Analog.Cafe was built to serve a community of photographers, many of whom choose film as their creative medium to take a break from screens or to find a tactile connection with the images they create.
We still connect online. These connections arguably fuel the interest and opportunities in this medium, thereby making film production viable. I spend much of each day online, writing articles for this blog, maintaining the website, and chatting about photography on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.
As a software engineer, I also work with AI. It can be helpful for film photographers in some ways; for example, machine-trained apps can be good at removing dust and scratches. It has its uses, but it is also clear¹ that this technology is exploitative and is often used inappropriately.
This includes the film photography community, where on Meta platforms (and, I’m sure, others, too), you will find AI-generated images made to look like film cameras, film prints, and film scans with AI-generated text romanticizing the craft².
Some individuals knowingly post AI-generated film camera diagrams, while others publish AI-generated long-form blog posts on film scanning without a single example of real-world use or a note that they actually didn’t write any of the text.
There’s an explosion of vibe-coded apps for film photographers, which can be a good thing for some but also a cause for concern (as I feel when I browse AI-generated file repositories with prohibitive licensing that use research powered by our community³, and code without credit).
I have received several AI-generated submissions on the theme of film photography. One was from a well-known US-based film lab.
But unlike the early days of this technology’s popularization, the content it creates is now delivered covertly, without disclosure, in an attempt to hide the lack of understanding, experience, passion, or any connection to the people who view or read it.
I want to make it clear that I am not doing any of that here.
Everything you read on this website is written by humans, and all the images you see on this blog are shot on film cameras. Including product photos and illustrations, with some exceptions when images were shot digitally, drawn by hand on paper, or designed on a computer without AI.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to comment below or contact me directly.
¹ — 5,023 US adults in 2025 say “AI will [more likely to] erode than improve people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.” pewresearch.org/science/20….
² — A Threads/Instagram account is trying to pass AI-generated content as photos shot on film analog.cafe/comments/jyxd.
³ — Daniela Ivanova’s research (which includes my images licensed for research purposes only) is at the core of all new machine-trained dust & scratch tools. Yet apps like Spotless Film and EmberFilm, which were built using machine-generated code, do not acknowledge the source of their core technology, and do not disclose where they got their training material. Only one person had ever reached out to me for permission to use my images.
Dmitri