Film? What's film?

Camera technology amazes me.  More specifically, the exponential improvements amaze me, not to mention annoy me, especially when I spend money on some awesome piece of gear and three months later it's rendered completely useless by some new amazing gadget.  Nowadays the pros are shooting 21 megapixel DSLR's, and those using medium format check in around 40 or so.  Middle range consumer cameras weigh in around 12 megapixels, and the newest iPhone boasts a 5 mp camera - which by the way is only 1 tiny megapixel short of my current backup camera body.

That backup body - the Canon EOS 10D - was all the rage back around 10th or 11th grade, I can't really remember.  This was the first truly affordable digital slr that everyone was drooling over.  At that point I was still shooting film and so were a lot of other people.  Since then however the digital snowball has continued to roll and film has pretty much become relegated to the fine art/alternative process crowd.  Some companies have stopped production, phasing out products that are no longer in demand.

Now don't get me wrong, I love my digital cameras.  They take amazing pictures, are super versatile and have done nothing but serve me well, especially over this past year.  But I feel like there's still something to be said for film.  I spent the past 2 days testing out two old cameras for light leaks.  They hadn't been used in some time and I removed and replaced all the light seals.  Originally the intention was to fix them to sell, but considering what I'd get for them, and how much I enjoyed shooting with them again, I'm reconsidering.

The Canon EF and AE-1, both full manual cameras - I shot a roll of black and white with the AE-1 and a roll of slide film with the EF.  Having never replaced light seals before I was expecting to get two completely ruined rolls of film, but I ended up being generally pleased with the results.

The fourth image down seems to have some light leak on it and the exposure needs some tweaking across the board but I'd say for not shooting film for 6 years and working with cameras I fixed myself I can't complain too much.