Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

The marinating pile

Despite the title, this isn’t about stout beer or red ketchup. No, it’s about the workflow of film photography in a digital age.

Once again, a portrait of my father

This is one of the first photographs I made with my new-to-me-but-nonetheless-older-than-me Leica III g. Many more followed. The film I put in was Kodak Portra 800 for the most part, though lately I’ve been trying Ilford XP2 Super, a chromogenic black&white film that is processed in C41 chemistry. Both these films I hand in at my local photo shop to have developed at one of the few remaining commercial labs in Germany, Cewe. And then you have to wait. Sometimes for a long time, a couple of rolls took four weeks to develop (or find again in the lab, I don’t know)!

So, here are some film shots from this year’s Photokina:

And you know what? I like waiting. I even make them wait longer in the selection process, putting the envelopes with the processed films, small prints and a CD of low-res scans on a pile after looking through them for the first time. It helps me select the best and I get multiple occasions to pick out the best for scanning. Let’s face it, that is where it converges, we all want our pictures in the digital realm nowadays, if only to share them.