Why I still shoot on 35mm when nobody asked me to.
Film costs money and slows you down. In a world addicted to speed and cheapness, those may be the two most useful things a camera can offer.
One roll of Kodak Portra 400, in Chandigarh, in the year nobody asked me to be writing this, costs sixteen hundred and fifty rupees. A pack of three is nearly five thousand. I budget for film the way other people budget for their phone bill. Most months, I underpay it.
Nobody asked me to still be doing this. The whole industry — such as it is — has moved on. The cameras that come out now are better than my eyes. They see in the dark. They correct my mistakes before I make them. They offer me, politely, every advantage I could want.
I shoot on film anyway, because I need the disadvantages.
Here is the first thing a roll of film does: it tells you no. You load it, and it says, you have thirty-six frames. Not a thousand. Not infinite. Thirty-six. That no is where everything starts.
The second thing a roll of film does: it refuses to show you what you have done. You cannot look at the back of the camera and squint at the little screen. You cannot delete. You cannot reshoot. You cannot stand next to the subject and show them the frame and ask, is this okay. You decide, in the moment, and then you live with that decision for a week and a half while the lab in Sector 17 does what the lab does.
The third thing: it costs. Every time your finger moves, something is spent. A rupee, a chemical, a piece of plastic that cannot be reused. The economy of attention gets rebuilt. You are not photographing this and this and this. You are photographing this. One of these.
I needed that economy. I had grown — on digital, like everyone my age — too generous with the shutter. I was photographing in the way one eats peanuts at a train station: absently, continuously, without noticing. Film was the first thing in years that made me stop and ask what I actually wanted the frame to say.
Digital noise is a technology problem; film grain is a texture. One is the camera failing to see; the other is the film choosing to remember.
People get romantic about grain, and I will try not to, but let me say this: digital noise is a technology problem; film grain is a texture. One is the camera failing to see; the other is the film choosing to remember. A grainy photograph does not look like the night it was taken. It looks like what you felt that night, which is a slightly different thing, and which is often closer to the truth.
The lab wait is the other gift, and I think the one I have come to love most. Three days, sometimes four. You hand in the rolls and you walk out, and you have nothing to show for your weekend except a receipt. For three days, the pictures are safe inside the chemistry, becoming what they are going to be. You cannot touch them. You cannot edit them. You cannot post them. You cannot make them into content. For three days, they belong to the chemistry and to themselves.
In those three days, I almost always forget what I shot. And then the scans come, and the pictures I did not remember taking are the ones I love most. That has to mean something. I have decided it means that my attention and my memory are not the same organ, and that both of them should be allowed to work.
So, no. Nobody is asking me to shoot on film. The economy argues against it. The industry argues against it. My own bank account argues against it. The world — our world, this fast and bright world — is addicted to speed, and to cheapness. Film offers me the opposite of both. Which is, more and more, exactly what I need.
Thirty-six frames. No preview. A three-day wait. And a cost that forces me to mean it. In a world that wants me to shoot without thinking, those four things are the most useful gifts a camera has ever given me.
Chandigarh · 02 Mar 2025