Yeah usually the surprises were failures!! Digital truly frees you to focus on the composition and artistic aspects without worrying about development time/temperature curves for film and then the challenges of printing the negative - and that's just in B&W and doesn't factor in the order of magnitude difficulties of processing color transparencies and or printing C-41 images - It really slowed the creative process down and I think we thought a lot more about the whether the image was truly "worthy" of the effort along with taking more time to meter the exposure, check focus and generally double check things before the shutter was released - it took masters like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston a lifetime to assemble a body of work using large format equipment - I wonder how their work would have been influenced by today's technology