Old photographs

It's a strange thing, looking at old photographs. You can tell when they weren't taken with ultra HD digital cameras. Old middle of the road 35mm cameras where you couldn't see the picture until a week later when they were developed, so you were stuck with what you got.

Mostly it's the lighting and color. I honestly don't have the language to describe it, but you can tell when it was a film camera that used chemicals to develop vs a digital image, the colors are different. They don't have as wide a range; shadows are darker, and bright lights overwhelm. Colors seem a bit more muted.

And when you get 24 shots you get to see a week later? It's more raw. There's less refinement to the subject. People blink, the shot is blurry. A bad picture of your friend on vacation was kept because it was your *only* picture of your friend from that vacation.

It's a strange thing, looking at old photographs. Some old friends will post an old pic on social media, and I seem to have gained a sense of when they were taken even without a caption.