THANK goodness for the digital camera. Back in the yesteryears, our options were either the 35mm or 110mm. Having owned both a 35mm and 110mm camera, I’m appreciative of the modern day digital models and smartphones.
Unless you were a professional, using a non-digital camera was kind of similar to the lottery: hit the shutter button and hope for the best, then find out if you’d got lucky when the photos were collected from the chemist.
My experience of using the roll of film camera went something like this:
Drop my three rolls of used film off at the chemist. A week later, I’d pay an absolute fortune to collect the developed photos. Filled with excitement, I’d dash home and look forward to seeing the fruits of my snapping. I’d start flicking through the photos… great photo followed by shaky photo… blinding bright photo followed by pitch black photo… no photo followed by another no photo… the whole shebang was a bit like the lottery.
The final calculations were as follows:
Photos taken = 72
Cost to develop = Painfully expensive.
Acceptable photos = 40 (at a push)
Success percentage = 55.5%
The strange thing is this: even though I love the modern digitial cameras, I now rarely have any physical photos. With the non-digital cameras and film, I got a photo that could be stuck into an album and enjoyed from gereration to generation. I now have a tendancy to put my photos onto a hard drive or USB memory stick; I have the intention to eventually print them but I never have. For the last two years my wife and I have been talking about printing-off our honeymoon photos – yes there are still stuck in a cloud somewhere in Apple-world. Maybe, just maybe, a non digital camera may be more beneficial for me considering my procrastination with printing photos taken with the iPhone and digital camera. There’s just the question mark around whether I’d send the film away to be developed, or will there be a collection of undeveloped rolls of film stashed-away in a shoebox?
Reminisce on the Keep it with Kodak advert below