Film

For 30 years, I have shot a special kind of film, for my color work. It was made from 35mm movie film--lengths of film that were left on the big spools when a scene of a movie was shot, but the spool not finished. It was color balanced to be contact printed upon slide film [transparancies] and that is what I got back in the mail. The digital revolution, however, knocked my film processing company out of business. ..as it has with my local film lab. So I am sputtering along one roll of film at a time, while I make decisions about a serious digital camera. I have a little fixed-lens point-and-shoot digital camera that is a fun toy--but I have other interests [music] that are competing for that high-dollar tool. I'm sadly aware that my image quality could certainly be sharper. So take heart. I'm working on it.

I have been shopping the digital cameras for some four years now, and sooner or later it is likely that I will abandon my attachment to the chemicals and film in favor of electrons and silicon. But the advancements in digital cameras are coming so fast, that procrastination has already seen me through several technical breakthrughs, rendering what I would have bought, obsolete. So I still pay $9/roll just to hear that nifty click-whirr of my Nikon and its motor-drive, aware that I am a dinosaur at the end of an era.

I almost always shoot several shots of each subject, and it was so simple, just to flop a page of slides on a light table, and choose the best image from the slides. The frame number is on the slide, to make it easy to order prints from the negatives. If you take a regular roll of film into the lab, they make a print of each one, but you have no idea which frame goes to which photo when they get mixed up. The other factor about all this was that it was cheap, and it came through the mail to me out here in the boonies. I had made a little light box for my truck, years ago, with which I could view the slides and negs out here in the woods, instead of being in a hurry in town. But that is all history, now. I'm tied to a computer, anymore. At least the planet can redirect its usage of silver, anyway.