I spent two hours yesterday scanning a roll of film I’d shot nearly a year ago. Thirty-five frames of discontinued Kodak Portra 400BW black-and-white stock, exposed on a winter afternoon I’d completely forgotten about, finally converted into digital files I could actually view. The process was tedious—batch scanning in sets of twelve, waiting three minutes per frame, adjusting metadata, running batch conversions. It’s not nostalgia. I’m not pining for some imagined golden age of photography when everything was pure and authentic. Film is expensive, inconvenient, and objectively worse than digital for most practical purposes. My Fuji X-T3 produces sharper images with better dynamic range, costs nothing per frame, and shows me the results immediately. There’s no rational argument for loading expired Kodak stock into a 1980s Nikon and waiting eleven months to see what I photographed. Blue Spring Road, Skillman · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm Maybe rationality isn’t really the point. The roll sat in my camera for months. I started it in December 2023 with good intentions—proper documentation, meticulous record-keeping, careful notation of location and exposure settings. Then I abandoned all that and just drove around Montgomery Township shooting whatever caught my eye. Construction equipment on a residential street. A stone stack. Tree shadows across a colonial building. The kind of mundane observations you make when you’re not trying to make Art, just pointing a camera at the world and pressing the shutter. Blue Spring Road, Skillman · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm Those photographs sat unviewed for nearly two years. First in the camera, then at the processing lab, then in my drawer as negatives waiting to be scanned. At every stage, I could have looked at them sooner. But I didn’t, and that delay changed something. When I see an image immediately after shooting it, I’m still inside the moment. I experience the context, the intention, the specific quality of light or composition I was chasing. But when I see it years later, those connections have dissolved. I’m looking at evidence of a moment I no longer remember clearly—a version of my neighbourhood that existed before two winters changed everything. Blue Spring Road entrance to Autumn Hill Reservation, Skillman · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm Film enforces this distance, but not because of anything inherent to the medium. It’s just the workflow I’ve let happen. The delay between exposure and viewing isn’t a feature—it’s a consequence of how I’ve decided to use it. In the 1970s, plenty of people got their prints back from the drugstore in a week. The extended delays are something I’ve unintentionally created. I could achieve the same distance digitally. Just don’t look at the files. But I don’t, because that would require intention. Salisbury Road, Skillman · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm The technical process reinforces this. Scanning film is genuinely tedious. Two minutes per frame adds up quickly across a thirty-six-exposure roll. I batch-scan in sets of twelve because doing the entire roll at once is mind-numbing. I lock my exposure settings after the first frame and hope the rest of the negatives are consistent enough. I spend another hour running batch conversions and adding metadata. It’s manual labour in an age when most photography is automated. When I’m spending two hours digitising a roll of film, I notice things. I see the consistency—or lack thereof—in my exposures. I recognise patterns in my compositions, my choice of subjects, my handling of light. I’m engaged with every frame, even the unsuccessful ones, because I can’t just scroll past them. Salisbury Road, Skillman · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm Though honestly, I could achieve the same level of engagement with my digital work if I bothered to look at it with the same attention. The medium isn’t creating the insight—the time investment is. I’ve just made film photography artificially expensive in time and money, so I treat it more seriously. It’s a trick I’m playing on myself. This is completely backwards from how photography actually works now. The dominant model is high volume, instant feedback, ruthless curation. Shoot a few frames, review immediately, delete as needed, confirm the keepers before I leave the location. It’s efficient, and it produces good results. Digital photography is simply better for making photographs that matter. Eno Terra Restaurant & Enoteca, Kingston · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm Film photography—the way I’m practising it, anyway—inverts that model. Low volume, delayed feedback, minimal curation. Shoot thirty-six frames over several months, wait nearly a year to view them, keep everything because I’ve already paid for the processing. The aesthetic judgements happen much later, when I’ve forgotten what I was trying to achieve. But that’s not a virtue. It’s just a different set of arbitrary constraints, and I’m not convinced they’re producing better work. They’re producing different work, which I’ve decided has value because I’ve invested so much time and money into the process. It’s the IKEA effect applied to photography—I value these images more because I had to assemble them the hard way. Rider Furniture, Kingston · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm The irony is that I’m only able to engage with film this way because digital photography exists. The Epson V600 scanner, the Mac, Adobe Lightroom, Negative Lab Pro—all digital tools that make film practical for someone who isn’t running a darkroom. I’m using digital photography tools to support an analogue process. The workflow is hybrid by necessity, and the analogue part is purely decorative. When I scan a roll of film, I’m not creating anything that couldn’t exist digitally. I’m just adding steps. The two-hour scanning session isn’t some profound ritual—it’s just inefficient. The temporal distance I value could be achieved by simply waiting to look at my digital files. I’m using an obsolete medium as a crutch for habits I could develop with better tools. Kingston Historic District · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm That distance does reveal things, though. Patterns I wasn’t conscious of whilst shooting become obvious in retrospect. The number of times I photographed bare trees. The preference for overcast light. The tendency to shoot from inside the car rather than getting out and engaging with the scene. These patterns emerge when you see an entire roll at once, months after the fact. The medium isn’t creating the insight. The time gap is, and I could create that gap with any camera if I had the discipline. Telegraph House, Kingston Historic District · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm The expired Kodak stock performed as expected, which is both reassuring and slightly disappointing. I was half hoping for something interesting—grain anomalies, unexpected degradation. But properly stored film ages gracefully. The tonal range was decent, the grain structure fine, the negatives consistent across the entire roll. Which raises the question: why am I doing this? If the film performs like fresh stock, if the images could have been shot digitally with better results, if the entire workflow is just a complicated way to achieve something I could do more easily with the X-T3, what’s the actual point? Kingston Grist Mill, Kingston Historic District · Friday 22 December 2023 Nikon N2020 · ISO 400 · Kodak Portra 400BW AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 · 50 mm Maybe it’s just the challenge. Not the challenge of mastering film photography—I’m not particularly good at it, and I’m not trying to be. But the challenge of working within constraints, of making something work despite its inherent disadvantages. It’s problem-solving for its own sake, which is a polite way of saying I’m making things unnecessarily difficult because I’m bored. Digital photography is frictionless. Point, shoot, review, adjust, shoot again. The tools are so good that they barely resist. There’s little challenge in making a technically competent photograph with modern digital equipment. But 35mm film? It’s expensive, so I can’t afford to waste frames. It’s slow, so I can’t machine-gun my way to a good image. It’s uncertain, so I can’t know if I got the shot until weeks later. Those constraints don’t make the photographs better. They just make the process harder. It’s the same reason some people build wooden boats, or cook on cast iron instead of non-stick pans, or use manual transmissions when automatics are objectively superior. The difficulty is the appeal, even when the difficulty serves no practical purpose. I’m not going to pretend that difficulty equals virtue. Film photography in 2025 is a hobby, not a necessity. It’s a choice to work harder for results that could be achieved more easily another way. But I should probably stop looking for deeper meaning in what is essentially just me making things unnecessarily complicated because I enjoy the complication. When I finally saw those winter scenes from Montgomery Township and Kingston, they weren’t revelation. They were adequate documentation of an afternoon I barely remember, shot casually with a camera I’ve not mastered, on film stock I’ll never be able to buy fresh. Most of them are unremarkable. A few are interesting. None are particularly good. The satisfaction may not be in the images themselves. The satisfaction may be in having done something difficult for no good reason. If I’d seen these photographs immediately, shot digitally, they’d still be unremarkable. But I didn’t see them for a year, and I shot them on 35mm film, so I’ve convinced myself they matter more. It’s self-deception, but it’s self-deception in service of actually finishing projects and paying attention to my work. I’ll probably shoot another roll of 35mm film next month, and the month after that. Not because film is better, or more authentic, or produces superior results. Just because the challenge of working with an obsolete medium in an inefficient way gives me something that effortless digital photography doesn’t: the satisfaction of having done something difficult. Whether that’s actually worth two hours of scanning and the cost of film and processing is a question I’m not ready to answer honestly. ### Like this: Like Loading...

Spent two hours scanning a roll I shot nearly a year ago.