My last hurrah with film was with a Leica MP LHSA, Nikon F6, Hasselblad 203FE, Hasselblad H2F, and the Mamiya RZPro-IID. Prior to that, just name a good film camera and I probably had it … I'd be embarrassed to list them, it'd stress the band-width here.
Without a doubt, my past favorite was the M by a huge margin … with a loving nod to the 203FE, Contax 645, and Contax N … all sporting the Zeiss optics I preferred.
Sort of the pinnacle of each format for my uses. A product of the love/hate, angels/demons, can-do/can't-do relationship I've had with film for more decades than I care to admit to.
The proof of my denial that film's dead to me is that my Zone VI equipped wet-darkroom is still intact, my fabulous Kaiser MF enlarger sites fallow in storage, and I am waiting for our town to have their annual hazardous waste pick-up to shed the last of my aging chemicals. That denial cost me a lot also … I had at least $3,000 in film in my garage freezer energy hog, which I got rid of leaving the film to go bad (a parent's illness distracted me from such mundane things as selling it roll-by-roll). Even had the last run of Verichrome in copious quantities that I loved for wedding work.
Oddly, one of the most missed aspects of my film age was the tactile feel of winding a M or V camera. Something reassuring about that physical connection to the camera. Sort of
"There, that one is done" sense of incremental accomplishment to it. Of course, the other is the magic of a print appearing in a tray:bugeyes: while enjoying the inner Sanctum of the darkroom where no one dared enter when I was working.
I was an early adopter of digital … a 3 meg Canon and whopping 16 meg Kodak Proback that could shoot any ISO as long as it was 100.
Mostly to facilitate commercial work where time was of the essence. Slowly that digital cancer spread, feeding on my inherent laziness. After trying a number of scanners to bridge film and digital, I secured the mighty Imacon 949. That helped me come to the aesthetic realization that if you shoot film, then the analog process should be carried all the way through to making silver-prints with an enlarger. Facsimiles always involve some sort of compromise IMO.
By then the digital cancer had reached my brain.
I stopped waxing poetically about film. Truth be told I had longed for the immediacy of digital well before it was even commercially available or a known alternative. I blew through an enormous amount of Polaroid film and even had a Pola back for one of my Mamiya 7-II cameras (the other loaded with film).
I never enjoyed the nail biting process of handing over my precious color film rolls to a lab, and a few too many times getting the phone call that they had screwed up. Costly for a commercial assignment redo, a un-retrievable disaster for a wedding gig. Film lost in the mail happen one too many times also … whole vacation memories gone forever. If there was to be a fug-up I wanted it to be my fug-up, not one out of my control.
Darkrooms sound romantic, but often were just pure drudgery … and stinky. I am on a septic tank, and the process of protecting that became an enormous task. Drying and flattening silver prints was a precarious task where one dimple meant hours of repeating the whole process.
Today, we have many shimmering silver prints placed all over our home. A testament to a bye-gone age of hand-crafted beauty that has it own separate set of visual charms. To this day I admire and celebrate well done analog prints as a highly disciplined art form of its' own.
I then dedicated myself to the digital process and relentlessly digging deep into its' own set of visual attributes. Having been deeply involved with the dark-room helped a lot because I knew what I was looking for … not to duplicate, but to exploit what digital could offer as a new aesthetic discipline. So far it has been very rewarding and fulfilling … and the most unendingly expensive thing I've done in the name of art.:facesmack:
- Marc