Film liberation

Film has become so foreign to me. It has been four months since I lost my digital camera and I was trying to go back and re-explore film again, but I just can't. Maybe, I don't have the patience, or maybe Im just too cheap. But the idea of paying someone to give me crappy renditions of all of my images just doesn't appeal to me anymore.

In the four months I have shot maybe 10 percent of what I shoot when Im using digital. Ive had 200 images put on cd and Ive made 3 prints. Talk about pathetic. I think its the delay. I guess the only way to do film is to give your stuff over and get everything back and be suprised and happy about what works. The thing is that I know exactly how these pictures are supposed to look. And thats what I want. Not the surprise. Anyway there are seven rolls lying around here which I will have to do something with. Probably two rolls that i am really excited to see. But Its just no un the rolls of film are on my desk, Im going to have to get them scanned, because Ill never scan them all myself. So Ill send some money to shutterfly three days later I'll get an envelope. Ill put my film in it. i'll drop it in the mail. Four days later i'll geta an email saying that I can look at them online. they'll look like crap. I'll pay them some more money. A few days later i'll recieve the crappy looking scans on cd. Hopefully there will be four or five that I like. I will open those up in photoshop and hopefully be able to make them look much better. Hopefully there will be one that i really like. Then I'll call Anwar who borrowed my film scanner in 2001. He'll bring it by nine days later. Then I'll take the one negative that I really like I'll scan it in, I'll work on it for forty minutes to make it like really clean, and then I'll have an image comparable to what I could have gotten in 10 seconds from my digital camera. Maybe I will want to blow it up really big and I'll be really happy that I shot it on film.

Either way, films no fun like that. Film is fun when you shoot something and get it developed right away, and then walk into a smelly darkroom, mix some chemicals, shine a light, use some tongs, drop a print into the developer and watch while a blank piece of paper transforms itself into your memory under a red light. And you watch and watch and watch and 2 seconds before the paper matches your memory exactly you pick it up, throw it in the fixer, wait ten minutes walk out of the dark room hold it up to a light and rejoice.

Thats the experience. I did it for years, its magically analog. But digital is just reality meeting raw vision. I'll take digital every day of the week thank you.

So I just got a great little photo-nerd camera (c5060wz) to liberate my vision while Im waiting for canon to build my next real camera. It has a nice size, nice lens, nice color, nice field of view, nice price, and the right options. Technically its a big step back from where I was in December (10D), but good vision trumps good hardware any day.

Posted by Kirk at April 10, 2004 02:36 AM