simonw wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2020 10:22 am
(which is massively easier than messing around with cupboards under stairs and weird red lights!).
Very true, of course. It was a giant faff involving lots of time and chemicals. But I must say I loved it. I would sometimes spend a whole night with the enlarger (Oh, that sounds all wrong...!), developer / stopper/ fixer etc.
Photography just feels so casual and disposable now. With a reel of 35mm film you had 36 exposures (just 10 on my old Mamiya 6x7) which you rationed carefully and made the most out of. Creative manual work then went into processing and particularly printing. It was relatively expensive and you took more care over each exposure/print.
I'm not a total luddite. I do use a digital camera. But I can't get the enthusiasm for it that I used to have for roll-film.
I know what you mean about it seeming casual and disposable now. I think there are two elements to that. The first is that phones take some incredible pictures which are quickly and easily shared. With so many people taking so many good pictures in increasingly more accessible locations, great photos are everywhere. Previously many of these sorts of photos were only consumable in a glossy magazine, taken by a pro on an 8x10 who had spent 3 weeks getting to the location by boat and donkey. Every photo you now take is competing with thousands. Add in the fact that it's so easy to add a nice sky and bump the saturation, for example, in post processing and you end up feeling like it's all so easy and disposable.
The second contributory factor to that, I think, is that it's easy for you to do just the same too - wander around with you Z6 (or whatever) on full auto, click, click, click (doesn't matter how many you take - it's all free!), drop it into some post processing software and click "auto" and there you have it. I tried to mitigate the latter by pretending that instead of having 1,000 shots available to me on my memory card, I only had 36, so each shot had to count. I also started using a tripod to slow me down and force me to more carefully consider each position (even though you can hand-hold at nutty exposures these days), but frankly that just became a pain in the arse!
