photographs......film vs digital.

I have several box’s of my mothers Polaroids.
She loved those cameras. I found a Kodak 110 in one of the box’s years ago and tried to get it developed but the something had happened to the film and they were not able to make it happen. I do enjoy looking through photos.

My grandfather and father both had a bunch of glass plate negatives which I still have. My previous father in law served 30 years in the Army and was also a photography nut. I had boxes of negatives from his Crown Graphic of which most were lost during a hurricane. I had saved several before that happened and here is my favorite. Generals Wainwright, Eisenhower, and Admiral Leahy doing an inspection of a base in Panama shortly after WWII ended as they all knew the importance of the Canal in any future conflict.

grew up with the 126 cartridge cameras (because they were cheap and fit in the pocket) in the 80's along with 35mm cameras.

Had an uncle that was a member of the local photo club since he was a teen, a cousin followed and did photography for the local news paper. old single use flash bulbs, flash cubes, xenon strobes. My uncle was partial to his vertical viewfinder cameras from the 70's and 80's with more adjustment knobs than the dash of the space shuttle

Dad had a fuji and a pentax with a dozen lenses.
cousin had a bunch of nikons with about 30 lenses

I did the SLR cameras as soon as they fell below $500 in the early 90's Ex wife killed most of them

film is "warmer" however limited to the equivalent of 14megapixels in resolution. today, my phone has a better camera quality and shoots 4k video. but it just feels wrong and disconnected compared to lining up that one shot and the mechanical "click...click....click" of the shutter

dingbat said:

My grandmother had half a storage unit full of pictures and slides. Most pictures she left behind were of people and places long since lost from memory.

Truth being, most pictures will never see the light of day after the collage comes down after your funeral.

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I see this every time my wife and I go 'antiquing'...browsing thrift stores and the like...one often comes across photos from the past, and yes, that picture MEANT something to someone at some time. Now just cast aside, not even a memory anymore. So sad.

bajaman123 said:

I see this every time my wife and I go 'antiquing'...browsing thrift stores and the like...one often comes across photos from the past, and yes, that picture MEANT something to someone at some time. Now just cast aside, not even a memory anymore. So sad.

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Mrs. Dingbat and I did a lot of antiquing in our younger days as well.

Finding out our kids have no interest in this “old stuff”. Never thought I would have to beg family members to pass heirlooms on to the next generation

DeepCMark58A said:

Where do you find a place that still develops film?

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I've got a local shop that processes film, and will deliver negatives and prints and/or will scan to digital from film.

Dad shot pro and for MI ANG. I shot pro for a number of years. I have most of the cameras, and still shoot both film and digital.

Most of my life is recorded on 35mm slides that Mom and Dad shot. And one thing I like about digital is IF I keep up with it and dump the photos by date and event on a SSD drive (or online drive) - you can sit there and run through 'em like lookin' at the old slides. Just pop a bag or two of popcorn, cast 'em up to your TV and go.

Indeed.
First camera was a home brew pinhole box camera using 126 film. 126 film in and of itself was not all that bad.
Then came the cheapo 110 cameras that really stepped backwards in quality, along with Kodak's Disc system.
Polariods always had their place with me - mostly in taking photos of test equipment CRT screens when performing proof-of-performance testing. Mom sure loved hers though, and there are even quite a few left that survive.
Dad had an inexpensive Japanese 35mm camera from the early 60s that he, then I used extensively. I've still got his old prints and color slides.
My brother bought Dad a Kodak instant camera back in the 80s, and then Polaroid sued Kodak, with the end result being film was no longer available for it.
As an adult, I was finally able to afford a decent SLR, and I still have all the negatives and prints from it. I've also scanned in the negatives.
Switching to a DSLR in the mid-2000s, I never looked back.
The thing I've noticed is that I no longer shoot as well as I used to. Not that I can't make decent looking photos - quite the opposite. What I mean is that with film, I shot to make every click of the shutter release count. I composed the shot in the viewfinder. Now I can just click away and take 20 images of the subject, and then correct for whatever flaw might exist with photo editing software.
The hard thing to do is to train myself to delete the shots that aren't needed.
As for archiving those digital shots, I keep them on a fault-tolerant RAID and also dump that off to optical medium yearly. I started with CD-R, went to DVD+/-R and now have them on Blu-Ray M-Disc. The ones I really don't want to lose are in cloud storage. I figure I'm doing all I can to keep bit rot at bay. Having a possible 1000-year archival storage format goes a long way to making this happen.

35mm and 120 right out of the gate for me. I still have the 1950-something Kodak 35mm that I learned on. Dad had 8x10 cameras and Hasselblads. I still have his Leica M4. I shot mostly Minolta.

I finally got a Nikon DSLR a few years ago, but I shoot just as much on my iPhone as I do my Nikon. I hate to admit how good the phone is.

kd4pbs said:

The thing I've noticed is that I no longer shoot as well as I used to. Not that I can't make decent looking photos - quite the opposite. What I mean is that with film, I shot to make every click of the shutter release count. I composed the shot in the viewfinder. Now I can just click away and take 20 images of the subject, and then correct for whatever flaw might exist with photo editing software.

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Yup. I have to make sure I pay close attention when I'm really shooting - so I don't get too lazy.