Back to analog?
On my latest trip, I shot a film, Kodak Gold 200. Eager to develop, I went to a camera store. The salesman explained that they ship films to California to the 3rd party company that scans films into digital files and send them electronically. Somehow that company believed that we all should dispose of film, believing that no one would want to keep the 35mm film having a digital version available. I rejected the offer without thinking.
The salesman noticed my reaction and sensed a different breed in me — analog. He mentioned the Downtown Camera place that develops and sells 35 mm films. He said that the camera store owner is brilliant and jumped on the right trend — “going back to film” and that his store is a slow corporation missing the opportunity.
I knew Kodak had recently hired more engineers to revive its film business. However, I did not take it seriously. Listening to that salesman showed the magnitude of that movement and the new demand that started in times of COVID. At the time, when Nikon was considering closing their DSLR lineup production and moving to mirrorless cameras, the world was going back to film massively. What is behind all that?
It looks like the new generation, inspired by filters in social tools like Snapchat, turned to specialized films like bubble film.
My daughter prefers the inexpensive Fuji Instax camera she takes when travelling. True, iPhone is always there, and she takes a lot of pictures. However, only Instamix’s memorable photos get special attention and the place on the side of the bookcase where she keeps all her travel trophies.
As I thought about film vs. digital all over again, I realized that both are complementary. Digital photography has apparent strengths in the efficiency that it introduced to fashion, wedding, travel photography and other genres. However, as my dad mentioned, there is a special place where we want to stay, being artists and painting with light. It is a place where we want to connect deeper and be more involved with the process. We want to take time to visualize the exposure, take a time framing, stay patient, anticipating finishing the film and developing it, revealing beautiful natural grains and rich, continuous tones that we have tried to mimic with no success for so many years. We all have the amount we want that is impossible to standardize or automate; it keeps us who we are — human.
