[Originally published in the Spring 2012 issue of LIGHT AND TRUTH]

Cover photo by Elizabeth Messina for 2012 Ruche lookbook.

Welcome to the post-digital era. Everywhere you look, you see people turning back to analogue: music listeners purchasing vinyl instead of tracks on iTunes, guitarist using vintage tube amps to get that "sound" they're looking for, readers fanning through paperbacks in the park rather than their compact kindles, and hipsters toting 120 toy film cameras instead of digital point-and-shoots. We want more than immediacy and convenience. We desire a tactile connection with reality. We've had our fill of binary data. We choose substance! Film is no longer seen as the way of the past - it's a classically relevant tool for the photographer with an astute eye and adventurous will. The digital revolution is over; an analog revival has begun! 

That's not to say that digital isn't here to stay in a powerful way. Our society is just growing out of our digital adolescence and into a realization that digital has many virtues but cannot replace the connection we all have with the tactile and the handmade. This evolution has resulted in the digital world's paying tribute to analogue with popular Smartphone Apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic, which merge the aesthetic of analogue with the convenience of digital. The market has spoken and the consumer loves it! Hollywood has also been successfully going hybrid - or "figital" - for quite some time, with artists shooting film, transferring to digital for CGI effects and mastering, and then back to print for projection and archiving. Seven of the ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year were shot on film! The figital method is preferred by nearly all the top major motion pictures today because it is simply the best.

Most film photographers today are going figital as well. They love their film cameras and emulsions (some even process their own black and white and color), but they cannot deny the convenience of Photoshop and the ease of sharing their photos with all their friends on sites like Flickr, Tumbler and Facebook. More and more photographers, whether film or digital, are even beginning to print their photos again and make real photographs! The idea of a strict analogue or digital approach to photography is beginning to pass away. Now, the question isn't if you go digital... it's how you go digital.

Film photographers need to bring their photos into the digital world. If you aren't having a professional lab scan your photos after processing, you basically have two choices: either do it yourself from the original film, or from your handprint. Either way, you want to bring your photo into the digital world without compromising the fidelity of your analogue medium.