WPPD – Selfie! and a little venting.

Photography, Thoughts and Opinions

I suppose I might as well continue with my pinholday pinhole photos. This is the 4th photo from that day that I liked. It has become a habit to make the last roll on my Terrapin* an arms length selfie and I like to grab whoever is with me to play along. In this case we have my buddies (clockwise from myself on the left) Remko, Brendan, and Inge . What a fun day that was! Looking forward to next year’s meetup in San Francisco!


Geeky Bits:

Camera: Terrapin Bijou, Incher configuration
Film: Ektar 100
Exposure time: 5 seconds


 

Mini rant:

So yesterday I made the mistakes of reading the comments on a Petapixel post that compared a film photo and a digital photo (I know, I know. Don’t read the comments). There was the inevitable “Who shoots film these days” comment, and there were several people defending the use of film with the “who uses film these days” guy brushing off the arguments and not listening. Typical online argument.

I found myself in a similar predicament in real life a few months ago. I was explaining my pinhole photography to someone and mentioned that I used film (“You can still buy film?!?”) and she couldn’t understand why I would use film. She then proceeded to list all of the ways film fails to digital and I found myself in a discussion where I had to defend my use of film. It kind of sucked. And I didn’t feel like having this kind of discussion so I changed the subject. But I think about it a lot, especially when the film vs. digital topic comes up. Here is what I have to say to people who are so vehemently against the use of film photography:

  1. Why do you care? What does it matter if I use film or if I don’t use film? What does my creative medium of choice matter so much to you? Why can’t you focus on your creative medium of choice and I will focus on mine and we can respect each other’s work, instead of nitpick the way we approach it.
  2. Artists in other mediums don’t have this heated debate, so why should photographers? People who draw digitally don’t disparage those who draw with a paper and a pencil and vice versa.  People who write using a computer don’t care if someone is writing a manuscript using a pen and paper. I mean, seriously, who fucking cares what medium is used to produce the art? What matters is the outcome. And why should one artist waste their time worrying about how another artist produces their creation.

The Digital Vs. Film argument is stupid. Just stop it already.

/end rant


*Incidentally, the first photo I took with this camera was an arms length selfie!