo lab in the highest possible resolution or invest in a good scanner such as an Epson V700.

By all means, shoot film, develop it yourself in your own darkroom, enlarge and print the photos yourself and confine them to a portfolio.

If you wish to edit your images in Photoshop, share them online or email them to others then you will need to have them scanned. That's the age we live in, deal with it.

I still shoot film for the enjoyment of it.

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There are plenty of reasons to still shoot film. Film grain has a much more organic quality than digital pixels. It is easier to enlarge film due to the random distribution of film grains as opposed to the rigid organization of pixels. Also, digital technology has not caught up to large format film yet. For instance if you are using 8X10 film, that is the equivalent of over 1,000 megapixels.

Scanning and digitally printing film is the best way to maintain the quality of the film image. optical prints are subject to fading, while digital inkjet prints are not. The color and tonal range of inkjet prints is far beyond anything possible with optical printing.

As far as scanning with a DSLR, it is possible, but you will lose a lot of quality. A flatbed scan will be much better, and for the best results, top photographer will drum scan their film.

A high quality dedicated film scanner will be able to get better resolution of your negative than shooting them with a DSLR will.

As to why not just shoot digital, digital is not archival. I shoot digital now myself, but data gets corrupted, hard drives fail, CDs degrade with time, technology becomes obsolete. Properly fixed and stored black and white negatives will last more than your lifetime. As of now, there is no archival digital format. The best you can do for digital is have it saved in several places, and then back it up periodically for ever.

But if you're not concerned with archival quality, then shooting digital is just fine.

I use an Epson v500 to scan my film and as fishmeister said, it makes it easier to share photos. It's also a means of creating a back-up copy of my film images. The first two years of my daughter's life are on film only and I would hate to have something happen to my negs and lose those photos forever.

"I scan my films with a DSLR myself."

That is totally pointless and the quality will not be as good as a proper scan.

As to your question - off course it does not defeat the purpose.

It has been going on for many years - before digital cameras were the "norm".

I don't think so, friend.