Film Status

(I prepped this post pre-sabbatical, two years ago; forgive me for losing the source of the quote–although I suspect it’s Araki-san. Also, kindly note that, being fourth declension, the plural of “status” is “status.”)

“Photography needs to be sentimental. That dry brightness that digital cameras create, that’s not sentimental at all. Colors created with the three primary colors have a very simple impact, but there’s a melancholy at the same time. Colors don’t turn out the way you want them to be, that’s what so good about them.

“Perfect colors are not to be researched like that… To be extreme, you look at black and say, it’s red. That’s art. Creating ripples among people is what art does and its the density of art, but before that, you have to feel the ripple in yourself.

“It’s not exciting because there are stupid guys who ignore that, trying to figure out how to create real colors. They say, ‘If you use this digital camera, you can take a clear picture in the dark’. The dark should stay dark. You can’t really see that much, and you don’t really want to see that much anyway.

“Humidity and darkness are very important elements in photography, so you have to be careful with digital cameras because they sort of kill those elements, I say. I, too, use them, sort of recording things in everyday life for fun, though.”

Synaesthesially speaking, this is not so different from vinyl records versus compact disk recordings.

Film vs. No-Film

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“Twitchy;” Not Twitchy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/instagram-collective-act-self-delusion

Degas

http://arpeggia.tumblr.com/post/37758339933

“Meaning is mushy. Meaning falls apart.”

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1040&fulltext=1&media=

Excuse me: digital humanities? Somehow not unrelated: as Howard Hampton put it in, mid-paragraph (and the Times placed it, at the top of the column), this Sentence Of The Week: “The random gush of information and observation starts to coalesce into patterns; the leapfrogging backward and forward in time is gradually shaped into history, or at least becomes dried handprints in the warped concrete of memory.”

Doh Puuh Wuuh Ih Ma Mahf

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/10/digital-photographers-insecure.html

Not Dead.

Yet. (Ever?)

Many of you know how this guy feels:

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/09/random-excellence-the-lazy-aussie.html

Work in Progess/Process

Not that anyone’s on tenterhooks, but some negatives are made, and what remains is what has been called the “photo-finishing.”

As a further preview, here’s a little sample ‘shopping:

Yep.

You don’t have to abandon the process you enjoy

In response to this week’s alarmist articles about film’s allegedly imminent demise, Blake Andrews posted on his blawwg: “I must live in some film bubble timewarp because virtually every photographer I know in Portland still shoots film. My photogroup Lightleak has eight to twelve members depending on what month it is and who shows up, and every one of us is a film shooter.”

If you have asked about this, or paid attention to conversations and posts, you already know that most of the following is reasonable. Nonetheless, this article by Ctein…

…makes long-term planning clearer: http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/06/film-photography-future.html

A Game Changer for Film

…or at least a game, anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWU3-gA3ueo&feature=player_embedded

(You don’t have to wait until the day after March to watch this.)

George Santayana Weighs In

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Only coincidentally, both these links happen to be to National Public Radio.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/02/04/133188723/tools-never-die-waddaya-mean-never

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/03/09/134391895/the-legacy-of-the-cd-innovation-that-ate-itself?ft=1&f=100