Against the grain

by Simon Handby in At home on 23.07.08

My best friends have a few tricks that they like to play on me from time to time. I’m a bit rubbish at drinking, so there’s the “making Simon drink too much game” (fortunately they’ve grown out of this one, as they normally had to clear up afterwards), and then there’s the “quick, Simon’s distracted, everybody hide” game.

This last plays on my dislike of being alone in a big crowd. It generally happens during public events like festivals or demonstrations, and takes place at the instant when I’m distracted by something like a passing rock legend. While my attention is elsewhere, everybody that I’m with ducks behind the nearest bit of scenery, and watches in hysterics as I look around with increasing confusion and concern.

It’s that feeling – of everything familiar and reassuring having suddenly disappeared – that sometimes comes over me when I think about technology. Music used to need vinyl and CDs, but for a lot of us it’s now something that lives invisibly on our computers and iPods. Words used to come only on paper – more and more of the ones we now read are online.

But there’s probably nowhere that the change has come more quickly than digital photography. Back when it was still a novelty to write a ‘2′ at the front of the year, almost everyone was still using film. Digital cameras were generally expensive, slow and cumbersome, and they didn’t take very good pictures. Even if they did, there weren’t many places you could print them, and you certainly couldn’t pick up a decent home photo printer. Roll forward a few years, and digital cameras are ubiquitous.

So, I’ve just found myself dropping a roll of 35mm film into a local photo lab, and wondering how it is that they’re still in business. Even at lunch time I was the only customer, and I can’t imagine that the money they’ll get for my single set of prints is going to make their day. They’re a professional lab, so I’m hoping that there’s a steady stream of profitable retouching and digital printing happening somewhere out the back. Without it they’re unlikely to survive.

I know I sound like a grumpy old man, but I also use a digital camera and know how much easier it is to edit, print and share its photos. For the record, I also (legally) download my music these days, and hardly buy a newspaper.

But most of the photographers I know agree that there’s still a certain quality to the grains in film that no amount of zeros and ones can add up to. Sometimes it’s just nice to do things the old, slow, expensive, hit-and-miss way.

IMAGE by Flickr user Jen Mo