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FOREVER IS TODAY: I love film

 


This made me miss film a tiny little bit. The problem is that it also reminded me of how god damn expensive it was to shoot all that film, then either develop it (smelly, tedious, but rewarding) or having it sent out to process and print ($$$).

Then I started remembering how much I sucked at using a light meter correctly, which was the most painful when shooting slides, which had a hell of a lot less room for error than print film. I shot a lot of blue snow, and flat shadows back in my film day. For some reason B&W film never gave me much grief. Tri-X and Plus-X always made me look like a hero, I really loved shooting these two films. 

What killed my film addiction? A Sony digital camera that cost an arm and a leg, and had a huge, gorgeous chunk of glass as its lens. I tested one at my job, and liked it so much that I bought one for myself. That camera, the DSC-S70, let me take pictures I could have never figured out with my Nikon D60 35mm SLR. 

It's been 10 years since I ditched my last 35mm film camera. Since then my digital cameras went from 3 Megapixels, a huge lens and 16MB memory sticks. to a marvelous gadget that is about the same size as a credit card, can shoot 10 frames per second at 10 Megapixels, and can shoot HD video at 1080i AVCHD, or 1080i and 720p with MP4. And it can detect when people are smiling. And it can stitch pictures together on the fly to create panoramas.And it has an 8GB card the size of my pinky's fingernail. And with the right optional equipment it can talk to other cameras or printers without a physical connection. 

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