I've been thinking a lot about my weird relationship with color film, lately. Since I don't really shoot digital at all, my way of capturing the normal things that I see in front of me is to shoot C41 film.
This is of course, a slippery slope if you want the colors to be "correct". Objectively with C41 there's no such thing. If you've ever seen actual color negative film, it doesn't even remotely resemble a "true" negative. But the pieces are there to get it close enough. But that's also why we have so many different color films. They all respond a little bit differently to colors, and you will drive yourself completely insane trying to make the shot look like it was supposed to in your head if you don't account for that. It's something I've struggled a lot with.
So, enter some weird fucked up garbage film that expired in the 80s. The colors will never be right. You will not spend hours editing the colors. You'll let it rip through NLP, accept whatever comes out the other side, and move on. That's the fun of it. You don't know what to expect, exactly. It's almost as if the memories contained in the photo aren't even yours. It doesn't matter how you pictured it. In a way, there's a unique kind of beauty in that.
To select using a certain expired film is still an artistic choice, though. Maybe in a way not too different than AI "artists" now yeeting random words into a prompt with no idea what will come out the other side. I dunno. I can't stop myself from overthinking this, but I guess I can choose to at least overthink in different ways.
