I was just reading online about a restaurant in Tokyo that serves dirt, literally. It’s organic but still I can’t see paying those astronomical prices for fancy soil! What is it about society today that makes people long for the imperfect? In photography lots of younger photographers are exploring film. Is it that digital is too perfect; all smooth and shiny. I have started shooting film again. Not that I ever really stopped but I was on a sort of a honeymoon for almost  a year with my new Nikon and Panasonic digital cameras. They are great image making machines, especially at night or indoors, but film is a totally different beast both aesthetically and technically. When I talk of film and I referencing black and white film in particular although I guess some of what I say can apply to color negative film as well. (Black and White) Film is more abstract. It copies the world imperfectly by not recording color. It is also organic in that the image is made up of thousands of individual grains of silver salt. Yeah, I know pixels, but they are not the same. Check out the detail below of part of the above image.

It’s organic and a bit dirty not to mention the depth of field. An image like this would not work if captured digitally. The depth of field would be hell to behold and it would not have that warm organic feeling. In art as in life, a little dirt is a good thing!