Hard copy

How do you view your images?

Our photographer recently had a Recalibration moment.  That’s what we call events that tell us that our assumptions about the world and the people in it are inaccurate, and we need to change our thinking.  Our tutor, who was used to students who had never seen a slide rule in person, had a Recalibration when none of his had even heard of one.  We expect one soon when none of his students have ever seen a paper map.

For our photographer, it came when he was picking up some prints from a film processing shop in DC.  Another customer was having explained to him, in short sentences and in some detail, why he would want to keep the negatives of the film he had just shot.  There was something about the difficulty and necessity of copying files when formats changed, and the danger of losing everything to a computer crash, to set against the inconvenience of having to come into the shop again in a week’s time to pick up a physical package.  (The scans, of course, would be emailed.)

Our photographer struggled to come up with an adequate analogy.  Shooting film and discarding the negatives would be like, well, baking a pie and throwing away the filling; or carefully designing desert-pattern camouflage, and only wearing it in the city.  Negatives are the basic product of a film camera.  They can be printed in any number of ways, re-printed, stored for decades and done again.

And scanned, turned into digital files.  People don’t make prints now, or look at printed images much.  The overwhelming majority of photography is produced by smartphones, shared more or less instantly, then deleted or forgotten.  Even much more sophisticated and ambitious photography is viewed online almost exclusively.  So there is little need for a form of information storage that will last (if properly cared for) a lifetime, only to be tossed when grandchildren clear out the old house.

There is nothing wrong with this.  What you do with your images, or with anyone’s, is up to you.  There is no imperative to take only pictures worth keeping, as there is none to produce only technically perfect shots or those that conform to some standard of Good Art.  You can even Photoshop your image to within an inch of its life, then animate it with AI to make it look like someone’s bad dream.  As long as you don’t hurt anyone, or misrepresent what you show.  (Photographic ethics may be the subject of another blog post.)

But there remains some puzzlement in our photographer’s mind.  Nowadays, when you can find software to mimic any effect at will, including anything that film produced, why are these people shooting film at all?  Possibly it’s the process of slowing down, looking carefully and making every shot on a limited roll count.  We can hope.