Why I love film cameras, part four
Here is an experience the children of today will never have. I have been at my childhood home all week and yesterday took a look through a pile of old photo albums from the period 1966-1972 or so--roughly the first six years of my life. It occurred to me that I had never seen the negatives of any of the photos, and I was almost afraid to ask my mother what had happened to them. But when I did, to my great surprise, she produced a large bag holding boxes of negatives in their original envelopes, most in perfect condition (pretty much untouched in 30+ years).
But that's not even the coolest thing. I've seen all these photos in the albums so many times, beginning long before I had the slightest photographic interest or knowledge. Consequently, it never registered that all of them were in a square format. To my delight, I realized everything was recorded on glorious 6x6 cm medium-format negatives. I really couldn't believe it. My mother can attest to the number of times I exclaimed things like "I wonder what kind of camera that was!" and "I wonder what happened to that camera!" Many times.
Above is a rather poor attempt to render one of these negatives as a positive, using my camera to "scan," my computer screen as a light table (bad idea) and Photoshop. I wonder what happened to that cute little boy.
If you are a parent relying on digital photography, your children will miss out on this kind of discovery. First of all, you may have deleted the "bad" photos soon after taking them. Second, there will be no bag of negatives. It's laughable to think of average parents painstakingly upgrading storage media and porting images from computer to computer for more than 30 years. And a bag of old hard drives and probably-corrupt CD-ROMs is going to be worthless in 30 years without some major reconstructive work that most people won't even consider having done. (Yes, I am discounting the possibility that tiny nanobots will be supplying all such needs in 30 years. If that's the case, I guess my nanobots and I will have a jolly good laugh about this whole entry.) Finally, even if you could get the files off and look at them, they would be dippy little 3, 4 or 5 megapixel jpegs. Whereas a 2500ppi scan of a 6x6 negative yields a file of 30+ megapixels.
So shoot a bit of film, at least.
Sometime in the mid-1970s, my parents switched to a Kodak Instamatic and began to take tiny 110-format slides. It's really too bad, although that was around the time that the cute little boy vanished into a vast bramble-patch of Sears Toughskins and really bad haircuts. It's just as well we don't see those images very often.
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 11:44 AM
1 Comments:
You've pretty much summed up why I never jumped on the digital camera bandwagon... Of course, storage for all those negatives is becoming a pain in the a**! ;)
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