…digital can never be film.

This is a photo of Kuulei from Niche that I did a little experimenting with.  We were shooting indoors, and it was kind of dark so I was pumping up the ISO with all the lovely nostalgia of film.  Sadly, the noise of digital photos will never have the same romantic quality of film grain.  Sure there are programs like Exposure 2 that will attempt to emulate the qualities of film, but it’s still not the same.

This is a self-portrait I took with Ilford Delta 100 last year, and printed it on matte RC paper.  That’s the actual border of the print too! (This image ended up being used for making inter-negatives and experimenting with various hand-applied emulsions.  So old school!)

I really need to start shooting/making small prints again.  With my access to the UH darkrooms about half a mile from me, what’s stopping me? The laziness of digital is. Heck, I’m too lazy to edit a lot of the digital photos I have, let alone go venture into the darkroom again.  But, my romance with the nostalgia of film grain keeps tugging at me to get out of my chair and back into the dark, so maybe…

Some people keep cheese in their refrigerator drawer. I don’t!

(And yes, that is some Polaroid Type 55 in there…and no, I”m not giving it up for anything!)

Today, Kodak announced that they will no longer be making Kodachrome film. But it will live on forever, partly in Koda’s name, partly in Paul Simon’s song, and as a legend amongst photographers.  I’ve never shot Kodachrome film myself, because by the time I was into photography it was far too expensive to buy and process for it to be wasted on me, but I do have this roll of Kodachrome 64 that I will keep as a memento of a different era in photography.

This photo was processed with the demo version of Alien Skin’s Exposure 2, set to Kodachrome 64. It’s unfortunate that this filter will be a ghost of film past, but at least it’s something?