Ah, the memories...

It has been a long time since I posted last. I have been out of town and busy with a project, which prevented me from posting as I would have liked. My apologies, gentle readers.

I am going to keep today's post short, but I wanted to take the time to lament the decline of film. I am no purist who insists that photos need to be taken on film only and developed and printed by hand without using any enhancing techniques like dodging and burning. I shoot digital and love it. But, this past weekend I was doing research on old film cameras and thought back to my days of shooting Velvia 50, trying to find a processor who could do E-6 quickly (or at all, for that matter), then sitting in my college library for hours using their Coolscan to scan my images one by one. Very rarely has viewing a digital capture been as exciting to me as was looking at new slides under a loupe at the lab. Those images were always very detailed and saturated and the wait for them made them that much more exciting.

Obviously digital has incredible advantages, not the least of which is being able to correct your images in the field thanks to the viewscreen and historgram. Memory cards are less cumbersome than the equivalent amount of rolls of film, and digital image quality at this point most certainly matches, and possibly exceeds, that of 35mm.

But, film was pretty great. I feel bad for kids who will grow up only taking pictures on digital autofocus cameras. I hope that film sticks around for a while yet.