Film is dead, long live film!

I was about to write this as a reddit comment, but I figured it would work better as a blog post…

I am a guy of this digital day of age. Work with computers and technology, spend the majority of my life interacting with the digital world in some form or another, be it on my computer on the internet, on one of my many gadgets or something else. I am like most people of  my generation.

I was born in the mid 80′s. I had a few film cameras in the very cheap end of the scale, but managed to score myself a digital camera working for the high school newspaper, not that I was very impressed with it’s pictures, since it was a compact camera from year 2000, but it was a cool thing to have. Convenient, and with previews of my pictures. I took distorted pictures, manipulated them in photoshop and called it art. The first couple of pictures on my old deviantart profile are from that time: http://eising.deviantart.com. I was never very serious with photography.

A few years later I got myself my own digital camera, took it with me on my various trips abroad, and told my friends that it was a good camera because it had a whooping 7.2 megapixels.

Fast forward some years , I got myself a real DSLR. It took pretty pictures and I conveniently loaded them onto the computer, edited them and put them on my flickr, facebook or where ever.

Then something happened. Someone introduced me to film. I was intrigued both with the style of old cameras and with the pictures found on flickr from people claiming to shoot film.

I started to shoot film. I got myself some cameras. Started by buying a plastic camera, then got a TLR, and finally I got myself a real SLR.

The real revelation came when I started to print my film in the darkroom. The process in which you take your negative, blow it up and manipulate it until it becomes something you are proud of is just such a fulfilling task that it has blown me away. It takes a while to learn, and I only started to get a hang of it about a month ago.

I suppose in this digital time, getting a physical product in your hand is much more fulfilling than a virtual product on the internet.

I do not have many of my enlargements online, but soon something new is going to happen with my online photographic presence soon. Keep an eye out.