Another one bites the dust

I woke up to news today that Kodak are selling off their film and paper division. This is another area of film photography which is rapidly slipping away, I'm sure quite a few of us film photographers will be buying up films such as Portra and Ektar over the next few months. As a photographer I love their film, Ektar is a firm favourite of mine for landscapes and nature shots, while Portra is the king of the portrait world. It's so sad that such wonderful film is being sold off, my only hope is that another company buys it and continues to manufacture it.

It makes me sad to think that another era of film photography is coming to a close, I know that photography has moved on, but there's a magic in film (or so I think). It's so nice to shoot with a beautiful old camera, to hear the clunk of the shutter like on my OM2 or to hear the click of it like on my Rollei, to wind on the film (or not to double, triple expose it), each shot with film demands your time and attention.

I love old photos on some beautiful film and paper, one of my favourite things to do is going through old family albums, and seeing the memories of the people I love the most. Thanks to film and real albums, I've seen my nan and granddad when they were younger, I've seen photos of my mum growing up, memories of my brother and I as children and days that I would have forgotten if it wasn't for film photography. I find that the photos I take of my friends and family now are lost in a sea of online photography, once taken they're almost forgotten about. We're in the age where everything has to move so fast, we take photos with our phones within seconds our friends can see them, now I love that as much as the next person but I can tell you this for a certainty, there is no better feeling than waiting for a roll of film to develop and to finally look at your shots. I think that feeling is where part of my obsession lies (as well as shooting with some amazingly beautiful cameras).

I implore you to go find an old camera, if you can't then you can pick one up cheaply enough and try to shoot film for yourself, capture some beautiful memories you can hold in your hands before the most amazing film gets sold off and another part of the film photography world dies.