oh! the art of dealing with toxic chemicals for the enviroment, having no privacy if you don't have time &/or a laboratory (specially if you want to process color) & super tidy manipulation that don't have C-z if you screw stuff is so: T.T
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My ham radio instructor (VE3XT, RIP) talked about how tube amps for audio were on the upswing at the time (2000s) because of the “warm” sounds. He was an RF transmission engineer, and it was bizarre for him that people were shelling out money for what was just distortion. A lot of aspects of his life’s work was seeking ways of replicating signal distortion-free, and he saw it going out the window.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that every generation will try to connect with a fading medium. This must be human nature. I’ve also realized that my life doesn’t improve when I pass judgement.
I fondly recall the computers and games from then but all of that objectively sucks today
There were tons of stupid things invented in my childhood, but we only kept the „good“ ones around.
Similarly old stuff seems antiquated because we found better new solutions in many cases.
And the majority of new inventions is unnecessary, we'll see in a decade or so which ones are gonna stick
Yes, that's mostly what it is. It's basically how people grow up and react to change. And there are many biases at play, like the recency bias, where the current events seem more impactful than the past events, or the survivorship bias of the old refrigerator of grandma, chugging along all these years, they don't make stuff like this anymore. And the funny thing is that despite bias, there is good information in the experiences as well, because things really do change over time, and certain things really do have certain upsides, which were lost when the thing changed.
I shoot, process, and scan my own film, both color and B&W, and I don’t have any special facilities. Just a sink and a table…
As for environnemental concerns, B&W film is pretty straightforward chemically, and the developer I use is just ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and phenidone. It’s non-toxic. The fixer gets full of silver, but I take that to a lab periodically and they put it through a silver recovery system. I think the environmental impact of the film I shoot is dwarfed by all the other things I do in life (burning fossil fuels, using water in a desert, taking and excreting prescription medicines, etc., etc.)
I doubt most digital camera owners ever shoot enough to get to the point where there’s an environmental net benefit compared with film.
This is one of the reasons why I only shoot with secondhand digital kit now.
ETA to whoever downvoted me: I accept you think I might be talking made-up nonsense! But to get an idea of what I mean, I would urge you to look at why there are so many Superfund sites in Silicon Valley.
It’s just my instinct based on what I know of the processes involved in manufacturing the main bits that are different between even a late era film SLR and a contemporary mirrorless camera —- displays, high density batteries, sensors, additional microcontrollers and usually two powerful CPUs.
The nastiest bit is the sensors, which are very large chips.
But given the sheer amount of electronics in it and what we know of the impacts of toxic waste pollution in Taiwan and other silicon manufacturing centres, and even just CO2 emissions, it seems likely to me that the contents of a digital camera are likely worth hundreds of rolls of film and their prints in terms of pollution impact once you consider all the processes that are involved in controlling that pollution.
The average secondhand consumer digital camera in my experience has shot in the low thousands, where that data is easily found still; it’s getting harder to find shutter activation data and it may not really be a useful guide anymore. But in the DSLR era it was normal to find secondhand kit with use equivalent to 50 to 80 rolls of film at the very most.
This is why secondhand camera companies and hire shops are so important, because they extend the useful life of what is otherwise e-waste. And I think there's a lot of delayed e-waste out there; people who own DSLRs but haven't chucked them because they are occasionally still better than their phones.