Why film is still cool

Film photography is still around, and if you ask me, its not going anywhere. Film has been the predominant method of taking photographs for over 100 years. It won’t just die out overnight. Anyone that has heard of the Save Polaroid campaign knows this to be true.

In early 2008, Polaroid announced that they will cease producing instant film.

There. Was. An. Uproar. Thousands, if not millions, of people exclaimed their woes. Savepolaroid.com was born as an attempt to show the powers that be that the world still loved Polaroid instant film.

To make a long story short, people listened. The Impossible Project was put together and began manufacturing a variation of the old film. Polaroid = saved.

This love of film doesn’t end with Polaroid. Hipsters all over the U.S and Europe use film because its cool.

Many “artists” use film because they can control the process entirely.

Film photography has a tactility that is completely absent from digital. From shoot to finish, the image has your fingerprint all over it (unfortunately sometimes literally

In the end, you are left with a print you can hold in your hand that you feel like you have made yourself. More work is involved, and while that deters many from using film, others flock towards it because of its purity and history.

I’m not saying that people should throw away their digital cameras, but I am saying that film is still a strong photographic tool. Fujifilm is still taking out full page ads in major magazines advertising their film with the tagline, “In a digital age, is it possible to have a renaissance in film?” They seem to think so. They even announced a brand new professional medium format film camera earlier this year.

Yes. The world is on fire for digital everything. And why shouldn’t it be? Instant gratification is the bee’s knees. When I shoot for clients, 80% of the time I’m shooting for the web, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I love digital photography. I love(/hate) the internet. I even kind of like TV. But I also love getting my hands dirty. That often means spending entire days in the darkroom, staining my clothes with developer, cursing myself for exposing something incorrectly, and feeling like I’m standing on top of the world when I hold a beautiful print in my hands made by those same hands.

No, I am not a hipster.