Why I still shoot film?
I get asked this question a lot by family & friends and I have to say that sometimes I asked myself the same question, especially when things got wrong.
Yes, it's partly down to nostalgia, remembering the cameras the family had when I was a kid. It's also the tactile feel of using old manual cameras, loading the film, having to wind on to the next frame.
Although we have lost a lot of film emulsions, there still enough to give you plenty of different looks. There are also the weirder emulsions like Lomography turquoise, metropolis and purple and these are another reason to shoot film.
Along with the film there is the choice of cameras, my goto SLR is a Nikon F80 made from 2000 to 2006. The body is the same body that was later used as the basis of Nikon's DSLR camera.
Although this isn't the camera I have the most fun shooting film with as it does feel very much like a digital camera, it's the collection of cameras that Digital can't compare with. The half-frame, the Holga, the sprocket rocket and the pinhole cameras.
People will say “Oh, you can create that in photoshop”, no you can't, I've tried, it never looks right it's never the same as a film produced image. And who wants to sit in front of a computer manipulating images to look like them.
When you also added the Fuji Instax cameras into this, there are plenty of reasons to continue shooting with film.
After far too much travel where 3/4 of the gear I take along ends up not being used, I've been travelling for the past 6 weeks with an F80 and 24mm and 50mm lenses. And an orange filter.
It's a great little camera and if you're going to cover many KMs a day it's light, which makes a huge difference.