Film has left the building…
I got my first camera when I was about six or seven. It was a pretty basic Instamatic affair, took 110 film cartridges and had a lens the size of a freckle. And a purple shutter button if I remember correctly. My mother worked on the photography counter at Boots in Hartlepool from the age of 14 until she was whisked away to the Midlands, and she handed it down to me.
From that point on I was hooked. I would take pictures of anything that moved and everything that didn’t. I have a box at home stuffed with pictures of family members, my Scalextric set, my Dad’s constantly changing company cars, etc. etc.
Christmas 1986 brought my first 35mm camera. A new fangled Snappy S compact camera made by Canon. Suddenly, pictures were in focus, correctly exposed and the negatives were full size like proper professional ones! It just made me more determined to capture everything in front of me. And obviously mother was paying for the processing!
My first SLR came a couple of years later from a school friend who had no use for it. It was a Praktica. It was forged from solid steel and was completely manual. It had a light meter built into the top that never told the truth. It was a rude awakening. But it didn’t really replace the Canon until the mysterious world of the school darkroom was introduced to us. And darkrooms are where I spent a lot of my free time through art college and uni.
There’s nothing like getting your hands on the hidden workings of film processing. Having such control over your images makes it very hard to go back to High Street labs. For some bizarre reason, I never considered photography for a career, and so once I moved to London with my graphics degree and started having to earn a living, photography took a back seat in a massive way. I had a jazzy new Pentax SLR camera, but it only came out to play on special occasions. Boots in Hackney seemed to have an uncanny way of mangling all my films, and using pro labs was too expensive. The final straw came with my friends’ wedding when Kodak in Camden managed to process all my film after seemingly dragging it through a dustbath.
The next month I bought a Canon Digital Ixus 400. Yes, there was a level of sacrifice in the quality, and I felt like I was breaking some unwritten law by turning my back on film, but once again I was back in control. I kept the Pentax, but it wasn’t long before I was hankering after a digital SLR.
6 months on and it’s time to send the Pentax to it’s new owner (thanks eBay). I thought I’d feel bad. I know I’ll probably never own a film camera again. I’ll almost definitely never process another film myself. But the expense, time and wastage are the only things I’m losing. Everything else is just nostalgia.
Add comment September 26th, 2005
