Film

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.

                                           -Kodachrome, Paul Simon

            There was a time when I was a boy that I wanted to be one of three things; an astronaut, a forest ranger, or a photographer.  Or perhaps an astronaut-ranger who takes pictures. Any who, I didn’t make it to space or ever wear a Smokey Bear hat as part of my work clothes, my private life is another matter, but years and years later I got back into photography.  Mostly because of digital cameras.

            I liked how with digital cameras you found out right away whether your lighting, focus, and framing where what you were trying to do.  I liked how I wasn’t restricted to 12, 24, or 36 pictures at a time.  I also liked how I could change film speed and white balance with the flick of a switch, and what white balance meant.

            I don’t miss film photography.  I remember in high school I got the opportunity to photograph the football team practicing with the chance that one of my shots might end up in the yearbook.  But I didn’t load the film properly; I didn’t catch the film’s sprockets on the camera’s gears so every time I thought I was advancing to the next frame, the current frame was just sitting in the same place. When I got to photograph number 100 or so without reloading I thought that I had either made a mistake or somehow was using a magical endless roll of film.  When I rewound the film it pulled it all into the canister where my skills at that time meant I couldn’t get to it.  By then the team had left the field and it was too late for me to start over.  I delivered zero shots from that day so I got zero shots in the yearbook.

            I doubt if Ansel Adams had anything to fear from my photography prowess - I wonder if he ever did the miss the sprocket thing - but I can look back and remember some of the special quirks about film photography.  In the photography course I took in college the instructor said to buy film that is just about to expire, because the manufacturer has set the expiration date far earlier than it needs to be, but mostly because it’s usually on sale.  (Just like my auto shop teacher in high school said when buying motor oil, get your car’s weight on sale).  With film you had to read the box; there was nothing worst than shooting a roll of slide film when you didn’t have a slide projector.  Between Kodak and Fuji film I always chose Kodak.  Probably because the yellow box reminded me of the boxes Matchbox Cars came in when I was a kid. The green Fuji seemed too new, too upstart-y.

            There are still photographers who use film.  They insist that the quality is better.  They say that not being able to review photographs on the fly forces them to take a more critical look at composition of each shot.  It’s likely that film is not going away completely but that market is a very pale shadow of what it used to be.  Case in point would be the implosion of the Kodak Park buildings in Rochester, N.Y., Oct. 6, 2007.  It was attended by many former employees, most of whom documented it, ironically, on their digital cameras.