Do you have a moment to talk about 35mm film?

I'm probably part of a wider trend on this one. It started less with a passion for photography and more with a specific frustration: that thing where someone takes a photo, immediately reviews it, doesn't like it, and takes it again. I've watched it ruin moments. The best photos I have of people I care about are the ones where nobody was thinking about the photo.

Ah, maybe not that one

In May 2021 I bought an SLR, thinking it was the right tool. It wasn't. Too much to think about. Aperture, shutter speed, ISO, all of it getting in the way of just taking the picture.

Point-and-shoot film cameras were the answer. No fuss. You point them at something and press the button. The constraint forces you to trust the moment rather than engineer it, which was the whole point.

Film costs how much?!?!

Film is expensive now, so I've been experimenting with editing iPhone photos in Lightroom to get a similar look. Whack up the grain, mix the tones, push the colours somewhere interesting. It gets you most of the way there.

But it's not the same, and the difference is worth naming. The excitement of film is in not knowing. Every roll that comes back from the lab is a small surprise. Some shots are better than you expected. Some are completely wrong. The imperfections aren't flaws, they're part of it. You can't emulate that with a slider.

Maybe I'm just a hipster

Could be nostalgia. I grew up in the 90s and early 00s and there's something about the aesthetic that pulls at that. Or it could be that film photography forces a different relationship with time. You take fewer photos. You're more deliberate. You wait.

Probably both. Either way, I'm not stopping.