I, of all people, should have kept my love of film going.

I used to work at my local Jessops after university and subsequently became a lab technician developing the hundreds of rolls of filmed dropped in every week. Back then consumer 35mm cameras started to be replaced by APS, and medium format replaced by pro SLRs but the premise was the same as it was in previous decades: you had 24 or 36 shots to capture an event or your life and I was the person that would develop those memories if you lived in the central Croydon area.

There was nothing I didn’t see as the film ran through the scanner: from weddings to funerals; children’s parties with the obligatory picture of birthday child sat in their throne with cake in front of them; holidays from all over the world (the same picture of the Eiffel Tower gain and again); friends on a night out where no one understands the limits of their camera’s flash. I even offered to retouch photos as an extra service and got to see family memories from days gone by: men in the 1940s posing together before they went off to war; children in the 1960s sat on Santa’s knee at Christmas and black and white images of people long dead that meant something to probably only a few people left alive. Other lab technicians from other stores would pop in to visit and we would swap tales about what we saw on rolls film— the old couple dressed in full head-to-toe rubber suits or couples taking pictures of themselves mid-sex act. The magic of film — we saw it all.

“Nothing beat the smell, the feel and the authenticity of film.”

I took my love of film out of the lab and into the real world, experimenting with black and white, infra-red film and cross-processing. My staff discount meant that I could develop at low cost and scan at home. Back then colleagues passed around their photo imaging software to each other and I would spend hour after hour retouching images, enhancing and experimenting. Professional digital cameras were way more expensive than doing it this way and besides — nothing beat the smell, the feel and the authenticity of film. Right?

Then digital got more affordable. Being able to capture a picture and feed into your computer straight away meant more time out there taking pictures and more time in the editing suite. Film started to take up more time (loading, unloading, taking to develop, picking up the prints) and besides, our printers meant we could get physical copies at home and not have to bother with labs any more. I left my job at a top London lab as the trend started to turn downwards and even Jessops started to feel the change.

My Olympus OM became a shelf ornament, making way for my Fuji 6900z a hard-earned purchase that wasn’t quite a professional camera but looked like it. I became a minor celebrity amongst my friends who took all offers to be photographed, delighted to be able to see the images straight away in the tiny viewfinders. I would still fire off the odd reel of slide film to develop in C41 chemistry but less and less labs wanted to do this as it tainted the balance of their mini lab. They started to point the way to specialist labs for this service and after a while, it was just as easy to create the same look in Photoshop. No need for the middle man film any more.

“This was a time of quick pics. Take the pic, edit it and
bang it back out online.”

My semi-pro digital camera made way for am EOS 300D — my first digital SLR and with this the seriousness of taking pictures of bands, head shots, club nights and DJs. This was a time of quick pics. Take the pic, edit it and bang it back out online. People didn’t even want prints any more. You tagged them on MySpace or Dontstayin after Saturday night and they would then find and tag themselves on a Monday morning.

The Olympus OM and Fufi sold on eBay to make money to pay for my EOS upgrade. My Polaroid camera was sold as the company had decided to stop making the film. Not even the gift of a Lomo L-CA 35 mm camera few years later would reignite my old love of film fully. It and the Diana still sit on my shelf, true style icons with a whole hipster culture behind it, but I now have my Instagram account on my iPhone6. I can still “point and shoot” but now I get to see my pictures straight away. Oh sure, I made friends with the local lab that would develop medium format film and process exactly to my specs but it still took time and as I got older and my career developed to 40 then 50 then 60 hour weeks, that time got precious.

Still, as much as I try, photo editing software just can’t recreate the look of 3200 speed black and white film and I miss the element of surprise as I extend a roll of developed film and look at it frame by frame by holding it up to the light. Instagram has made me lazy. I add the same filter again and again, publish the image and then post online all within minutes. I used to pour over every detail of every image I took, developed, edited and printed. I can remember so many of the more iconic images of my early photographic love affair but couldn’t pick out stand-out image from the hundreds (maybe thousands?) from my hard drive from the past couple of years and I wonder why I take these pictures at all, if not just for the instant gratification.

“As much as I try, photo editing software just can’t recreate the look
of 3200 speed black and white film.”

Undeveloped rolls of 35mm and medium format film still sit in the back of drawers and have been calling out to me for some time now. They promise to produce memories on them that have been long forgotten. The calls are getting louder and now I have more time, I hear them even more than ever. I even found myself researching London labs that will take my film, bringing back old memories of companies I used to know and seeing who survived the transition from film to digital.

The Lomography cult seems not to have changed since I left it for it’s digital cousins either. It’s peak may have past as hipsters became jokes and apps became kings of the photographic castle, but I’m ready to spend the time again and use those little cameras as a way to rediscover film again. Maybe I can find another Olympus OM and run a couple of infer-red films out? My new daughter would make an ideal subject and I should be pouring over pictures of her, instead of spending the time saving phone pictures of her to folders I’ll never visit.

I’m sorry that I forgot about you film. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll start tomorrow. Who knows what we’ll do together but I can’t wait to spend the time finding out.