Just finished looking up one of my old archives. Found a folder named Ilford, one of my favorites BW grainy films. Beautiful rendering of gray tones, superb granularity, and its easy development process appealed me. I was thinking what I lost and what I've gained since I stopped shooting on film and started the digital age. In the beginning, I had two cameras with me. film and digital. I guess it worked for a while until my neck cracked up.
Why did I give up on film? I got to hand it to you, digital is practical. I mean, boom, there you go, live view, instant review, push-to-wifi and here I am, Instagram! Yea. And those filthy 64Gb Ultra Speed III blah blah SD cards. More photos. Thousands. Readily available. But something is lost in this process. It becomes a mechanical process. Photography is no longer an incentive to contemplation. It becomes fast-food. Gigabytes of fast-photos. No substance whatsoever for 99% of them.
I remember the film was getting pretty expensive in its "final" days. Only 36 positions. 12 even on medium format. It compels you to stop. To feel the scene. To construct it. There's no delete button here. There's no instant preview. Given the correct setups, exposure, shutter speed, you must get it right in all terms. It was something else. It is like reading a paperback book versus a kindle one. Or a god damn pdf file.
Digital has something immediate in its rendition of colors. Film was dreamy. Film was perfect for artistic photography. It promised an altered reality.
If you go out with your 1000Gb SD card plugged into one expensive digital SLR, limit yourself to 36 frames, as an experiment. And then review the images at home. Pretend that you have to wait for the development process. Don't use the instant review. You will get a glimpse of the joy of shooting film. And I might just switch back to my double cameras set-up. Just waiting for the Easter bunny to see if he is kind enough pointing at my wife and gives me one rangefinder.
I miss my Ilford days!
Photographs below were shot on film, Ilford Delta 3200 pulled to 1600, Nikon f90x, 18-35mm, 35mm, etc.
