I wonder what if Genesis 1:3 instead read:
“….and God said: “Let there be film”. And there was film. And he saw the film was good. Then he separated the light from darkness”….

As much as I love digital photography, the time has come to go back to my roots from decades ago, slow down, and start enjoying the process of creating photography, as opposed to the North Star of sharing photography with everyone else. The goal of my enjoyment has shifted from the actual end product towards the creative process itself.

Though, I’ve sold all of my DSLR gear/glass during the pandemic lockdown and went minimalistic with only two pocket-sized Ricoh GR cameras, I’ve been really missing the tactile feel of good old film, its imprecise peculiarity, lack of forgiveness, and its infuriating knack of being a neverending teacher of patience, because film is an instant gratification killer. Full stop. Film grabs instant gratification by its neck, snaps it in half, spits down its throat, stomps on it and kicks it off to the roadside in vengeance. In film, one has no option left other than to wait until the entire reel has been shot, film sent out to a lab for development and pictures received back. Seeing your photo scans or prints literally takes weeks!

And I love it!

The prices of development have gone through the roof, so have prices of film stock, so in order to stay on a reasonable budget, I now develop my own film at home and scan the negatives. It is laborious and tricky, but there is something magical about sliding your arms into a dark bag and in complete blindness, using only the tactile feedback of your fingers, opening a spent film canister with a bottle opener, unwinding the exposed film stock, loading it onto a spool, cutting and putting into a developing tank, then running it through a carefully controlled development process with precise times and temperatures, hanging it to dry, cutting it, scanning it, processing it and all the fun along the way.

There is a massive resurgence of film cameras among the younger generation and not only do I applaud them, I feel where their curiosity is coming from. Just like the whimsical feeling of an old paper book cannot be replaced by an app on an iPad or Kindle, a feeling of a film negative gently sliding between your fingers cannot be ever replaced with a digital film-wannabe filter.

I’m now a proud owner of two Pentax K1000s, two Pentax Program A, a Canonet QL17, a Minolta SR505 and in the mail will be soon arriving a medium format Pentax 645N behemoth.

Rest assured, there will be more of film images on my site going forward. A whole lot more.

More soon…