The Phoblographer

I think most of the people going back are the people who are advanced to pro photographers who may have only been shooting since the digital era. Their love, interest and intrigue into the art form leads them to the desire to try shooting film which is what all their digital equipment is based on. Just like when I was in college shooting film, we used to make our own glass plates and shot the way they did in the 1800′s with plate film and field cameras. There are many reasons why I see it being a very small trend that won’t grow. The first is that because most labs have changed over to digital printing, the cost of printing from film as well as film costs itself will remind people that they were able to afford to shoot because digital was so cheap. The second is that they will remember that film is 100% anti-green. The chemicals can not be recycled and can not be processed through the sewer system. Most cities require the use of a haz mat disposal service.

The good thing is that it will cause many of these machine gun shooters to learn to slow down and wait for the right shot.

Erm ok i guess i belong to that small group of people who ditch digital for film.

Welcome to the postdigital society. Or rather, the beginning of it. The “post” state is what comes after the revolution is over, in this case when the society really has become digital. Parallels can of course be drawn to earlier transitions, shifts that always has its roots in disruptive technology. Postmodern, Postinustrial and so on.

What characterizes disruptive technology is that the new is not better than the old on what the old was good at, or else we would only have talked about development of the old technology. The new technology is good at something new. The radio was not better than live music at being live. The movie was not better than the theater in the interaction between actors and their public.. there are many examples. When the new are in the middle of its revolution and really is succeeding, everybody embraces it. Our language adopts to it, the whole commercial side of our society embraces it and every one around us. But somewhere along he line more and more people stop and starts to fall out of the line, something is missing, something got lost along the way. Suddenly shure recipes of commercial ads stop working. People got fed up. Live music did not die because of radio, or records and cassette tapes. The theater did not die due to movies and movies did not die because of TV. Old technology do not die just because we think it will at the time when we are living the new revolution, it just goes out from the hype and keeps on existing on its own terms, not the commercial terms, its own.

At the sixties “everyone” just knew that BW-film would die, we knew it, it was just around the corner, just wait and see.. We are still waiting 40 years later. It just keeps on living on its own terms, keeps on being good att being BW-film. In the “post-color-film” world it keeps on living at its own terms. But back in the early eighties when even the most conservative photographers had begun using color film people where looked upon as very strange if they kept on using BW-film. Today? No one starts to put negative labels on people making BW photographs, but they do question the use of film, still. A couple of years from now they will not, just as we do not question a person who makes his own furniture from wood, nails and glue. But when the postindustrial society was very young, a person who made his own furniture had to explain himself among his friends.

I remember when digital wristwatches became popular back in the early eighties. Exactly every one had one, they became more and full of features, played small melodies, could be programmed with wake-up functions, got minicalculators and so on with bells and whistles. If someone back then asked for plain simple whatch with a dial face, electronic clockwork or not, they where looked upon as back striving dinosaurs and could even be ridiculed by salesmen. Kids got bullied by their classmates at school if they did not have the latest and greatest digital wristwatch. But look around you today +25 years later. No one gets ridiculed if they do not have a digital wristwatch, most stores selling watches have more of kind with a good ol dial face. Today both types lives on at their own terms, the commercial hype blew over.

In the eighties many music artists saw live tours as something necessary evil to promote records, and records where quite expensive. Today records is cheap, can come for “free” when buying a newspaper or magazine, but live concerts.. good seats in a high profile city can be extremely expensive, and even so, the bands play for full house. It has become the other way around and records are more and seen as promotion for “the real thing”. In the postdigital society with virtual this and that the real thing, that cannot be copied infinite for next to nothing, gets valued higher, a lot higher.

I use film of several reasons. But it is only to those that yet have to take the first steps towards “post” i have to explain. I value photography and there is a part that cannot be improved upon by technology, photography is not just a way to get a picture as quick and easy as possible. Just as the carpenter who makes his own furniture, or the painter and many more examples. It also has a lot to do with the camera itself, not the recording medium in it. I want to be the driver, not a passenger to the technology. I would probably buy a digital camera that looks, feels and most important handles and is just as manual as my 30 year old SLR, even if it costs 5000eur for just the housing. But there are no such camera, for any money, no matter how big pile of money i could pay. In the market departments of the camera manufacturers, that have yet to take first step towards “post” i do not exist, despite that there are already today people like me in numbers probably greater than the whole world market share of Pentax (the smallest of the big ones). But it is just a matter of time until we once again can buy those cameras with a “good ol dial face”. And! This is important. In every shift to post when old things just keeps on living on its own terms, it has nothing to do with “retro” or nostalgia. People do not buy plain simple wristwatches out of nostalgia, not plain simple bicycles without gears, suspension, diskbrakes and what not either. Nostalgia has nothing to do with old technology that lives on in new things on its own terms, nostalgia is about old things. A Leica M9 is not about nostagia for example, it is new, a camera that i would be very happy with, if it wasnt a rangefinder, i am an SLR-man. An old M3 cold be nostalgia, but not if the owner is young. So, the camera itself is one reason. I like it simple, and do not confuse simple with easy to use. The simplest camera of them all, is the old style large format camera, but that is at the same time the hardest one to use. Good scanners more and more reasonably priced is probably also one part reason to the upswing of large format photography lately, now we are talking megapixels, like 500Mp and even more. As computing hardware gets better and better, filesizes get silly.. With large format photography we really are talking about other photography values than just recording a picture, a really slow and very deliberate photography where the photographer really is the manual driver and not the passenger to anything. And again, it has nothing what so ever to do with retro or nostalgia, not even the slightest to most people who actually use that kind of equipment. But believe me, they do value photography a lot more than average Joe on the street wondering why they are not using a digital camera.

Another is that the recording is physical, a physical original, not logical information of ones and zeroes, no need for any equipment at all to see with our eyes. Put it in a box and there it is, not a lifetime of endless copying to be preserved. Digital preservation for the future requires work, a deliberate act of copying. Though digital preserves better due to exact copies, or rather, duplication of originals, but it requires a lifetime of copying at certain times to last a lifetime. Forgotten digital information cease to exist, forgotten physical things will still be there when found again. Film is easy to store, just forget it. The less you handle it, the better. But all my digital images requires my time, time and time again, whenever i upgrade, change hardware and so on. As an old computer nerd with some programming skills, i have realized this long ago. I caught memories on film, unimportant things on quick and easy digital. But this is secondary for me, it is just the medium of capture, my valuation of photography lies elsewhere. A part of it even in the darkroom, i do process my own film today, for BW i even make my own chemistry from raw chemicals. And thanks to free global electronic communication and the sharing mentality of man kind, i know how to do it environmentally friendly of chemicals we have in our food. Though it is not recommended to drink photo-chemistry, but maybe we should start to think about what we drink and eat.

I know this may be an older post, but It’s the first time
for me seeing it. I don’t think they’re dissing digital at all, The video shows
people with opinions of both sides, I think they’re just showing what people
think… They have a point when the video states that digital camera’s have
been forced down everyone’s throat… When you walk into a store, they’re not
going to try and sell you a $250.00 SLR film camera when they can make the
revenue off a 560.00-2.000 DSLR. In the city of Toronto here, Toronto has been
the first to jump on the Technology bandwagon with all the new advancements of
technology, but on the other hand, There’s plenty of stores here that still
carry the old cameras which in my opinion allot of people can’t be bothered
with because of the simple fact that they can’t just simply point the camera at
something and let the electronics of it do all the work. I can’t speak on
behalf of other cities, but here in Toronto, The shelves of the camera repair
shops of some of the more higher end camera stores have old film cameras
stalked up to the ceiling. Just last month, One of the camera stores had told
me that the older m42 screw mount lenses are making a strong comeback, and
there’s only 2 reasons for it. 1- Cost effective and 2-Pretty much adaptable to
almost any camera.

Most people are under the impression that it’s going to a whole lot cheaper to
take photos with digital cameras… Well, they may be right, and they may be
wrong. They’re 100% right when it just comes to taking the photo rather than
having to buy the film and have it processed, but what happens when they need
prints? That’s where it all changes. take place. I think we all know what
cartridges cost for printers and how many prints you can actually get out of
them. It’s not cheap; compare that to anywhere from .30 – .40 cents per print
at a local film lab.

Please don’t take this comment as an insult, as it not intended to be one, but
I just simply think it’s just a matter of personal opinion. Some can’t be
bothered with the complication of taking photos without electronics assisting
their image quality, where as some others prefer the full manual control over
an image and having to work a bit harder to get a good quality image…  But
there’s 3 things that I can tell you about my old film camera, and that is if I should be out in the field. 1- Don’t need to worry about batteries dieing, 2- Don’t need to worry about electronics failing, 3-Don’t need to worry about having a working computer to get my images + replacement gear can be obtained for a 1/4 of the cost as the modern gear today.

Cheers!
Jim