I'm pretty bad at developing my exposed film rolls. There was a time, many moons ago, where I was fairly frequent in developing film. I no longer have the resources to develop my B&W film at home and I rarely did color. Too much of a hassle maintaining a constant temperature for color film.
So at some point I decided to just outsource my film to a professional lab (not Costco, CVS, Walgreens etc.) and have them process and scan my stuff. The level of quality as far as scans are concerned is so much better than any of the commercial stuff your average Joe can buy and the people who work at the lab I depend on (Richard Photo Lab) have decades more experience than I do with the same amount of passion and love I have for the medium.
The less frequent I sent in my rolls, I kept shooting and I've amassed quite a queue. I'm due in for another visit to RPL and I went into my shoebox where I store my exposed film rolls and was greeted by this...
I did a count and it came out to 48 rolls of exposed 35mm and medium format film. If I were to develop one roll a week (which I do), it would take nearly a year to develop whatever is in the box at this very moment. Sad right? Depends on how you look at it...
The world is now saturated with digital photos ranging from DSLRs, small point and shoots and camera phones. Immediacy is everything and its culture has changed the way we look at and practice photography.
When I was growing up, we didn't have the luxury of being able to (near) instantaneously view a photo after we had just taken one. We had Polaroids which took a couple of seconds to develop but that was the closest thing to immediate we had back then. I sound old right now but I'm not. If you had owned a Polaroid camera and didn't like the photo, it was rare for someone to throw it away (unless by some chance the exposure came out well over or underexposed) because there was a magic to watching your photo "come to life" before your eyes. Now, if you don't like a photo you took, a simple press of a button on your camera and its gone as if it never happened. But it did.
For those of us who shot roll film, we had to wait to see our photos. Head over to a lab and drop it off for development and the quickest a lab could do it was 30 minutes. Some may think that's inefficient and in today's world you would have a point, but there's the element of anticipation in waiting for the result of your exposures that makes shooting on film, to coin an Apple term, "magical".
Even though I have so many rolls waiting to be developed, each week I turn in a roll to my lab, its my birthday because I get to see the results from the last roll I turned in the week before and I'm always surprised with the results. I get to relive moments long forgotten. Memories become re-connected. Others who do continue to shoot on analog may be better than I am at processing their rolls but it's all the same feeling. I think if more people shoot film, picking it back up or trying something new to their normalcy of digital photography, it would benefit them and their art because they would be able to experience being surprised (pleasantly or otherwise) by their results. It would make them, in my opinion, much better photographers because it would allow them to approach their craft with a different view and/or mindset. You can pretty much shoot forever depending on how many memory cards you have on hand and delete photos on the spot of the ones you don't like. You have that freedom but it's a cheap way to go about your craft or hobby. With film, you're limited to thirty-six frames, at most, per roll. The exposures you don't like are stuck with you because they'll be on your negatives but that's all right. You'll be able to look back on those blemishes and correct it in your future shoots. How are you going to get better if you delete your lesser photos from history? It happened. That's the purist in me.
By the time this gets published, I'll have already developed a handful of rolls. On the other side of that coin, I'd have shot double and throw the new rolls into the box and they'll wait there until I'm ready to reconnect with those memories.
-Q