Film vs. Digi

I was browsing through my old deviantART account and came across these photos from my college photography class. These were from back in the day when we used something called film and developed our pictures in the dark room. I feel really old right about now.

I miss film/dark room photography. I swore I'd never go digital, and a few years later, I bought my Nikon D80. I was in love, I must admit. Being able to see your shot moments after you take it is convenient, but I believe overall it made me lazy.

When you were spending a fortune on film, every slot on that roll counted. You took your time to set up your shot, using your grey card to find the perfect exposure, fiddling with the settings until that line was dead center, framing everything perfectly, then *click*- that shot you just took IS. IT. No turning back. And you just prayed it turned out as amazingly as you had dreamed it up in your mind.

Then you took that film to your local Inkleys (sooo expensive but sooo totally worth it) asked for white borders (because they looked so profesh) and proceeded to wait 3-5 horribly long days that just seemed to drag on forever. When the day finally came to pick up your prints, you opened them as soon as you got into the car, not being able to wait another moment. Flipping through the pictures, you see some that are totally radical and some that just completely suck. But doggonnit, you worked your tush off and now you get to go spend 53 minutes in the complete dark trying to get that freaking film out of it's canister and rolled onto a developer roll, swearing under your breath and sometimes crying out of frustration. (You didn't cry? Oh...me either...) But then as soon as you got that film developed, clipped, and made into a proof-sheet, you got to go into that stinky dark room where you got acid burns from the developer and smelled the rest of the day. But what fun! What FUN! After going through an entire pack of photo paper that cost a whole weeks allowance, each crappy print crying as it fell into the trash, you finally, FINALLY get exactly what you've been trying for. One print. Perfect exposure and composition. That baby got a special frame and you couldn't help but stop to stare at it each time you passed by it. So proud. "Look at my photograph! I took that..yes, me. I did. Accomplish," you would say proudly to visitors.

Now, you take 367 pictures of the same flower, take 3 hours to narrow it down to your very favoritest and then head over to photoshop to curve, expose, blur, saturate and crop. Or HECK! You can have photoshop do the work for you with preset actions! When you're all done, you completely forget about it and don't care about printing it because you have the file on 18 different websites and you can print it anytime. Plus, you have 145,345 pictures you still need to print out, so screw it. You can just enjoy it on the computer screen.

Don't get me wrong. Photography still takes a great amount of skill and you can't take a bad picture and make it a good one in Photoshop. I just felt like being dramatic. I'm still in love with my digital camera and Photoshop. Holla.