photo credit: rbrwr

Only four more days until the World Film photography Day on the 20th March. Get your film camera out and take a few photos on the day. Get your kids a disposable camera and get them photoblogging for the day. Annoy your partner by chasing them about your house with your kids all with cameras in hand. Get out and about and take some serious photos and maybe take your kids along and show them the ropes.

Once you’ve done that get the films developed and get busy posting them up on the internet for everyone to see.

Remember back when I first mentioned this day? The website I mentioned that was holding a blog carnival is still looking for submissions right up until the 20th March. As you may have picked up from the comments on earlier post I ‘won’ the disposable cameras and they arrived on Friday so we’re all looking forward to this coming Thursday so we can get out and about and use them.

On March 20, there will be the first ever World Film Photography Day. It’s got to that stage where film photographers have to push to be remembered almost.

Over at Foreignlight Julia Scho is running a small blog carnival to highlight the day and get people thinking about their photography. Answer a few questions and if you get your reply in before the 5th March and you live within the EC your in with a chance of getting one of her disposable cameras to use on the day.

I’ve long been a fan of film photography but I lack many of the skills needed to be a succesful film photographer and I don’t have the cash to work on them. This is where digital comes into it’s own as you have no development costs but at the same time it looses that mystique that film has. Up until very recently I still used my trusty Canon compact over my digital when I wanted good crisp photos.

As I mentioned earlier its almost as if the film photographers by having this day are standing on a box shouting “Hey we’re still here you know!” I walked into my local camera shop the other day and was actually shocked to find where they once had a wall of film to choose from they now had a small display of memory cards and maybe 6 brands/types of film. They didn’t even have any B&W film in stock!

I’ve still got a few rolls of film about the house so I may just give this a go but I think I actually may invest in a couple of disposable cameras and give one to our eldest for him to record his day and I’ll use the other to try and get our middle child interested in photography. He’s got the toy camera but he’s at that age where looking through the lens is more fun that looking through the eyepiece! It would be good to let the boys know where photography came from, they see me with my camera all the time so it’s about time I started passing on the fascination.

In this day and age it’s almost to simple to take a photo. It’s almost lost that mystique from when I was a kid where you might not see the photographs you took for several weeks or months until you used the film up and you convinced your parents to get it developed rather than spending your pocket money on it yourself.

My first camera for an old Kodak 110 cartridge camera when I was about 6. It took me a few years and lots of moaning before my parents found me the model with the plastic pushdown zoom lens attachment. Even at the age of 8 I was looking to upgrade! In fact even although I’ve had a digital camera for the last 6-7 years it’s only been in the last 2 years that I’ve stopped using film and to be honest I miss it. It’s all to easy now with cameras on mobile phones to forget that feeling of your first look at the photos after picking them up from the developers/pharmacy.

Anyway enough of my reminiscing. With the rise in digital cameras on the streets and the huge fall in the costs of said cameras its very easy to pick up a cheap camera should your child show any interest photography. With entry level cameras coming in at £25/40US$ your not going to be completely heartbroken if it gets broken and with no developing charges theres no overheads to take into consideration. The simplicity that I mentioned at the beginning also works in your favour as who wants to teach their kid about shutter speeds, exposure and ISO ratings when the camera can do all that for them.

From that point onwards it’s only the child’s imagination that can limit them. Two ideas for expanding on your kids already existing interests might be collecting photos of any silver cars they come across with bonuses for finding and photographing new models or if they are more inclined to be at one with nature then photographing all the bugs and animals they find in the garden or on trips to the park or countryside. One kid and his dad have even taken it one step further and ran a small photoblog for a while.