Inheriting a film camera made me think.

Working in IT I’m very much reliant of the digital paradigm. The majority of everything I produce can be broken down to its binary form, a form that has no meaningful physical state. The words I write, the photos I capture, they exist as representations in memory locations -without computation they mean nothing.

I was sitting on the train back to my parent’s house yesterday, leafing through a set of prints I recently had developed of a day out in Oban, listening in on the kids sitting across from me as they lampooned my archaic medium. The gist of their derisions accumulated to; if it won’t go on Facebook, why did you bother?

When I handed my film camera to a stranger, on said day in Oban, to take a picture of Jo and I (see scan below), he depressed the shutter then went to look for an LCD screen to review:

“Its film, you’ll need to wait a while till you can see that…”

“Oh, that’s… cool”

The guy (about the same age as me) looked genuinely baffled– not in a bad way, just surprised.

Let me ask a question. Remember back in the day (ha) when you had Bebo, a 56K connection and a Dell/Tiny 800MHz desktop your folks bought from Comet – how many pictures did you lose when you switched to Facebook, got broadband and joined the multi-core revolution? I’m not assuming everyone did, but when transitioning I bet some of you forgot to backup files, files which held dear memories, files that would have been better stored in a more physical format.

Digital storage seems to devalue importance. Pictures are important to me. The photo-processor is going to busy…

P.S I’ll print this post to avoid hypocrisy ;)