It’s an honest question.
There are some easy, obvious answers to this: Cost. Ease of use. Immediacy.
But there are other answers that only become clear as you move through the world. Perhaps the most important one can be illuminated by a recent experience Leah had.
When Ava was relatively newer in our lives, Leah had a professional photographer friend of hers come by the house and shoot some nice b&w portraits of our little punkin. At the time, I protested that I could probably take shots that were just as nice (or almost so) for less money and time, but Leah would hear none of it (she doubts my prodigious talent). So be it.
We kicked some money to the friend for her time and then waited to get a look at the contact sheets she produced. The pictures really were very nice, I have to admit. Well, at least the little tiny pictures on the contact sheets were nice. There was no way to view them any larger without paying someone to make prints from the negatives we had. What is this, 1982?
So we went to one of the two places in town that made prints from medium-format negatives. I won’t bore you with the cost. Suffice to say it was more than a nice lunch. We took those first prints, bought frames for them, and put them up around our house. More money and space.
But the best was yet to come. Because so many people in our town were now doing their own “developing” in front of their computers in the comfort of their own homes, one of the places that did medium-format developing closed its doors. Good riddance, I say. But it posed a problem. We now only had one shop where we could get more prints made, and that shop turned out to have really, really bad customer service.
Like, take-in-the-negatives-five-different-times-before-they-got-it-right type bad.
Along the way, Leah got plenty of “not my problem” feedback from the staff, including the owner. In the interest of fairness, I won’t come out and name the shop, just so Google doesn’t drag them through the mud.
It’s sad and frustrating, but as I was all too happy to point out, we could’ve ordered 4×6 digital prints from Walgreens from our dining room table and had them ready in less than an hour. Our new camera will be able to produce some really nice 4×6 in. prints, so it’ll just be a matter of capturing some suitable moments before we can kiss those nasty plastic negatives goodbye forever.
