Making a move into shooting film was inevitable, I knew it was. Since the moment I picked up a digital camera there was an enticement about film photography that felt almost untouchable, mysterious. It was a medium that has been around for so long but was so foreign to my digital orientated mind.
Photography for me has always been digital, on a phone screen or through a webcam – you could always see the image you were about to capture in the exposure it was going to be captured in and even if you couldn’t you got an immediate rendering of the image once you had taken it allowing for immediate adjustment. Film didn’t allow you to see the image you were capturing, even on automatic exposure though a light meter you don’t know if you subject will be correctly exposed. You don’t know if you’ve got the shot so you have to scrutinise the image when your taking this and reminding yourself to do so if difficult.
Film also cost more. £5-10 per roll and then £10 development. That’s £20 for 36 images, about 56p an image. Although you could argue it isn’t much… it is if you compare it to 0p per digital image. Yes a film camera costs about 1/5-1/10 of the cost of a digital camera but over time those costs add up. However I don’t look at it as 56p an image. I’m seeing it as a nice evening spent photographing sunset at £20. Which if I compare the level of enjoyment of shooting a sunset with a camera I enjoy using vs the cost of going to a pub and getting a meal and pint it suddenly becomes very good value.
One also has to be a price of the emotional side of film. This sounds cheesy but there is something nostalgic about film photography. It seems more connected to memory than digital photography. It isn’t necessarily there to have a pristine image but trigger something in the mind to connect you to the time you took that image. This makes it special and worth those 56p per image.
All that said I’m seeing shooting film as a learning experience. Manual focus, manual exposure, figuring out how the camera meters to enable the correct exposure. You also have to remember what you did when you shot the film vs when you receive it form the lab once it’s been developed.
There is no instant feedback so you have to remember and learn each time rather than working predominantly off intuition. Film isn’t for every occasion but I love it. It’s costing me shots in the digital side of things but I don’t care – when I get better at film I’m sure the images (in certain circumstances) will outshine my digital ones.
