Why I still shoot film

People ask this at every shoot, usually while I am rewinding a roll with the little crank that every camera designer since 1936 has agreed to keep exactly where it is. Why film, when the phone in my pocket sees better in the dark than I do?

Because thirty-six frames is not a limitation. It is the whole point.

When a roll costs what a lunch costs, you stop photographing everything and start photographing something. You wait. You watch a corner for ten minutes because the light is about to do a thing it only does in June. Digital never taught me to wait; it taught me to delete.

What the grain keeps

A negative holds a version of the afternoon that no slider can produce, because it was decided then, not later. The colours were chosen when I loaded the roll. The mistakes are in there too — the missed focus, the half-blink — and they stay. I have come to think of that as honesty rather than failure.

So: film. Slower, dearer, occasionally heartbreaking. But every frame on this site was waited for, and I think you can feel that, even if you cannot say why.