It started a couple of years ago when the Fugifilm X100F caught my eye. It was a digital camera styled after old rangefinder cameras. It had a fixed lens and featured a number of film simulations that would process photos to look like a particular type of film stock. The simplicity of the camera appealed to me. It reminded me of when I was learning to shoot on my Dad’s old Minolta. It was an SLR but I only ever used the 50mm lens so it might as well have been a fixed lens.
I ended up purchasing the X100F and it has been my go to camera ever since. The compact size and fixed lens simplicity helped me focus more on the shot and less on making sure I had the right piece of kit.
Fast forward to the spring of 2019…
Maybe it’s just nostalgia as I’m now closer to 40 than I am to 30. Maybe it’s the realization that unless I expose my kids to the world of film photography they’ll probably grow up without knowing what it is. Maybe it was the film simulations in my X100F quietly encouraging me with each photo to get back to the real thing rather than a digital imitation. Whatever it was, this spring I went on Ebay to hunt down an inexpensive film camera to see if this was more than just a passing moment of nostalgia.
I purchased a little Konica C35AF. In researching it before purchase, I found out the C35 line had one of the earliest autofocus systems and it sounded like exactly what I wanted to test the waters of film photography. Thankfully, the little plastic camera that shipped from a seller in Japan functioned perfectly. Sure it had some light leaks but there was just something about loading that film for the first time in decades, depressing the shutter release and hearing the mechanical “twang,” and then experiencing both the sound and the feel of winding the film after taking a shot. Not to mention the weeks of arduous waiting from the moment of taking a shot to seeing the developed photo courtesy of The Darkroom lab in California.
And maybe that’s why I’ve felt the draw to film again. My world is increasingly digital. The words I’m typing now are data on a server farm somewhere. Digital images, from the moment of snapping the photo, are all bits and bytes processed in a computer in my camera and then further in a computer on my desk. Even the images I have developed from my film are scanned and uploaded. But there’s something about popping open that Ilford HP5+ film canister and loading it up. There’s something about depressing the shutter and then winding the film once or twice to make sure it has taken correctly. There’s something almost counter-cultural about having to WAIT weeks to see an image. My kids will often leap behind me after I take a picture of them with the Konica or my recently purchased Canon AE-1 so that they can “see” the picture and I have to explain that it will be a little while before we can see the developed film.
So whatever it is: nostalgia, a subtle push back against the increasing digitization of everything, or just a simple desire to share something from my childhood with my own kids, I’m thankful that film is still there. I’m thankful for the local camera shops continuing to service old film cameras, and I’m thankful that I can go back to my roots and enjoy both the incredible photography technology available today and also the analog joys from decades past.
