You might say that film and I...well...familiarity breeds contempt. Or maybe film breeds the contempt. I took pictures on film for 21 straight days, using a digital camera (my compact) pretty much just as a light meter. On the 15th I started to crack up, setting up a little flash-lit macro studio and shooting a bunch of objects in it, but of course I maintained the film month theme. Yesterday I decided (at last) to send back the big-deal pro medium format SLR I got last week (great deal, but just too much camera).

Today I just couldn't do it, so I put my good strap back on my digital SLR and threw it over my shoulder to go to Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice. I'll finish out my film month with this one misstep, but it has made me appreciate what excellent tools we have at our disposal.

I chose between two pictures, both of which were outside of the standard ruts I usually take pictures in. This one is...well, you tell me what it is. It's not like my usual static, crisp subjects anyway. The other was a color picture of American consumer excess. As much as I hate those, I will let myself indulge in this one, but I'll do it when the light balances better...

3 to 2 years ago, I didn't take a single picture for an entire year because I was so tired of developing failure after failure. A big part of my problem was that I wasn't thinking enough and trying to see, but another big part is that failing on film is devastating. When I take a bad picture digitally, it doesn't exist anywhere. It's numbers on a platter, and it can sit there forever without me seeing it. When I create a film failure, it exists, it's an object, and it torments me. Removing that negative strip from the scanner and having to put it away, having just verified that all the images on it are awful is such salt in the wound.

In elementary school, listing things we were thankful for was an annual exercise. I sort of intentionally don't talk much about my life and feelings here, and stick to photography and metaphotography, so although it's relatively low down on the list of important things I'm thankful for in life, I will say that as far as blipfoto is concerned I am very, very thankful for digital capture.

Besides, without it, blipfoto wouldn't exist! Believe me, trying to do this from film is awful. :)