Always behind the curve with film (small rant)

[Pherdinand]

agree: you need new relatives who better appreciate your work😀

 

[css9450]

My dad, when he first got his digital P&S, would faithfully download all the pics and save them on a CD, which he would make copies of and mail to all of his relatives. The pictures were set up to display as a slide show.

Imagine his disappointment when he heard from one or more of them that they never watched more than a few pictures of the slide show! It was just too time consuming to watch the whole thing.

 

[jsrockit]

My way around this is to not make family photos unless they all want to sit or stand for proper portraits. I did this for my family a year ago and delivered the prints months later. Everyone was happy because they knew they couldn't do it with their iPhone.

 

[MikeMGB]

I'm fortunate that most of my family and friends are all old-fashioned and love film photographs, they want the instant gratification of digital but they also wait to see what I produce. However, I do my best to have everything processed and scanned within 24 hours so they can see the images while everyone is still talking about the event.

 

[Colin Corneau]

"Doc, it hurts when I do this"

Then don't do that.

 

[x-ray]

Normally I never take a camera to family gatherings. One, my family is tiny and two no one cares if there are pictures. The one time I took a camera was a few years ago and was my wife's mothers 80th birthday. It was on the other side of the country in Arizona so I decded to take a Nikon D3100 that I bought specifically as a vacation camera. At the party I was roped into shooting candids. What I did was shoot jpg's and after the party took the SD card to Walgreen's and printed a set of the best for each family. Getting the prints was quick and easy and the quality was good and they were inexpensive.

even a better solution, let everyone shoot their own photos on their phone and you enjoy the event and visit with family. It's just too easy to turn something like this into a job.

 

[Steve M.]

Sounds like the op is just using his film camera for snaps. Probably not the best use of the medium. A phone is all you need for that. On the other hand, when I look through anniversary pics of the wife and I, I don't pay much attention to the digital pics, but the ones that were made w/ medium format folders where I had them loaded w/ Tri-X and asked a passer by to take our pic after I had set the focus and aperture for them, those shots look really, really good.

I can't remember the photographer's name right now, but it was a very famous one, and she and her friend used to go out (think they used 2x3 and up cameras) and come back from a days shooting, develop the negs right away, go into the darkroom and make prints, and have them pinned to the wall a few hours later. That's an excellent standard to aim at, and doing that is very different than sitting on them for a spell, scanning them and posting them to the internet.

I only did this once and wow, it put me in touch w/ my subject a lot more and added a lot to my photography. Why didn't I do it all the time? Good question. Laziness perhaps.

 

[Jim Smith]

Your famous photographer was Dorothea Lange, active in the thirties through the fifties.

 

[Timmyjoe]

I come from a family that doesn't live long. My brother and I are the oldest males in our family line in four generations. Not to be too morbid, but I take B&W film images of all the family gatherings, in a way to remember all those we have lost. I've been doing this for decades, and those beautifully toned B&W images of Uncle This and Aunt That, sharing happy times with nieces, nephews, grandchildren, bring me (and others in the family) a warm glow of remembrance now that they're gone. So I'll keep shooting B&W film of the family, as long as I am able. It's how I remember.

 

[farlymac]

I tend to not worry about what my family thinks of my photos. Since I don't do FB and the like, I do make CD's of special events, but not of the other things. I'd get prints made for my parents since they didn't do anything related to a computer. Only one or two of my siblings bother to look at my Flickr pages (and I've got 8 siblings), so it doesn't matter if I did post family stuff (which I normally don't).

Hopefully, one of them will take the time to go through all the boxes of my photo CD's after I'm gone. And if not, I won't be around to feel bad about it.

PF

 

[_goodtimez]

Once upon a time my wife showed me a black&white print from a digital picture. She was founding it nice. I was not so much enthousiast, so I offered her to make an identical picture, her with the digital camera, me with a film camera.
Once we compared both printouts side by side, she was astonished of how she had forgot how good a printed black&white picture coming from film could be !

 

[lxmike]

We live in a world where, 'instant gratification', is now the preferred norm, people find it strange that some still shoot with film and 'wait for the results, they mostly fail appreciate the effort that goes into the process of shooting film and at worst do not care. Your philosophy of, 'shoot for yourself and if others appreciate it then all the better', is a good outlook to have

 

[Corran]

I think I can understand your family's position when it can take up to a month to develop the photos and then they are put on a website that most folks have no interest in using, especially with how bad Flickr has gotten.

Film can be almost as fast as digital, if you put in the effort to make it so. I sometimes beat my digital-shooting friends to the punch - developing and scanning photos before they can parse through their hundreds of RAW files. Film has an inherent advantage in pre-exposure culling in that regard. And then obviously just upload things to Facebook, not Flickr.

 

[goamules]

Yes, I've had the same experiences. In the race to "get it captured and prove it happened", a camera photographer will not win. What I've noticed is people shoot the cellphone shot, always just a posed snap of everyone huddled in front of a sign or in a bar, then hold the phone up for everyone to see! It's like using the cell phone as a mirror, to check your clothes and makeup - just then and there. After that, it's only purpose is to post on Facebook later for the bragging rights: "I was at Bubba Gump's Shrimp....I was on the beach at sunset....I had to drive to Omaha...."

There....is....NOTHING....photographic....about ....it. People aren't looking at composition, lighting, mood, nothing but "proof I was there."

 

[Godfrey]

If your enjoyment of photography is in having people tell you how much they enjoy your photographs of them and their family, quit the film business entirely and get a good smartphone. You can make superb photographs with a good smartphone and some decent software and you'll be right in there on timeliness to satisfy your family's desire for pictures 'at the moment'.

If however you derive great satisfaction from making good quality photographs with a fine camera, either digital or film, and making beautiful prints from them, then do what you like to do and don't worry about whether anyone else in the universe even notices.

G

 

[mlu19]

+1 to Godfrey.

Try delivering prints, even small 4x6's, to people. Digital is just so much more convenient and efficient to fulfill the instant gratification that I lust. But nothing beats prints in the long-run (even better if you can wet print and frame it!).

 

[pvdhaar]

If however you derive great satisfaction from making good quality photographs with a fine camera, either digital or film, and making beautiful prints from them, then do what you like to do and don't worry about whether anyone else in the universe even notices.

Not only is this very solid advice about how to deal with being behind the curve, it's also a very good recipe for creating your very best images..

Far too much potential and talent is spoiled by catering to other people's whimsies.