A great post here about someone who tried to make a last go of shooting 35mm film. It didn’t work out too well. Oh well. Film is dead – long live film?

I have long ignored the technological battles and ideological warfare between film purists and digital zealots. Use what you’ve got and use it to get a little better each time. Accept that digital photography is supplanting film the same way that ball point pens trumped fountain pens and move on with life.

If you like film so much – keep shooting it! There will always be a place for film and it will never (never!) go away entirely. People still do calligraphy with fountain pens (or even quills!). To me the technology is secondary anyway – the only thing that really matters is where you point your camera and when you trip the shutter. A great story is a great story whether typed on an old Smith Corona, scratched out in pencil or carved into runes.

The film vs. digital smackdown reminds me a lot of the sturm und drang in motion picture editing over the arrival of computer based non-linear editors. There was lot of moaning about weird visceral connections to the medium and the need to “feel” the film. Ok – so the process is different now – what you’ve lost in feeling you’ve gained in speed of iteration in never misplacing trimmed frames. Is one process better than the other? I think not – they’re two different processes, and so it is with film versus digital photography. Film is great and digital is great, and they’re both great for different reasons.

But to me, the thing that is really great is photography itself – to capture and record light in a precise enough matter that another person who wasn’t there can experience it too is nothing short of miraculous.