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As someone who shot and developed a lot of film (I was a photo editor at a daily college paper..) I won’t miss it. Though printing black and white pictures was

As someone who shot and developed a lot of film (I was a photo editor at a daily college paper..) I won’t miss it. Though printing black and white pictures was kinda fun, they often had dust and getting the exporsure and contrast right was tedious. I don’t miss film. Though there were a lot less pictures taken and shared before everyone had a camera on their phone. A different time in a lot of ways.

yesimahuman 8y ago
I think film is awesome, provided you have the right process and you actually enjoy that process (or you are fine spending $20/roll to have a lab develop and scan for you). Certainly has been going through a hipster revival of sorts lately.
- gringoDan 8y ago
  I agree that there’s something magical about film cameras. I’m 25 years old now, so I’m probably one of the last people to ever experience working in a darkroom during photography class. There is a sense of anticipation and discovery in having a limited number of photos on a roll of film and not knowing how they’ll turn out until you develop them yourself. Undoubtedly, the photos that you thought would be incredible turn out to be duds, but you’ll also find a gem or two in shots that you thought would be mediocre. In an age of infinite options, limitless data, and constant connectivity, I’m drawn more and more to these examples of deliberate limitation / non-scalable craftsmanship.
- ghaff 8y ago
  B&W printing in particular has a certain hands-on craftwork aspect to it that you don't really get with digital in the same way. (Working on a computer with Photoshop or Lightroom isn't really the same thing although it takes an equal amount of skill.) That said, I never really got into multi-hour printing sessions to get a print just perfect. I always came more from the newspaper than the fine art mindset. So it's one of those things that leads me to reminisce about how that was fun without any real desire to ever do it again.
ghaff 8y ago
At one point I was probably spending 10s of hours a week doing B&W darkroom work so I have a certain nostalgia for it. I also spent lots of time playing with developer chemistry, etc. But, no, I don't really miss it. It was an enjoyable hobby but it was also a pain to the degree that it was a process you had to go through in order to arrive at the final photograph. And color slides were just always a finicky and fairly expensive way to take and show photos.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  > And color slides were just always a finicky and fairly expensive way to take and show photos. When I was a kid in the 80s color slides sessions with a projector were awesome. Since we don't really use projectors anymore and our screen sizes are somewhat limited, I think we have lost something by moving to digital.
  - acomjean 8y ago
    Some friend and I did a "show and tell" slide show nights with friends and beers. Most "shows" were trips, though a few other things were covered. One friend had a digital projector another had a screen. It was fun. We did it for a number of years. tried it outside once, bugs were attracted to screen...
- mauvehaus 8y ago
  I've never shot much transparency film, and I've definitely never developed it. I guess my favorite part of shooting slides is that you can't fix things in the darkroom. What you get off the camera is what you've got (absent digital manipulation, of course). As a pretty casual photographer (I don't have a darkroom or access to one, and have never really been more than a roll a month shooter), that means I've both been surprised at how well shots have come out, and disappointed at others. It's an expensive feedback loop, to be sure. I won't defend slide film for more serious work, but I love it for my own casual use.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    In that respect, slide is a bit like shooting JPEG instead of raw.
GuiA 8y ago
I still shoot black and white medium format, and spend about 10 hours a week in a darkroom. It’s hard to compare spending 2 hours on a print vs 2 hours on a shot in Lightroom - they’re very different processes. That being said, the reason why I enjoy it so much is because I’m working with a physical process that - once fully understood - is reliable, coherent, and predictable (to your comment about it being hard getting the exposure and contrast right - split filter processing changed my life. It removes a lot of the guesswork and basically turns it into a binary search). Working with software is anything but - I can’t count the number of times where something didn’t work quite the way it used to because of a software update, or I had to restart Lightroom to get it to behave, or some fairly direct manipulation I wanted to do was hidden under unnecessary layers of UI. Not to mention that the final output of the darkroom process is a print - whereas the final output of software is a file. Since I care about making large prints, if I worked in software, I’d still have to deal with a printer and all the mess that comes with that to get an object. The one thing that digital excels at is obviously back ups/instant duplication/being able to navigate through history/etc. But they really are 2 utterly different approaches to making photographs, and I wish there were an embodied system (à la Dynamicland) that brought to the digital photography process the wonderful things from the darkroom process.

yesimahuman 8y ago

I think film is awesome, provided you have the right process and you actually enjoy that process (or you are fine spending $20/roll to have a lab develop and scan for you). Certainly has been going through a hipster revival of sorts lately.

gringoDan 8y ago
I agree that there’s something magical about film cameras. I’m 25 years old now, so I’m probably one of the last people to ever experience working in a darkroom during photography class. There is a sense of anticipation and discovery in having a limited number of photos on a roll of film and not knowing how they’ll turn out until you develop them yourself. Undoubtedly, the photos that you thought would be incredible turn out to be duds, but you’ll also find a gem or two in shots that you thought would be mediocre. In an age of infinite options, limitless data, and constant connectivity, I’m drawn more and more to these examples of deliberate limitation / non-scalable craftsmanship.
ghaff 8y ago
B&W printing in particular has a certain hands-on craftwork aspect to it that you don't really get with digital in the same way. (Working on a computer with Photoshop or Lightroom isn't really the same thing although it takes an equal amount of skill.) That said, I never really got into multi-hour printing sessions to get a print just perfect. I always came more from the newspaper than the fine art mindset. So it's one of those things that leads me to reminisce about how that was fun without any real desire to ever do it again.

ghaff 8y ago

At one point I was probably spending 10s of hours a week doing B&W darkroom work so I have a certain nostalgia for it. I also spent lots of time playing with developer chemistry, etc. But, no, I don't really miss it. It was an enjoyable hobby but it was also a pain to the degree that it was a process you had to go through in order to arrive at the final photograph. And color slides were just always a finicky and fairly expensive way to take and show photos.

ekianjo 8y ago
> And color slides were just always a finicky and fairly expensive way to take and show photos. When I was a kid in the 80s color slides sessions with a projector were awesome. Since we don't really use projectors anymore and our screen sizes are somewhat limited, I think we have lost something by moving to digital.
- acomjean 8y ago
  Some friend and I did a "show and tell" slide show nights with friends and beers. Most "shows" were trips, though a few other things were covered. One friend had a digital projector another had a screen. It was fun. We did it for a number of years. tried it outside once, bugs were attracted to screen...
mauvehaus 8y ago
I've never shot much transparency film, and I've definitely never developed it. I guess my favorite part of shooting slides is that you can't fix things in the darkroom. What you get off the camera is what you've got (absent digital manipulation, of course). As a pretty casual photographer (I don't have a darkroom or access to one, and have never really been more than a roll a month shooter), that means I've both been surprised at how well shots have come out, and disappointed at others. It's an expensive feedback loop, to be sure. I won't defend slide film for more serious work, but I love it for my own casual use.
- jacobush 8y ago
  In that respect, slide is a bit like shooting JPEG instead of raw.

GuiA 8y ago

I still shoot black and white medium format, and spend about 10 hours a week in a darkroom. It’s hard to compare spending 2 hours on a print vs 2 hours on a shot in Lightroom - they’re very different processes. That being said, the reason why I enjoy it so much is because I’m working with a physical process that - once fully understood - is reliable, coherent, and predictable (to your comment about it being hard getting the exposure and contrast right - split filter processing changed my life. It removes a lot of the guesswork and basically turns it into a binary search). Working with software is anything but - I can’t count the number of times where something didn’t work quite the way it used to because of a software update, or I had to restart Lightroom to get it to behave, or some fairly direct manipulation I wanted to do was hidden under unnecessary layers of UI. Not to mention that the final output of the darkroom process is a print - whereas the final output of software is a file. Since I care about making large prints, if I worked in software, I’d still have to deal with a printer and all the mess that comes with that to get an object. The one thing that digital excels at is obviously back ups/instant duplication/being able to navigate through history/etc. But they really are 2 utterly different approaches to making photographs, and I wish there were an embodied system (à la Dynamicland) that brought to the digital photography process the wonderful things from the darkroom process.