I had a short stint with film photography. The kind that drifts in quietly, feels real for a moment, and leaves your wallet lighter than you remember. I didn’t develop the film myself — I’m not that committed — but I did shoot a handful of rolls. Black and white. The kind that makes you feel like every frame matters more than it probably does.

There’s a photo of a woman on the beach, wrapped in a towel, laughing into the wind. It wasn’t planned. I just caught it — the kind of moment that happens when no one’s paying attention. That’s the magic of film. It strips away the polish. It doesn’t care about the algorithm. It just exists. Messy and soft and perfectly imperfect.

Another time, I watched a woman kneel to take a picture of a dog — nothing remarkable, just a quiet exchange between two beings, both focused, both still. I clicked the shutter without thinking. Later, seeing it on film, it felt like a scene pulled from a story I didn’t know I was telling. Maybe that’s what film does — it turns small things into stories.

There’s a frame of birds in motion — cutting across a sky that feels heavier in monochrome — and one of a flag caught mid-whip in the wind. No deep meaning, just shapes and shadows that, through the grain of film, feel older than they are. I didn’t know I was chasing nostalgia when I started, but it found me anyway.

The truth is: I liked film. I liked how it slowed me down, made me pay attention. But it’s expensive. $15 for a roll, $20 more to scan it. It adds up fast. So my little affair with film ended where most flings do — fondly, and with a quiet sense of reality.

I’m back to digital now. It’s fast. It’s clean. It’s… fine. But every once in a while, I look back at those grainy, crooked frames and think: that was something.

Maybe not forever. But it was something.

The Expensive Romance of Film

A Walk Through the Heat