This is a grab shot with my Ricoh GR III as I was walking down the street. The GR III is a digital camera and it took me less than two minutes to pull the file off the SD card, load it onto my computer and open it in Photoshop and scale it for the web.
OK, so it’s not a great shot, but the ease of getting from the decision to take a photo through to having a file I could print or put on the web is undeniable.
Contrast that with using a film camera.
I wrote about it a week ago after I bought an Olympus XA2 film camera – you can read the article here – and now I have finished the roll of film I put into it.
Years ago I would have developed the film and printed it at home. That was when I had a darkroom. And if I had the space to set up a permanent home I might do it even now. Digital is so much easier, and film is getting more expensive every year. But still.
Someone once said that with digital cameras the technology is in the camera but with film the technology is in the film itself. Looking at it that way, a film camera is just a lens and a box with a timer, more or less.
I remember picking up my Nikon FE film camera that I hadn’t picked up for years, opening it and thinking how Victorian it looked with the sprockets and steel rails, the pressure plate and the shutter blades.
But this roll is from the XA2 and I have just bought ‘develop and scan’ from Analogue Wonderland. They are a UK based company and they take the order online and provide the postage label to send the film for processing to them via Royal Mail.
They don’t send scans back by mail. Rather, they provide a link to an account area to download the digital files from there.
The next post on this topic will hopefully include photos of what I photographed.
If you are wondering how to get a print from a digital negative, it’s a matter of inverting the image in Photoshop and then tweaking it to taste.
Message From Analogue Wonderland
Share this link to give your friends free Roll of Kentmere 400 35mm Film (36exp).
[We’ll send you 250 Referral WonderPoints when they make a purchase.]
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