Days of Film

 

Recently I saw on social media where someone posted a whole lot of photos from their 'early years' and they extolled the special 'look' of film vs born digital pictures.  I have also noticed how a lot of people still use film and claim that it just looks better.  Anyway, I decided to go back and look at all my old pictures.

I took a lot of pictures back in the days of negatives and slides.  One thing I noticed right away is that most of my old slides and negatives we're poorly scanned.  Back in the day I had very little memory space on my computer hard drive and I intentionally scanned my photos to be less than like 250K.  Yikes!  It looks like I should be re scanning a lot of my old pictures!

But I did find that some of my old film photos - mostly the archaeological projects - have been scanned at high resolution.  So I decided to concentrate on the photos from one archaeological project from the early 1990s - the three summers I spent on an archaeological project in outer Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island in northeast Canada. I remember that back in the day I thought I took a lot of spectacular photos on that trip.

Today looking at the photos critically they looked scratched up, grainy and slightly blurry.  Worse yet the colors are simplistic and the exposures lack dynamic range.  They look about like the born digital pictures from 6MB cameras circa 2006 (maybe worse).  I noticed that the exposure plate on the old cameras used to scratch the film as it slid across from one reel to the other. I also noticed that more often than not I missed the exposure entirely.  At the time when you took the picture there was no feedback from the view finder.  You did not get your photos back until months later.  I remember getting the exposure wrong consistently for entire summers of fieldwork (usually all too dark).  

Also film was expensive and you only got 36 pictures per roll of film.  You generally only took one picture at a time and there was very little experimentation.  Heaven help you if everybody's eyes were closed or you missed the composition.

Anyway, I looked at my baffin photos and thought 'yuck!'.  Many of these photos I would not even keep today.  So, needless to say, but I do not miss the days of film!

Patrick

A late Dorset house with central hearth

Willows Island excavation

the bear that tried to eat me

An old tent ring - maybe hundreds of years old - just sitting there on the surface