Shooting Film in a Digital World

I started shooting film two years ago, mostly out of curiosity. Digital photography had become so frictionless that I stopped thinking about my shots. Point, click, chimping, delete, repeat. Film forced me to slow down.

With 36 exposures on a roll of Portra 400, every frame costs money. You meter twice. You compose deliberately. And then you wait — sometimes weeks — before you see what you captured. That delay is the whole point. It breaks the feedback loop that makes digital photography feel disposable.

Building Grainify was my attempt to bottle that feeling. Not the aesthetic — plenty of apps can slap a grain overlay on your iPhone photos. I wanted to recreate the experience: loading a roll, shooting until it's full, developing it in a darkroom. The constraint is the feature.

The irony of building a digital app to simulate analog photography isn't lost on me. But I think the best tools are the ones that impose meaningful constraints. Instagram's original square format. Twitter's 140 characters. A 36-exposure roll of Kodak Gold. Limitations breed creativity.

I still shoot real film whenever I can. But on the days I can't — when I'm traveling light or the weather is unpredictable — Grainify lets me keep that mindset.