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People don't care about film

Nico's Photography Show is one of my favorite YouTube channels. Nico's passion and love for film photography show on every video.

A couple days ago and thanks to YouTube's auto-play feature, I found myself watching his 6-month-old video "No one cares if you shoot film".

I do like going through the darkroom making my own prints. But that doesn't mean, because I make a print in the darkroom, I think it's going to be better than if you make a print from a digital scanned negative or from a digital picture.

He's right. Mostly. People care about the final result, the print or online image, and not about the medium you used.

But while I agree on the medium of choice being irrelevant, I think that people also care (a lot) about stories. They care about how you took it, the struggle you had to go through to make that image.

Take Ansel Adams, for example. This might sound like heresy, but I don't think his images would stand out from the work of other photographers nowadays. They were technically perfect at a time when that wasn't easy to achieve, but modern cameras have (mostly) closed the gap between amateur and professional photographers when it comes to sheer image quality.

I still find great inspiration on how he made those images, especially the early ones. Carrying pounds and pounds of camera gear and having just a few shots available certainly adds a lot of drama to the story behind some, otherwise, just decent photos by today's standards.

"Moonrise over Hernandez" is one of his most famous photographs, but at this point, the story of how he made it has changed so much and has become so dramatic (compared to the original explanation), that one has to wonder how much of its current popularity is due to the photo itself or the story behind it.

The photo is all that matters when viewers don't have any context; if it was made on film or using a digital camera doesn't really matter. But providing a (good) story can add a lot of value to an image.