The Manrilla Blog | Life. Art. Religion. Culture.

I was talking with a photographer friend of mine about how our shooting habits and image processing habits have changed over the past two or three years. About how digital’s really revolutionized how we’ve changed our approach to photography. We both had a good laugh at how, just three years ago, there would have been no shoot, check the back of the camera, and shoot again. No LCD preview. No histogram. No instant review. The times they is did a’ changin’ change.

While digital’s great for the professional world of photography (speed, ease of transporting images, quick turn around), I really do miss the craft of photography that was present with film, developer and paper. You have to remember, I learned on film. I honed my skills in my dad’s darkroom. T-Max 100. Across 100. Agfapan and Ilford’s 50-speed films pulled to 25 ISO. Dektol and D-76. Mixing the fixer. Getting my hands wet in the developer. The rush, excitement and anticipation waiting for film to process. Waiting for film to dry. And I was just as sure then as I am now that I had gotten what I wanted without having to have an instant preview on the back of my camera. Heck, I didn’t even shoot polaroids until my last year of shooting film on medium format (I still shoot 4×5, film, polaroids).

I guess the point in all of this is that to me, photography was very much a craft. It was tactile. You got your hands dirty doing it. And digital…, well, it feels just a little too clean sometimes. Yes, you can make your photographs simulate the grit and grain of film but you’ll never have the hands on feeling of making a photograph. The feel of your hands in the fixer. The smell of the developer. The magic of seeing a sheet of paper fade up into a photograph in the glow of a safe light. I miss analog photography. I really do. I’d give a whole lot to be able to get back into a wet darkroom again.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve embraced digital for what it is. But it’s also still in its infancy. But more than that, digital’s digital and film’s film. Apples and oranges. Two things not cut from the same cloth. I guess this is just a little rant, some part of me that feels like it’s dying or dead and wants to give one last shout to the world before it’s forgotten.