Coloring it up a bit on a gray day

Not that I like it to much, I have to inform you, but nevertheless I have been known to load a few of my cameras with colorbased negative film every now and then. It's not happening very often, but I seem to always have a few rolls dwelling in my dedicated film drawer. And from time to time I pick one out and load it into some old camera. 

I'm not too sure of why I keep on having them in "stock" to be honest, but it seems that they never quite dissappear from where I keep this stuff. I hear already people screaming in the background here. It's obviously a fact that many photographers are hysterical about the temperature of their film at all times, but I keep mine kind of warm. Or at room temperature, at least. It's always great to have some kind of excuse to throw out when the negatives comes out in a bad state. As they most certainly do from time to time. It's probably due to bad handling and too high a temperature, I would think! 

I am on facebook, as most people are these days anyway, and inside that area I'm a member of a few photography groups. I think what's common to most of them is the level of seriousness many of the members take it to. One of the latest things i read was a guy who never purchase film unless it was autumn or winter time. And that he had to be 100% sure that the film was from a fresh batch, and that the mail man had not kept his precious couple of rolls inside a too heated up car, and what do I know more. 
As I just told you; I keep my film warm, and the older it gets the more interesting results it will produce, maybe. That's the film, just to keep it clear. Me and myself produce more or less the same results all the time I'm afraid to say.
As a matter of fact I got a roll of film back home, in that drawer in my bedroom, which expired august 1958. Can't wait to curl that one through some old partly fancy camera from that same era. I would guess there's grain to find inside after it's been duly bathed in some old Rodinal or some other fancy juice. 
Color... it's just kind of a cheap trick, I would say. Like a magician that keep people distracted to look in the wrong direction. Personally I see the pictures themselves better in B&W, but that could be just me. 

I know people who tell me all the time that B&W looks like something from the stone age or thereabouts, and use every opportunity to inform me that the world has gone forward. That we see in color these days, that digital has arrived and all that kind of brilliant stuff. Well, it's to brilliant to my taste anyway. That's what it is. Just to shiny, to brilliant, to flawless, and way to blingbling. 

Colors might look bad on film, but electronic images take colors to a totally different level, at least if the operator of the tools is not of the careful kind. It's simple and easy for sure, and everyone seem to be a "photographer" these days, or at least quite a lot claim to be one, but the photos a good lot of them produce looks more like a christmas tree on steroids. Give me one more HDR "glowing" landscape, or one more beautiful young girl with eyes that seem to pop out of the computer screen, and I think I have to go stick my head over the side of the ship... for a short while. Sharpness has become a virtue, and these days the sharpness in pictures seems to be close to beat even the real world thing. Give me more of the things I have to struggle a little bit to find out of. Give me more to feed my brain, not only my eyes. Give me true stories in a way I can believe in them. And give me more of that beautiful film grain. 

Nope! I don't claim to be a photographer at all, but I do know how to make a fairly proper snap though... all the way from winding the film from a bigger box into a smallish box, load it into any old camera and showe some light through it in lots of different intervals and combinations of time and ammount, before the whole lot is rewinded back into the same old smallish box until it's pulled out again and loaded onto a different spool when me being inside a pinchish dark room. 
Further I know how to get negative things pop onto the strip of film, and also how to make a decent print by flashing light through the negative down onto various grades of beautiful and lovely paper, to, eventually after some humble bumble in a little bit lighter room, bring out a picture that some people think is looking fairly good, and some not. I can do all that, but I'm not a proper photographer anyway. In black and white that is... mind you. I don't do color paper. Or not as for yet, anyway. I might try that one day just for fun, or to check if I can.

The bunch running around snapping any of them fancy blingbling shots before they get themselves in front of their computers are not necessarily photographers either. Some of them obviously are, but not all of them. Just sayin'...!
You just can't buy the best camera you can get for money and claim you can take pictures like a pro. Maybe you are an expert in using that particular camera, which sometimes could be worth a medal anyway, but that still does not automatically make you a great photographer. 
Tell me a story with those pictures, and I will listen... carefully. I promise! 
Tell me nothing and I will definitively search somewhere else out there, because there will always be someone having something that really speaks to me. And how good is that? 
It's great, as it duly happens.