Film is Fear.

I figured it out. I hate chaos and conflict. It's poison. But, on some level I crave it. I crave small doses of fear and trepidation (although I DO tend to shy away from "terror" whenever I can so I'm OK Darwin-wise for now). Film brings out that fear.

Each and every shot is a tiny little commitment of time, money and esteem. "Snick" goes the shutter and the waiting starts. Was the composure right? Should I have changed my angle slightly? Is my exposure off a little bit? Not only do I knot know, I won't know for hours, maybe days! Either way, it just cost me a third of a buck: right or wrong. "Snick"! Another 33 cents down the drain.

I'll take pictures all day long of EVERY THING with my DSLR. What if I do this, change that? Often I'll use it to recon the film exposure that I want to make. It's all kind of haphazard though. I really need to start writing things down with my "modern" cameras the way that I do with my "old" ones. I tent to just burn shots off on my Film EOS cameras too, at least in terms of note taking.

I am DYING to drag this new A-5 out and finish the roll. But with nothing particular that I want to shoot at, it would just be shooting to shoot and on film, that costs money.


So, from all my fretting about dropping 15-20 on buying, shooting and developing a roll of color film, you might take it that I am a non-smoker. You would be right. 

Film is slow.

Too slow. Slower than I expected, that's for sure. The other night I went out and got this shot:

I thought that it would be neat to replicate it for film. I grabbed my trusty Olympus OM-2n (technically my daughters ax: I'm going to start calling "cameras" "axes" now) and headed back to to play another round of "Troll Under The Bridge". I set it up, sighted it in and click.  Nothing. The mirror just sat there in the "up" position for..... I don't know. It was a L.A.T. though. Eventually, I shut the darned thing off to get the mirror to come back down. I tried a few more times to capture this shot an some others and, mostly, the mirror just stayed up. I did get a few blurry hand-held shots off but over all I was pretty sure that I had just shot a roll of crap. I pulled it out and tossed it. I only paid $2.50 for the film. I didn't want to sink another $11 into this project by getting it developed and crap. I'm going o try to find some 800 speed some where (I was shooting 200 speed Kodak at the time) and try again. I think that this shot would be amazing on film.

Manual Exposure

God I love it. The smell of the film, the snick of the back closing. I love the way that you can feel each "click" of the dials when you turn the. I love how bright the image is as I frame it perfectly (they are always framed perfectly in my mind when I take them, it's only after I get them back when I see the flaws) and then that final, decisive "SNICK" as another 33 cents is exposed to the light. Steel is real. No, wait, that the other blog. Film. That's what's real here. Only, the thing is, it is.

Don't get me wrong. I love, love love taking digital images of stuff. I can see what I did right or wrong and make changed or corrections to nearly instantly get the image that I wanted. But it's not the same. An image captured on a negative has a permanence that 16 megapixels of 00011110111 just cant' replicate. Digital images pile up by the thousands on the computer, never to see the light of day. No one is going o see them laying on the coffee table or hanging on the wall. No one is going to idly flip through a book of them while drinking tea on a rainy afternoon. Sure, some one (most likely the person who took them) can pull them up on the screen or project them onto the TV but there is a purpose to that, a sense of frantic that pulling out a packet of 4x6 inch prints just doesn't have. Oh, sure, you can print out your digital images. Have you? I recently printed out a bunch from a  family vacation specifically so that I could put them in an album for my son. Other than that.... not so much.

One of my FAVORITE current uses for my digital camera is to take shots and use the settings that I settle on as "best" to pass over to my Olympus OM-1n. The 2n and 4T do a lot of their own thinking. I like the way the 4T thinks particularly. The 2n is the most "fun" to shoot of them though.

So, I ask you: which is which? Can you tell? Which do you prefer? Which is more pleasing to your eye?