I was just asked...

It's quite easy these days to get hold of anyone you like, at any time. Sometimes it feels like it's way too easy, to speak absolutely frankly about the matter. Like a couple of hours ago when one of my mates from the camera club thing back home just asked me via the interweb if I was keen on doing a shortish speech about film photography at the next meeting some time early May.
Sure... no problem I told him, well before starting giving it a second thought.
Then, obviously you finally start to think about what to talk about to make people actually listen and how to not make some boring event out of it and have the whole bunch fall asleep or something.
I'm not a great talker, so let's just get that straight from the very beginning. I know the words and how to pronounce them of course, but to actually find the right words and then keep on talking is a bit more tricky for me, especially when there's a bit more than a handful of people present.

I think I will speak only a very tiny little bit about cameras. As little as possible, actually. After all it's basically a light tight box with a lens sticking out. Everyone knows that little fact. I might bring a couple of examples just to pass around for people to look at and pluck on, but not much more than that. Of course they will already know how to twist and turn the very few things you possibly can twist and turn since they all should know a camera fairly well when they see one.
I'm more likely to spend a couple of minutes on talking about the film as medium and what it does, what it looks like, very basically how it works and why it's so much "better" than digital. And before you all run grab for your shotguns; nope... not better as in better, but everyone has to agree that the physical appearance of film is worth a million bucks compared to the bits and bytes we collect onto our hard drives floating around inside everyones homes these days.
Because in about 200 years, or even just 20 if light still exists (and hear me now, great leaders of the world), pictures can still easily be made from film. Good luck trying that with any .jpg or .raw file or whatever the file extension might look like at that time. The mentioned hard drives might no longer exist, or at least a big pile of the files stored inside them will no longer be alive and available.
And that's not fake news folks! I mean even today I got a computer which refuses to open .raw files I shot less than ten years ago.

Just have a look at this...! Is it not simply fantastic? One of "aunt" Laura's snaps of two of their neighbors who actually lived quite some distance away. It was most likely a Sunday since there was time left for a ride on the bike. They seem not to be in their everyday clothes either. It's just a snap, I know... but here we are maybe 80 or so years later looking at the thing.

I will probably also bring a small Paterson film developing tank with all it's inner bits just to show what a tiny amount of stuff and equipment you actually need to develop your own film. That might be an eye opener to a few as well. I can even bring a wasted film to show exactly how quick and easily it's done if they like. That's only going to take half a minute or so just to give a quick demonstration. I might also just as well skip that part...

I will probably use a tiny wee bit of time to show off a few freshly made prints from some of the negatives my father got from way before he was born, from back in the days when his mother was a kid. That might put a few brains into thinking about the reality of one of the biggest issues with the digital snaps overflowing the world today. OK, I know everyone have seen old photos, and most people still have some of them laying around, but to actually see a fresh print made from a negative that old might be something they have not been thinking too much about the possibility of. 
The prints will not be very sharp or technically great, as they were most likely shot on Kodak Brownies or Agfa Boxes or whatever and on really old fashion film, but there will be fresh made prints from about 100 years old negatives for people to see and touch. Some might even come to the conclusion that knife sharp focus and pixel counting is not the most crucial in a photo after all? Of course it depends on how you look at it, but I'd rather have one bad snap from the daily life around the old farm a hundred years ago as opposed to nothing at all.

One of quite a few photographs we got hidden away just waiting to be printed again. My great grandfather in his Sunday hat watching other people fishing on the frozen lake some time probably in the early 1930's. Looks very much like a 6x9 neg (one of my fathers scans, so I take no credit at all either for the photo or the scan...).

I'd like to use the rest of my little time to talk about printing inside the darkroom, since that's where the real magic happens after all. I might even find a good print or two from a negative taken with a more modern camera with a good lens for people to see that it's still possible to make good and fairly understandable work with old fashion tools. I can pass the prints around for people to touch without being afraid they smear the ink around the top of the paper surface. I will urge them to rub their fingers over the lovely paper, feel the texture and the weight and quality of it. Even tear off a bit of one or two of the corners should it for some odd reason please them to do so.

You've seen them before, I know. It's just to fill in the space... They are of course snapped in 6x7 format on Ilford FP4+ I think. Maybe even HP5+ but I somehow doubt it. 

That's mainly what I would like to talk about, I think. Oh, and of course also try to explain the joy of walking around looking for scenes to snap instead of staring into some damn stupid screen to check if you nailed the focus on the 200 shots you just snapped a couple of moments ago. There's nothing much there to distract you when working with film. Nothing that gets in the way too easily. There's the shutter time and the aperture, and that's about it. No inner finicky adjustments, white balance or tweaks to bug you off and make you loose your masterpiece without even knowing you did just that.
And you will never again come home with a thousand snaps to sort out after only a short walk around the house, which is absolutely great I can tell you.

My father and his sister. This must be a fairly new one, shot just after the war by the look of the two. The negative still exist, so would be nice to try and print it even though somebody messed up a bit with the focus thing. It doesn't matter, actually. It's way better than no photo at all! 

It's brilliant, actually.
And the biggest pleasure of them all must be the fact that your great great grandchildren still can make beautiful prints from your negs a hundred years from now with no hassle at all. It might sound stupid, you might get sick of me repeating this, and you may wonder who on earth would take interest in your pictures in a hundred years from now? Well, a lot of people no one have seen yet will be for sure. I know, because I would never have even heard of my grandmothers aunt Laura if it was not for the fact that she was the only one owning a camera in the family back then, and luckily she used it quite a lot by the standards of the time from around 1920 and onwards. I still call her aunt Laura, even though she was actually my grandmothers aunt and dead and gone a long time before I was born over 50 years ago. She's one of the biggest heroes of this family if you're asking me.
Photos will be important for the plain purpose of telling our history in not too many years from now, and the sad fact is that there will not be much to be told from most families from around the year 2000 and onwards, simply because there will be very few if any pictures to relate the words to.

That's the cold facts... and then there is the pleasure to the eye film gives you.
But that's a different story for another day, I believe.
Long post again... I'm sorry, but I just got no sense of limiting myself!