I took some of the best photos of my life on 35mm film. It will always have a special place in my heart, even though I haven't shot on film in years.

If you ask me what I love about film, I can rattle off lots of reasons:

Film grain looks painterly and artistic;

The texture gives a focal point to photographs that have a shallow depth of field;

Negative film is very forgiving of overexposure (digital is not);

The ability to hold a photograph in your hand makes it less likely that important photos will be discarded by future generations;

The expense of shooting film, coupled with the lack of seeing a shot in realtime, forces a photographer to plan his or her shots more carefully;

Getting photos back from a lab (especially by mail) feels like opening a present;

It's fun to experiment with the chemistry of film to see what happens. E.g. pushing, pulling, cross-processing, adding salt, microwaving, etc.

But, if you ask me why I stopped shooting film, I could just as easily tell you:

Each shot is expensive, especially when you add in the cost of processing;

Negative film is terribly hard to organize if you shoot mixed subjects on the same roll;

Film scanners are slow. Retouching dust, dirt, scratches and stray hairs is tedious; and

It can be scary and depressing when a film is discontinued. (Imagine if a painter woke up to discover that oil paints would never be made again. That's what many photographers felt like when Kodachrome was discontinued. I even wrote an obituary for it.)

Nevertheless, I look back at my old photographs with nostalgia. Each of my favorite films had its own character. Here is a small collection of photos that speak to how each was wonderful and unique. These images are minimally edited. I used Photoshop to restore the colors to what the original slides or prints looked like.