I mean, it really takes you back. On Saturday, I went on an accidental 6mi walk with my friend Oksana. We hadn't quite meant for it to last around four hours, just like I didn't quite mean to have my barely-shod feet cemented in pond-mud when I went chasing after a small leopard frog at the end of our walk. What happened is what usually happens when Oksana and I get together: we couldn't stop talking. We touched on everything from amazing book series, high school memories, phantom beavers... Relevant to this post, however, we both realized that we had film to develop.
We undertook this task today. I knew mostly what would be on mine two rolls since they were only one year old, but her disposable cameras were four, some even five, years old. We handed them over to be processed, went out for frozen yogurt, spent an unnecessary (but totally necessary) amount of money at a used bookstore, and then headed back to pick up our pictures. Just like tiny time capsules, with each seal broken, we were suddenly escorted back to an older, ostensibly simpler time. She had pictures from our first tubing trip down Darby Creek, when my hair was still ridiculously long and my waist ridiculously smaller. Our last day of high school, our last ever chance to open the door of portable classroom B-2. There were smiling pictures of people we could barely remember, waddling penguins, Christmas trees wearing slippers. Every time she moved one to the bottom of the pile to reveal the next, our faces lit up and we laughed. I said "Oh, my God" like a broken record.
Well, anyway, my smallest roll of film (only 12 exposures) featured Oberlin, and mostly my first Josh Ritter concert last Fall. My friends and I sat in the balcony, pretty far away, so you really can’t make out much of his face, but the organ pipes in Finney Chapel .tower majestically over the audience. Even with my minimal talent, I've also played on that stage, under that organ. How many audiences those pipes must have seen! And then there is Tank, my humble abode for one and a half years. The sun is shining as we eat on the lawn. It’s open mic night, so there are people dancing in the background, people singing on the porch. Everyone looks happy. Everyone was happy.
It really made me think. We get so caught up in the moments of our lives that we don’t realize we’re happy. I’ve shed so many tears at Oberlin, for crushed dreams, friends who have passed, turned down invitations, academic insecurities. But in only 12 frames I managed to capture so much of what I often forget. Good music, good food, green lawns, historic houses, smiling faces… It was a gentle reminder that i’m going to go back in the fall, and it’s going to be okay. So, this is where I want to say that film is better than digital.
Why? Well, I'll tell you why! Unlike digital where you have a mistake margin of 600,000 pictures on your memory card and the ability to see and delete the crappy ones to make room, with film each frame is precious, not to be wasted. And you don't get to say "Oh, I look bad! Delete it! Let's do it again!" With each candid frame, you relive the moment just as it was when you hit the button--the original laughs, not the recreated ones. Even through the smiles, you can see sadness if it is there. The colors are real, the face are real. Every sense is captured on film. Even the developing is an experience--for me, sometimes of love, and sometimes very much of hatred. Nothing is more exhilarating to me than to flick on the lights in the negative room, finally open the developing tank, rinse the negatives, and then unroll them, revealing the thumbnails of your success. And nothing is more heart-wrenching than unrolling a set of 36 blanks--wasted time, wasted chemicals, lost memories. You run into the enlarger room and can make prints for hours of any size. It's your choice, and your fault if it screws up.
I'm not saying I don't like digital images. I don't think I would have been able to deal with wrestling my flim camera and my laptop all the way around Europe, and I don't think I'd have been able to fit that much film in my suitcase. All I'm saying is I don't feel the same connection to digital images, where all I have to do is copy & paste from my memory card, then resize if I want to, maybe play with the color settings a bit (make it look like I don't have a zit on my chin, y'know)... There's no sense of a battle fought and a battle well won, and I don't have anything to hold in the end. And, most importantly for this post, there is no element of surprise in digital images (if there is, it is almost minuscule). When I take old digital photos to be printed, I know exactly what I'm gonna get. When I look at my digital images, it's hard for me to feel any satisfaction comparable to what I feel when I look at the very first picture I took with my SLR, the very first picture I developed. I can remember where I took it, how I felt when I took it, who helped me develop it, how nervous I was... And then I can look at what I can do now, and it makes me so proud! It's been a long time since I had the luxury of marveling over negatives, so pardon me if I sound a little lovey-dovey. It just... well... it really takes me back. :)
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