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Why I Still Shoot Film
August 2016, Sao Paulo airport. I packed for a 10-day trip to Peru, a place I have never been. As usual, I took several lenses of various focal lengths, and two bodies for redundancy. But my most advanced camera, my most recent acquisition — a lightweight, professional Nikon Df — stayed home. Instead, I loaded my backpack with a 25-year old Nikon F4, and its younger brother F90. They don’t eat CF or SD cards, but rolls of film. They don’t run on lithium battery packs, but on these old AA batteries.
Why did I choose to limit myself to 504 exposures, instead of unlimited bursts of pixels?
Why am I ready to pay for processing film and wait for several days, or weeks, before seeing my pictures?
Why am I even bothering to write down data about exposure in a notebook, and individually label hundreds of slides, instead of using the EXIF Data?
1. Because film and digital are two different media.
Like vinyl and CD, film and digital are two totally different means of transcription of what our senses tell to our brain.
Film captures light through a chemical reaction. In a film camera, light is not coded into 0’s and 1’s, it arrives onto a real substance, a real material, and in a fraction of second, it changes it forever. The positive film that will be…
