Mike Johnston asks, "Is there any reason a film photographer would shoot color today?"

I touched on this just about a month ago in, A Phone Is Not A Camera.

I know this makes me sound like an old fart, and that's fine because I am an old fart. Kids are shooting film now, I think, not because it's "cool," but because you get to experience making something.

In other words it's more "authentic," as photography, than "digital imaging." While there are likely boomers who are shooting film nowadays out of nostalgia or whatever, for the most part it seems to me to be young people, Millennials and younger, who are drawn to shooting film.

My nephew is a working photographer, touring with musicians and shooting gigs. For that, he mostly shoots digital. But he shoots film to be more expressive. It's a different process, and it requires a different mindset.

My daughter is shooting film as a side hustle. She recently bought a medium format camera. I think it's the same thing with her.

These kids have grown up digital. Everything associated with a screen being nearly instantaneous, and nearly infinitely mutable. A thing's existence is merely a sequence of ones and zeros that must be interpreted by a machine to make them accessible to a human being. There is nothing intrinsic in the artifact itself.

Film is different. Whatever is captured while the shutter is open is all there's ever going to be. Now, digitize it, and it becomes that ephemeral, ghostly entity that only exists as bits. But the negative actually exists.

A phone is not a camera. Even when "taking" or "making" a photograph with a phone, the machine is doing most of the work, and doing it mostly for its own convenience, which is presumably also the user's convenience. (Notice I didn't say "photographer.")

I think for folks who are shooting color film today, they want to be in touch with an experience, a part of the process. To know that the image that results is wholly a result of their choices, their experience, creative and technical.

Can you do that in digital? Sure. Mostly. The machine is still doing stuff you don't know about. Lens corrections. Chromatic aberration corrections. Sometimes you can turn that stuff off, sometimes it's baked into the RAW images themselves. And you still wind up with... bits. A "virtual" thing.

A phone is not a camera, and bits are not "real." We live an era of "deep fakes," because of the infinite mutability of bits and the power of our machines to manipulate them. Film is real. Yeah, you can do clever things making prints, but you have to fight with reality, not just move a slider, click a check-box.

Kids born when the iPhone was introduced are turning 17 this year. Chances are, for most of them, a phone is their only experience with a camera.

For most of the things we use cameras for, I think digital is a boon. I wouldn't go back to shooting film. But I've had that experience. I think young people today, who've grown up knowing only digital, welcome that tactile experience. That embodied experience. The reality of a physical artifact that exists because of their effort, their choices.

I think if this civilization were to survive that numb-nuts Kurzweil would turn out to be right. Everything would be digital.

We would only exist as ghosts in a machine.

I think shooting film is a rejection of that.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:45 Tuesday, 9 January 2024