9.10.24
Since this is my blog and almost no one will read it I'm allowed to get a little spicy, so I'll go ahead and say it:
Film is not a personality. Portra 400 does not make the photo good, nor cinestill whatever, lomo purple, expired ektar 100, none of it makes the photo good in and of itself. Film is not better than digital, it's not worse either, it's just different.
I've shot a lot of film in my life, and after the last 12 years shooting almost none, I've shot an incredible amount in the past , 8 or 9 months. I'm waiting on 6 rolls from my local lab right now. I love shooting film, 35, 120, and of course large format. But it's just a medium, another vehicle to get to a desired outcome, which should be at a baseline, a good photograph. I know I'm not breaking any new ground here, but the landscape of photography on social media in 2024 is so heavily film-pilled and grain drunk in a way that is both inspiring in what it means for the medium and deeply saddening because there's no message behind 99% of it.
In the early days of digital I thought of film as a grounding experience, forcing me to slow down, or if I worked quickly, to think and act with intentionality. To make each frame mean something as best I could, and accept that each time I fired the shutter I was one step closer to a predestined end to that roll of film, and the disruption to shooting that it would bring, sometimes ending the roll ends the shooting entirely. I know I'm being a major old man yells at cloud right now, back in my day, as if my day wasn't long passed the heyday of film. I came up shooting digital, came to film afterwards, I'm just as guilty of being Johnny come lately to the medium as any zoomer with a Vivitar ultra wide & slim or god forbid a fully CLA’d m6. Am I better because I have this loftier ideal of photography? No. I'm better because I'm a better photographer, I can only hope that all these kids with their Kodak Gold 200 propacks will, in time, be better photographers than me 10 times over.