Back to the Dark Ages

I just bought about $120 worth (after shipping costs) of chemicals and other various necessities to develop black and white film in my home.

Why, you may ask, when I have a digital SLR camera, do I feel the need to return to the darkroom of yore? Isn't film a dead medium?

Bullshit, I say. For one, I like the feel of tangible film over digital ghost files. There's something to be said about laboring for your work, doing things by hand, actually spooling the film onto the developing reel and then pulling it out, all wet and slick and so concrete.

Secondly, I just feel that black and white film gives much more depth to an image than simply converting a digital image from color to black and white or vice versa. The image was meant to be shot in black and white, and I feel like that adds a certain weight to it. It's not switching to black and white because your image was underexposed, or because there are too many distracting colors in it. You actually looked at a scene in color and had to convert it to black and white in your head before making the shot. It's a totally different way of viewing a shot. It's ignoring color and looking at light. And I love it. I haven't shot black and white film in over a year, and I'm itching to get back into it.

And yes, there's a darkroom on campus that's fairly cheap to join if you're a student ($76/quarter), and it is open 24 hours. The downside is that I no longer live close to campus and the latest I can stay without being stuck here overnight is 9PM, which is when the last shuttle to Hillcrest leaves. And driving in is expensive, not to mention bad for the environment. Plus parking's a bitch. So it's not really so much of an option, although if I want to eventually make prints from my negatives I'm going to have to join, or buy an enlarger for myself. But that's a whole 'nother level to this hobby. For now, I'm planning on scanning the negatives into my computer and dealing with them digitally from there on.

Another cool thing about black and white film - I can get ISO 3200 film and maybe try using that to shoot some concerts. It gives fantastic grain and works really well in low light, so it'll be cool to see how it works out. And that's even better than my digital camera, which can only be pushed to ISO 1600.

Something else that I forgot to mention previously - I have my dad's old Canon AE-1 fully manual camera, which uses a type of lens that is pretty much obsolete (FD versus EF lens mount). You can't use these lenses on any camera made after 1987. But you can definitely still find them, as glass that is well taken care of can last pretty much forever. What does this mean? EBAY!!! I just bid $10.50 on an FD lens whose homologous EF lens costs over $300. Hells yeah.

Next up after this adventure - learning how to develop color film. That should be interesting...