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@@ -75,6 +75,58 @@ There's no such thing as managing time. There's only so much you can do in day.
 ## EDC
 # Craft
 ## Return to Film
+
+I grew up shooting film. I first picked up my dad's Pentax in the 1980s and was hooked from day one. I set off to college with the vague idea that I would major in photography, though I dropped out before that ever came to fruition.
+
+Like most people I made the jump to digital some time ago. I sold my last film camera just before we left on this trip. It was a sad moment, but I hadn't shot with the camera (a Nikon F3) in years. I knew there were people out there still shooting film, and I wanted the camera to be used, not sit around gathering dust, so I sold it. 
+
+I didn't really give film much thought after that. From a technical standpoint 35mm film is massively more expensive, has less resolving power, and it's more difficult to work with, print, etc. 
+
+About six months ago an editor at WIRED reached out and asked if I would put together a guide to film photography. This caught me a little off guard. Film? Did you really just say film photography? I said I would so long as Wired bought me a new film camera because I didn't think they would do that. Surprisingly, my editor agreed. I went on eBay and bought an old Nikon FE2, which was sort of the less pro version of the F3. I didn't need the TTL and interchangeable viewfinders of the F3, so I went with the lighter weight FE2. It came with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4. Good to go. 
+
+I bought some Tri-X and some Velvia and went wandering around the Outer Banks trying to remember how to shoot film. Film photography is not like riding a bike. Everything I once knew... I forgot. But the technical hurdles didn't really bother me much after the first (embarrassingly bad) roll I developed. 
+
+I realized I was trying to shoot film as if it were digital. It is most emphatically not digital. It has a very different process. Film has to be shot calmly, carefully and consciously. 
+
+I've come to think that this is cornerstone of craft. What elevates anything to a craft is that you do it carefully and consciously.
+
+Whether it's laying stone, stitching leather, carving toys, drawing fish, or making coffee, there is a calmness to the process of craft that comes from the care and consciousness. Even in the midst of stressful deadlines, the process itself remains a thing of calm, even calming.
+
+What the Nikon FE2 gives me is the need to work slower. I can't make good images on film at the same speed I can with digital. Having to slow down gives you more mental space to reflect, remember -- sometimes technical details of process come to mind (expose for the highlights, careful with that tk Tri-X is unforgiving with tk, Velvia is going to render this sand dune more magenta than it is, and so on), other times I end thinking in tangents, just wandering through memory, almost like reading a book, but with the sense there's no need to hurry, you just let the world unfold at the pace you're reading. 
+
+Why would a 40-year-old camera do all that? I'm not entirely sure, and willing to admit that it might just be me. And don't misunderstand, this isn't a nostalgia, the process is actually difficult and sometimes annoying. If you just want results, definitely stick with digital photography. What keeps me shooting film isn't really the results, it's because the process leads me to interesting places, both mentally and physically.
+
+I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the machine and complexity of the task. There must be a balance here, but I think on the whole what humans really need are simple machines that enable complex tasks.
+
+The FE2 gives me a light reading of the scene in front of me, but it's an average, and doesn't take into account the characteristics of the film I'm shooting, the range of light and dark in the scene, where the subject is, or any other of a dozen things I must take into account. I am the computer. The machine is very simple, the task is very complex.
+
+Digital cameras are the opposite. They are very complex machines that can do 95 percent of what I have to do myself with the FE2, all I really have to do is press the shutter button. The machine is very complex, the task is very simple. While the result may be equal, even better in many instances, the satisfaction in the task is less because the task is too simple.
+
+Photographer Galen Rowell has written at length. 
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+A craft is a process over which we have total self-determination. There is no "rushing", even when producing something for a client on a deadline.
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+of the process and outcome.
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+Something about this process dovetails 
+
+everything is done
+calmly, carefully and consciously. This is not about training but about attitude and total self-
+determination
+
+wander a bit, reflect on things, travel through memories. like reading a book – you create a pleasant space for yourself. -- Doolaard
+
+I try to focus on the moment all the time. Planning traps you. Arriving at a goal is only exciting in the short term. At some point my home will be finished,
+but that won’t last. That’s why I enjoy the journey so much.
+
+
 ## Instax Printing 
 ## Postcard Project
 ## Carving
@@ -157,9 +209,46 @@ Also, Benjamin Franklin didn't say it. People did not talk like that in the late
 You don't need me to tell you you need a plan. It should be blindingly obvious that without a plan you're 
 
 ## Why shoot film
+
+
+Photography is one of the first things in my life that I took seriously. That's not to say I didn't find it fun, I did, but it was also the first time I recall being really driven to do something (like get up before sunrise) that I didn't otherwise need to do.
+
+I first picked up my dad's Pentax SLR in the mid 1980s and was hooked from day one. I loved documenting the world, the things I saw. I was already into backpacking, rock climbing, and adventuring in whatever form I could find, photography became a way to document all that and share it with others. Sort of. There was no real way to share your images with anyone but friends and family back then, save getting published in a magazine.
+
+I started reading magazines and books, trying to work out how one got published. Somewhere in there I ran across Galen Rowell and it all clicked for me. That's what I want to do. If he could do it, so could I. I bought more Kodachrome 25 and Fuji Velvia 100 than anyone should and went traipsing around the Sierra Nevada shooting alpineglow like no one had ever seen it before.
+
+My main problem was that it turned out people had seen alpineglow before, and my images weren't adding anything to the story. In hindsight I can see that my images didn't really have a story at all. They were just pretty things. People like photos of pretty things (witness Instagram), but professional publications need more than that and I didn't know how to deliver it.
+
+I turned to music instead, telling stories with sound and words. This worked out better. I kept taking pictures, but it took a back seat to the music and writing. Eventually the music began to take a backseat to the writing. Writing didn't require anyone else. It was just me. Maybe it came more naturally too. Whatever the case I produced a lot more of it and people started to buy it. Writing then. Onward. Upward.
+
+This continued through the early days of this site. Then two things happened. The first was the digital camera surpassed 10 megapixels. This was where the quality of a 5 x 7 print looked the same whether you shot it with film or digital. Without giving it much thought I bought the best camera I could afford and starting shooting digital so that I could make images for both the real world and the digital.
+
+The other things that happened is that I read W.G. Sebald's *Austerlitz*, which is one of the best books I've ever read. The description of Antwerp railway station is one of the most stunning things I've ever read. As I recall there's a nearly five page sentence somewhere in there as well that I didn't even notice the first two times I read the book. But that's not the lasting impact of the book on me, the last impact was that the book, which a strange blend of fiction and non, used images, but in a way I had never seen anyone do before. Sebald illustrated tiny details of his story with these images -- a knapsack hanging on a wall, a photo of a rugby team, butterflies mounted in a case, a partly disassembled pocket watch, the horsehead nebula. The list of strange images goes on. 
+
+Sebald drops these images in with no captions or any other insight. They act as a kind of documentary evidence that make you feel that the fiction characters really did the things the narrator describes. The images are always things mentioned in the story, but they aren't necessarily major things in the story, until the image puts the emphasis on them.
+
+If you go back and look at the early journal entries on this site, you'll see the influence of Sebald loud and clear in the images I used. The thing about these images, these little details that augmented the text I was publishing, is they didn't stand on their own at all. I didn't print them, I didn't want to print them. They were there to fit with the text, without the text they were nothing. At the time (2005) self-publishing a book was financially inaccessible so all my writing for this site exists only on this site and my digital backups.
+
+Digital photography got me out of the habit of printing because it let me take so many images. Currating them became overwhelming.
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+which bothers me even more today, when self-publishing is not financially inaccessible anymore and is in fact really easy thanks to places like Blurb.
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+I sold my last film camera almost 10 years ago and until a few months ago my main impression of film images I see online is that the photographers are more enthralled with shooting film than making good images. There are exceptions, but by and large, in the online world, film is the province of attention seeking hipsters.
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+
 ## Why print artifacts
 ## History as a harder time
 ## How Repair Skills Foster Self-Reliance and Independence
+
+"In modern times when everything a person needs may be bought in a store, there are very few hand-made things left. So we are robbed of that rare and wonderful satisfaction that comes with personal accomplishment. In Noah's time nearly every single thing a person touched was the result of his own efforts. The cloth of his clothing, the meal on the table, the chair he sai, and the floor he waked upon, all were made by the user. This is why those people had an extraordinary awareness of life. They knew wood intimately, the knew the ingredients of food and medicines and inks and paints because they grew it and ground it and mixed it themselves. It was this awareness of everything about them that made the early American people so full of inner satisfaction, to grateful for life and all that went with it. Nowadays modern conveniences allow us to be forgetful, and we easily become less aware of the wonders of life."
+                                                         --diary of an early american boy, p40
 ## Simple is Better than Complex. Complex is Better than Complicated
 ## There is no nature, because there is nothing unnatural, only ugly things
 ## Against data -- do you really need someone else to test everything for you? Do you really trust that their "expert" conclusions are right for you? Why not try things for yourself and see if they work?