Things Can Be Too Digital

In 1982, my father bought a wonderful medium-format camera in Hong Kong. He had long been something of a photography buff and for many years enjoyed the challenge of using this rather advanced camera. As my father’s Parkinson’s disease made it more and more difficult for him to use the camera, I started borrowing it for extended periods. When I managed an image I particularly liked, I’d send Dad a print. It was an interest we shared. He gave me my first “real” camera in elementary school and encouraged me later when I learned to enlarge and develop prints myself.

On that unforgettable Thanksgiving in 1994 when my sister bit me, before all the action started, I took some photos of my nephews. I took them each in turn onto the porch of the cabin and set them up in the autumn sunlight. The plan was to get one pretty good black and white image of each of her boys, enlarge them and put them in a large frame with three mat openings. It was meant to be a Christmas gift. I was using my father’s camera

Even though my sister bit me and we were not on speaking terms after that day, I put together those photographs for her and her husband for Christmas and sent them. They were never acknowledged, although I did see the pictures on the wall at their house after we reconciled.

About a year and a half ago, my sister’s husband called me in the middle of the day. He never calls. He asked if I still had the negatives to those photographs. It seems something had happened to the prints and they were oxidizing. (Perhaps hanging them in a humid bathroom on a wall that received several hours of direct sunlight a day wasn’t the best choice, but I didn’t mention that.) He wanted reprints of the photos. Fine and dandy, but at the time, the box where I suspected they were was under numerous other boxes in the loft as the extended renovations of our study dragged on and on.

My brother-in-law was insistent and persistent – and somewhat arrogant about the relative importance of his request (actually, he was a complete asshole about it). He pretty much asked me to find that box that night, thought it should be a high priority for me. After about a twenty minute conversation, I finally managed to put him off and convinced him that I’d look for the photos when I could.

Since then, I’ve looked for those negatives several times. They weren’t where I thought they were, so I looked in other boxes when I could. Finally, finally, I found them.

Yesterday morning I took the negatives to the local “professional” photo center to have a new contact sheet made to remember which were the images I chose for the enlargements. I was shocked to learn that the photo center no longer handles negatives. They are totally and completely digital. Less than a year ago, they still handled film.

The shop said they could scan the negatives – for $3.00 per image, and there are 15 images per negative set for this medium-format camera – and that they don’t do contacts sheets at all anymore, so I’d just have to get a print of each negative image. So to go through that process – just to figure out which three images I’d need to enlarge – would cost almost $60.00. No, thank you.

I called a bigger lab in the city, and they are all digital, too. No wet lab. Their scan fees were lower, but still expensive and no traditional contact sheets. I don’t quite know what to do, but figure I’ll have to suck it up and have the negative set scanned. I don’t have any choice.

Digital photography has been available to the general population for, what, 10 years? In that relatively short time (compared to the history of film photography prior to its advent) it’s slammed the door on film. Film manufacturers have stopped making certain films (think Polaroid), it’s harder and harder to find film, and even harder to have it processed competently. I keep thinking of the saying, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

I lament decline, and possibly the loss of traditional film photography.

I love my digital camera, but it is a different experience from my old film cameras. With a film camera, I think you have a deeper connection to the images. You have to think more about the picture you are about to take because you don’t have that instant gratification that you get with digital. While it’s wonderful to be able to shoot 20 or 50 or 100 images with a digital camera and delete 99% of them, the potential unknown of the film experience is exciting and can help you learn more. It’s the thinking before shooting that often is lost in the digital world.

There’s a more tactile connection to film images, too. It’s not just taking pictures that one learned with film, but a whole photographic process. It was the physical connection of loading the film (not the same as inserting a memory card), learning to use the equipment, the enlarger, and watching the image appear in the tray of developer. The red photo safe light in the darkroom. It’s not a connection that can be replicated in pointing and clicking in Photoshop.

The quality of the images is different. I don’t know how to put it in words, but there is just a different feeling about them. Sometimes digital images seem too crisp, too precise.

I’m not saying we should give up digital cameras – not at all. There are things I can do with my digital camera that I can’t do with my film camera. I recognize and respect the differences. They each have their place. We shouldn’t obsolete film cameras so quickly.

I still have my dad’s camera. Most of my favorite photos that I have ever taken were taken with that camera – even though it’s bulky and hard to focus.. I try to bring it out a couple of times a year to shoot a roll. It’s time to do that again, though I have no idea where I will find film or have it developed. I imagine it’s going to be more and more expensive to continue with this “obsolete” technology, but I think it’s worth it.

(Even more than the medium format camera I talk about here, the different qualities evoked by older cameras just cannot be replicated digitally. If anyone has an old medium format twin lens reflex Yashicamat, you know what I mean. I wish we had my dad’s old TLR; we have no idea what happened to it. That was one cool camera...though I’d still have the same finding and processing film issue.)