Roll Film Cameras are the Best

This past summer, me and the wife went to Italy, as I posted about extensively.

Today, we finally developed the film camera photos!! I'm really excited about this because I've been on this tirade of preserving things important to my human nature. The immediate results of phone cameras dilutes the value of each photo, but also makes the whole thing a far more casual, meaningless endeavour.

Oh look a random statue I know nothing about - let's have a selfie next to it
Oh look, a person in a funny suit, I'll take a photo of that.

With a film camera, you can't see the results until you take the whole set home, send it off and wait for its development, then get it delivered back to you (or pick it up).

That means, as I personally experienced, when you mess it up, there is an absolute despair. I was using my wife's fathers 20+ year old camera, and there was a dial on it that changed the focus. I had no idea about it until I was 20 photos in, and I had been taking blurry photos the whole time. Argh!

But this is the point. It's an experience that has some risk and significantly more reward when you see the successes. Lessons are learnt, and already I can feel such a great value in these printed photos compared to the ones on my phone, which I will maybe scroll past in my occasional bout of deleting pictures to clear out hard drive space, but otherwise ignore until the day my phone dies.

These human elements just feel like they have more heart and soul, and the pictures reflect this, with a warmth that comes from the fact that they are actually lower quality than some 700 megapixel, 150x zoom lens camera highlighting every pore on your face. It softens the appearance of skylines and sunsets and over time creates that bittersweet nostalgia we all cherish in that weird way.

Anyway, here's some of the ones I particularly liked:

Yeah ok some random people's fat heads are in the way, but look at that Florencian sunset.

What I found fascinating is that there's no filter here. That yellowness is just exactly how it was taken. On the very same film using the exact same camera and the exact same settings, there's also this photo in Japan during the winter. Look at the huge difference in colour:

Crazy. They had this particular street temporarily closed and pedestrianised for some unknown reason, which made for this great, car-less photo. It really looks like going back in time to 1980's Japan or something.

Here's a more similar comparison back in Italy:

It really kind of emphasises the difference in experience of the two places.

I like how I got photobombed by this giant, samurai sword-or-something-wielding person. Only just noticed today.

My food-oholic wife, newlywed in this pic! In contrast, I think in this situation, my photography skills are at least a smidgen superior.

A good chunk of the photo pile were failures, typically indoor stuff. Here's a picture of my cat:

... I think?