Slower, more expensive, more rewarding — and the photos are better for reasons I can't fully explain.
I shot digital for fifteen years. Then, two summers ago, I picked up my dad's old Pentax K1000 from a drawer and put a roll of Portra through it on a long weekend. The thirty-six frames came back and ten of them were the best photos I had taken in years.
The obvious explanation is the film stock. Portra renders skin beautifully, and the colour palette is forgiving in ways digital sensors aren't. But that's not really it. The difference is that I took thirty-six photos that weekend instead of three hundred. Every frame mattered. I waited for the moment instead of spraying through it.
I've been shooting film almost exclusively since. The costs are real — about €1.20 per frame including development — but my volume is so much lower that the monthly spend is actually less than the cloud subscriptions I cancelled. And the keep rate is up. Of the rolls I've shot this year, I'd genuinely print about a third of the frames. That has never happened on digital.