Digital photographs are so ubiquitous, and so easy to take that the pleasure of taking them has been somewhat reduced. I noticed this when I recently got back a batch of photographs taken on my various old film cameras – slides and negatives. There’s a thrill to the experience of seeing a “real” photograph that doesn’t happen with digital. Of course, digital photography is more convenient than film, the technical quality is higher, the flexibility of the finished photograph is greater and so on. But it the very limitations of photographic film are also its greatest strength. Much more of the photographed is “baked in” to a negative or transparency than into a digital file. This means you are forced to accept the limitations, and work with them.
Even when something goes wrong, the results are interesting. One image in the gallery below was taken with my rotating slit Horizon 202 panoramic camera. However, the picture was taken whilst I was rewinding, causing the image to blur in strange ways. There’s even part of a finger visible.
