Being an inventive and somewhat enterprising type from an early age, I borrowed some books on photography from the city library when I was 14 and taught myself all there was to learn about wet processing of films and prints. The next hurdle was not only how to save enough pocket money to purchase the developing tank, dishes, chemicals and photographic papers in soft, medium and hard gradations, but how to smuggle them home without my father, a stern type, ("concentrate on your studies, my boy") getting wind of it.

Sadly, not enough money was left to buy a yellow processing lamp but a 5 watt light bulb with layers of yellow paper wrapped around it actually did the job just as well without, surprise surprise, catching fire.

Soon I was developing and printing for the whole neighbourhood and I was managing quite a nice after-school business, financing, in effect, the next project: designing and building an automatic electro-mechanical home telephone exchange!

My first camera was my mothers' cardboard "Box Brownie" type and I was amazed on my first pushing the button that the event was recorded for posterity with just a single click of the 1/25 second shutter.

Those were what we now call the "Wet Process" days.

Now, anybody who is anybody wants to be seen toting a digital camera only. Even those people who in the past would have been quite contented with a US$50 fixed focus "point 'n shoot" camera, now happily spend US$2,000 on a digital job.

"What" I hear more often than I care to endure, "Are you still photographing on film? think of the CONVENIENCE of the digital, I can download onto my computer, print myself, e-mail and file - all electronically."

What defence can one put up against such terrible ignorance? When they proudly show me some of their digital masterpieces, I can cry, faint and get a bad case of the vapours all at the same time. The 4 x 6 inch home prints which I am usually shown are barely acceptable, and certainly NOT up to wet process shots. Their digital prints would have cost a lot more too, taking into account the cost of glossy paper, printing ink (which is now more expensive than gold) and the inevitable failures. Most enlargements I have seen are pitiful disasters and as for the convenience of digital: for high definition shots, a lot of memory space in the camera is usually taken up but also quite a bit of battery power is sacrificed. Nowadays, affordable digital cameras feature around 5 to 6 million pixels but my new wet process camera has a pixel equivalent of around 16 million at less than a third of the price of a digital.

Will I ever buy a digital camera? I do not doubt that I will, eventually. But only when affordable 16 million pixel jobs are available that have a similar contrast ratio and are in every respect equal or better to the roll film type.

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