mattloeber

"The Negative" "The Camera" and "The Print", all by the Master Ansel Adams. Know these and you know photography!

The feeling you get from going into a darkroom and loading film, then coming out and mixing chemicals and developing your own film, drying your film , cutting the negs and going in and tray processing an awesome black and white print is a feeling you can never get using todays digital cameras. To me it's a totally different experience. To me the old way is still the best way. It's about the whole process and what that means and the connection you have with your film and camera. With digitals you get mulligans, like in golf, and mulligans were always for people who never Really knew how to golf. With film you have to really know how to use your camera, and you really get to know about light and lighting conditions and how far you can take things because if you don't you might ruin a frame of film, so you really learned how to judge photographic scenarios. There is something beautiful about that! It easy to take a good photo when the camera you are shooting with has it own on board computer. It always seems to be about instant gratification these days. I'm sure one day i'll probably try using a digital SLR, but please don't ever try comparing film and digital, because there is no comparison, Film will always be KING!

I make 50% of my living with photography, maybe a little less, and the other half doing massage therapy. I should being doing more photography, but I do a lot of fine art stuff and it's a little harder to sustain in that world, than in say stock photography or wedding photography. It takes time and patience to break into the fine art photography world! Some day, hopefully it will be full time because my body is breaking down from 9 years of massage!