I’m not an analog snob. It doesn’t have to do with image quality or some kind of silly nostalgia for the good ol’ days. It’s not about how they don’t “feel right” or that the colors are flat or the shutter lag or image noise.

My only problem with digital cameras is also one of their greatest conveniences: they put virtually no limit on the number of photos you can take. With film, of course, you have a limit of 24-36 photographs per roll. You could keep a few extra rolls with you, but each roll costs a few bucks—not to mention the price to develop them. As a result, for that two-week trip to Shanghai, you’re probably going to take under 200 photos—something like 14 photos a day.

For the price of six rolls of film, you can buy a 4GB CF memory card. If you’re using a high-quality SLR shooting RAW, you’re sort of subject to about the same limit of somewhere between 100-200 photos. Except you can just transfer the photos to your laptop and empty the memory card and start over again.

Because people now have the ability to take as many damn photos as they please, they DO. Cyberspace is cluttered with hundreds of millions of photos of drunk twenty-somethings and every one looks the same and doesn’t tell you anything about the people pictured or even what made that particular night or that particular moment special. I know, I’m in a lot of these pictures.

So please, next time you’re out, imagine every photo you take costs you one dollar. Make it count. Just put a tiny bit of thought into it.