A recent press release from Ilford gives film users reassurance in film’s future – a renaissance even: THE FUTURE OF FILM (14th May 2007).
Old-fashioned photography
As you may have noticed, all of the photographs on this site were taken on film (discounting screenshots of OS X screensavers, CGI, and video of course).
Why should anyone living in the 21st century still cling on to such an archaic form of image capture? Personally:
- I like the quality of a real photograph; sure, having taken the picture, developed and printed myself adds something to the artefact itself, and yes, it’s a long process (a quick turnaround would be a couple of days between taking the shot and hanging it on a wall), but there’s something about the visual quality that just pushes my buttons..!
- I’ve never been happy with the quality of images printed from a computer – they seem kind of flat somehow. Maybe I need to shell out on a better printer. Or a better digital camera. Or both.
- Knowing that I’m dealing with a finite resource (I may have packed an extra roll or two of film, but that’s still limited compared with a 2GB memory card) – and getting to medium format? Only 12 shots per roll!
Using film also means that I’m take more consideration about shooting; shots are framed and focussed, depth-of-field and shutter speed are taken into account with more deliberation.
Sure, maybe I’d be the same with a nice DSLR (one day, one day!) but with that LCD, there’s the temptation to chimp 🙂
I also found this when I started using Super 8… DV tape is a reusable commodity (and a tape will last an hour!); Super 8 forces shots to be considered (and rehearsed) – 3 minutes 20 seconds at 18fps – or 2 minutes 30 seconds at 24fps is not a long time – better get that shooting ratio up!