Shooting Film Again

For no reason at all, I'm shooting film again. It's amazing how a cheap film camera can produce very good images and the negatives would easily outlast your electronic media (floppy, CD, DVD, every generation has a shorter lifespan than the previous). I remember how I just abandoned all my cassette tapes and floppy disks when something better came along.

The catch is that I no longer have the patience for darkroom, I only develop black and white film in a change bag and do the sloppiest scanning with a flatbed scanner.  So, is there certain je ne sais quoi about film? I am not sure a casual viewer would ever notice the difference, and we can safely disregard the opinions of the photo technicians (most of them mistakenly call themselves photographers because they follow the camera industry and take pride in knowing how to use their equipment, I'm afraid I'm a member of this group).  Photography is the largest and lamest hobby in the world simply because anyone with a pulse can do it, to use a computer analogy, we amateur photographers think we can write good novels by using the word processor correctly, and we must upgrade to the latest and greatest version and all great writers must be using something vastly more expensive.

Back to the subject of shooting film, the only reason for me to go back to chemical photography is nostalgia, I can still remember how it felt like Christmas morning in my school darkroom waiting for prints to develop. Today's printer does come close with a lot less trouble and there's no point in wet photography anymore until I heard somebody made a statement to the effect that "the medium itself is the message".  I am still dumbfounded by this assertion, how is it possible to convey more (whatever) with a fuzzy Polaroid?  I can accept that it's possible to convey something more profound in a drawing than a photograph even the photograph contains more information. The engineer in me just cannot accept the argument that less can be more in a mechanical process such as photography, one can always photoshop a more detailed image into lesser one but the message doesn't change, right? Errr, truth of the matters is Andy Warhol prints are still popular and the great engineer artist has yet to be born in this world.