Film nostalgia

Right before I was born, my father bought a film Canon AE1 camera to take pictures of my childhood. As a I grew up, I started taking my first pictures with this totally manual camera. Over the years, I became more attracted to digital technology since it was more convenient, time saving and with constantly increasingly high specs. Just like my father did, and moved by nostalgia of those times, I Recently I decided to use it again after so many years to capture memories of my two little kids. Every time I hold it in my hands, I have the feeling that this camera is like a sister to me. A strange feeling of being familiar to this machine and having shared my oldest memories together. It was hard to get used back again to the fully manual settings, like I just re-encountered with someone that I didn’t meet for a long time. I had to remember again her jokes, her personality, her abilities and weaknesses, the way she speaks her words, the way she is afraid of the dark. But then, the first pictures I took to develop after twenty years left me speechless. My eyes already got used over the years to the over-defined digital photos and I couldn’t understand why those pictures looked so different, less defined that digital and yet far more real. Was it the fact that I had to wait until the pictures were developed? Or maybe that the 36 stills roll was making me more selective when I was taking pictures? Maybe the actual light of that location becoming imprinted in the film allowed those pictures to capture some part of the reality of that precise moment. The texture, the slightly burned whites, those little imperfections make those images even more perfect. That’s how memories stay in our mind in fact, like imperfect copies of what we SAW, but more precise documents of what we FELT at the time. I felt like I have betrayed this camera for so many years, and the only way to fix that feeling is letting that old and familiar shutter sound again. Technology comes and goes, but film is simply irreplaceable.