Or „The Sweet Smell of Slide Film“
-> English version of the original blogpost, translated with a little help from ChatGPT…
Did this ever happen to you too? You open up Lightroom (or whatever photo organizing software you use) just to quickly check something – and then suddenly you’re stuck deep in some random photo folder you had zero intention of opening.
That’s exactly what happened to me last week when I stumbled across an almost-forgotten folder in Lightroom: scans of my old analog Hasselblad slides. Not the original slides, of course (those are safely tucked away in lightproof archival boxes), just the scanned versions. And not even all of them – just a few dozen. The oldest ones are over 30 years old. Looking at them brought back memories from what feels like a completely different era of photography.
It’s wild – feels like it was just yesterday and also like a hundred years ago. For a day trip, I’d pack 4 or 5 rolls of 120 film, 12 frames each – that’s 60 shots total. Since I usually shot everything twice (one for the archive, one for projecting or sending), that meant I could only shoot about 30 different subjects. And still, I’d often come home with a roll or two unused… Unthinkable in today’s digital world!
I won’t go into all the details – anyone who’s shot film before knows the differences between the two worlds. And if you haven’t, it probably doesn’t mean much to you. But – you know what I miss most about shooting slides on film? Besides the thrill of laying out freshly developed slides on the lightbox – it’s the smell. Yep, the smell! I know, it sounds a bit (very?) weird, but even now, when I pull out my old lightbox and put some slides on it, that familiar mix of warm air and film chemicals hits my nostrils and – BAM!– I’m instantly transported 30 years back in time…
Like it was just yesterday.
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All photos featured in this blog are copyrighted by Enrico Caccia. Copying, downloading, reproducing, distributing, or using these images in any way without my explicit permission is not allowed for copyright reasons.