FILM ~ The Lingering Funeral

A lot of my friends chide me about my not "getting with it", embracing digital, and joining the twenty-first century. After all, digital is everywhere. See the sign on the wall in the upper right corner of the photograph? "Electronics". Sometimes it seems that everything is heading in that direction.

The big Fuji machine that develops the film and then makes the prints? It scans the negatives and prints the digital file the same as it would if you used a digital camera. For $2.99 the drugstore will give you a disc with scans of all the pictures on the roll. Then if you're so inclined you can play around with Photoshop, altering the images at will. In that regard I already AM "shooting digital".

Here I am at my local Walgreens drugstore waiting to pick up my latest three discs. That's the twenty-first century easy way out. Nobody makes a digital camera that will give me the angle of view of my 15mm lens on film. Nobody makes one that even comes close that I can hold out there with just one hand. There are a bunch of other reasons why I stick with film, including just plain liking the way conventional black and white prints look. I get the impression that there are a lot of other people kneeling at the same alter. It's going to be a long drawn out funeral. If it was really all so cut and dried why did both Kodak and Fuji just come out with lines of "New, Improved" films again? Do they know something the photo magazines don't? In the meantime those of us wearing black will be wearing black for a long damned time. Film lives on.