I'm pretty certain of one thing about this culprits work. It's not film. It's digital. It's fake.

I have been wondering: if we have an AI detector for prose (why I think about this is a very different rant and will be addressed later) why don't we have an AI detector for photography? And on that matter, why did we never have a film detector for fake film photos on Instagram?

There was one photographer with whom I always I had that strange feeling in my stomach for years when I looked at his stuff. Something just seemed inherently wrong with his "film" photos, but nothing so glaringly wrong that you could call him out. 

One day this same creator (with over ten thousand followers of his "film" photography) published what was supposed to be a 6x7 photo out of a Mamiya 7; part of a series of photos taken one after the other– and from the light they were–complete with numbered film frame borders. 

In that series of photographs the alternate frame identifier number 40 came up twice. That just doesn't happen. Kodak may make mistakes but they don't make that mistake. That was when I knew that I had been right. 

For years I've been watching this guy fake film photos with his digital camera and Photoshop and a couple of frames which probably took him quite a while to create. I decided to spend the time to go back through his feed. I have insomnia and I can either stare at the blank wall or do absolutely useless shit like this. 

I noticed that an inordinate number of his photos were taken on frame 40. Even better is how the frame identifiers on a roll of 120 film are printed. There is an industry standard. 

The standard frame identifiers are printed from 1 to 16 (sometimes only 15) with the alternate frame identifiers (I could write an entire essay on why you need alternate frame identifiers on 120 film) numbered 41 to 56. Guess what number doesn't even come up –and has never been used by Ilford, Kodak or Fuji? If you guessed 40 you would be right. 

I'm not going to name the culprits. Why should I? They name themselves with every border of their 120 "film" screaming FAKE. Take a stroll through Instagram and make the time to study those borders and you might be very unpleasantly surprised. 

In one of my previous lives I taught statistics at the university to first and second year students, not high level stuff, just up to ANOVA. I taught a lot of sampling statistics. So, before you do a short dive checking other "film gurus" I am going to take you on a short journey. 

Any of the numbers used to collate the roll can appear only 1 in 15 times on medium format film. It doesn't appear anymore than that. There are, when you are shooting 6x7, ten frames on a 120 roll. As an example, let's choose the alternate frame number 41. It can appear once. 

The same if it is 6x6 or 6x4,5 or even 6x9 or 6x17. You may get more or less frames but that frame number 41–it is only going to appear once. 

If you had 220 film the number would only appear once in 36 times. The alternate numbers on a roll of 220 film went from 41 to 67, sometimes 68. If you do see a border with 60's numbering it might not even be fake unless the number is 69.

Now I'm pretty certain of one thing about this culprits work. It's not film. It's digital. It's fake.

Digital has its place. At the moment, I'm exposing much more digital than analog, although it pains me sometimes to do it.

The difference between digital and analog? Not much. Of course you expose differently to a sensor, you probably take more photos with digital than with film when you are just out and about, and a lot of other things that don't belong in this rant (but probably a later one). What this rant is about is deception– deliberate deception. 

If you shoot digital, then admit it. There's nothing wrong with it. As someone who came from film, stayed with film, and only recently has dipped his toes into the cold waters of digital photography, I can't understand why anyone who offered the advantages of digital wouldn't admit it. 

I have wracked my small brain trying to find out why someone would put such effort into faking film and I think I have come up with an answer, probably an incomplete answer, but at least a beginning. 

I think that that there is an inherent feeling, probably put into the world by us film photographers, that if you can get it right on film, you're doing better than when you can get it right on digital. 

If you have a good film photo, you're a better photographer than if you have the same photo of the same quality on digital. That's the only thing I can think of that's causing this. Why else would someone put in the time and the effort to take a digital photo, put filters on it, soften it, change the colour palette, and then add a frame to it, if there wasn't something inherently, supposedly, better with film than digital?

I may have actually contributed to this myself. I know I can wax lyrical for hours about film and what each stock looks like and how using this developer or that developer affects it. Ask my poor family some day–or Adam. 

In fact, I might go there and introduce you to some very interesting black and white developers. Not caffenol or tea, but more interesting things like wine, beer, leaves raked from your grass, and mushrooms. 

But those are all different posts and different rants.