... read on
It amuses the heck out of me the vast number of blogs and vlogs that have sprung up lately all waxing lyrical about and extolling the virtues of - that magical photographic medium - film, as if it was a new discovery. It's hilarious!
Many are Leica M film camera aficionados with the M6 being the not untypical instrument of choice though many sigh over the pure soul of the original M3. Black and White film working is also seen as the preferred artistic medium by many though, for those working in colour, Kodak Portra is the altar at which many worship.
One film photography blogger recently was complaining that they had discovered film five years back and they that had started the analogue photo blogging movement (a great exaggeration). Now they were being swamped by all the recent copy cat pretenders and worse they were starting to be killed off in recent months by the rise of multiple vloggers typically on YouTube explaining the joys of analogue (film) photography on video. Now there's irony for you.
So why does of all this make me grin so hugely? Well I was brought up on film, when it was the the only photographic medium and there was no such thing as digital photography and photography meant just that i.e. film and the term analogue would have just left people perplexed as to what you meant.
To people of my generation photography was film and film was photography and we serious photographers were steeped in it and very often the chemicals that came with it if you did your own processing.
There were no blogs nor vlogs nor for that matter any internet. Learning came from books (of which there were many), training courses, photographic clubs, darkrooms, and good old trial and error. You served an apprenticeship to learn your craft in many ways, even if you were self taught, as many were.
So you can appreciate why, after many decades of experience with and knowledge of real photography, as I am want to call it these days, it amuses me to hear all of these Jonny-come-very-latelies evangelising about this wonderful new analogue discovery of theirs and their "secrets" of using it and slagging each other off about who found it first.
Actually film in its current flexible roll form was created by George Eastment of Eastman-Kodak fame in 1888 and the Calotype the first ever negative/positive print process by Henry Fox Talbot in 1841.
So how about going to the library, remember those, and borrowing some of the extensive tomes on real photography or maybe hitting the second hand book shops, on-line if you like, for copies of the same where-in there is a wealth of knowledge to be found on every possible aspect of film photography you can ever think of garnered over decades by many very famous photographers and not a mention of the word analogue in sight.