Normally I’d post a “year in pictures” round-up just about now, but I’ve decided to do something a little different this time just because.
Instead I’m going to focus on the more off-beat, off-diary photos I’ve taken. You’ll have seen most of them, but not all, in various blog posts through the year, but it’s fun to pull them together into a single gallery to enjoy again.
So sit back with your cuppa and your mince pie and enjoy…
You might know, or at least you should if you’re a regular reader of this blog, that I’ve been taking some time to revisit film photography of late and I have to say I’ve been rather enjoying it.
There’s definitely a different interaction with photography when your camera isn’t buzzing with electronics, utterly reliant on batteries and a whole host of features which are sold to us as benefits, but which on the whole are just technological mitigations for the shortcomings of digital.
That’s what I said, digital has shortcomings. Don’t get me wrong, digital is incredible and of course it’s perfect for my corporate photography. The technical image quality of digital is astounding and under most circumstances far out-performs film, but this isn’t an article for those wishing to watch a punch-up between film and digital.
My point is just this; shooting with film allows you (indeed often forces you) to think differently, approach your subject differently. It sometimes limits what you can do, but if you’re doing it properly then you’ll realise that film isn’t about photographing everything, it’s about considering and carefully choosing not only how we photograph something, but also which things we choose to photograph.
I’m also finding it’s getting me back to basics, and as of Wednesday evening even more back to basics than I have probably been in maybe 30 years. That’s because there was a knock on my door and my neighbour, knowing my interest in getting back into film photography (and him having cupboards crammed with gear he stopped using years ago) gave me, gratis and for free, a Pentax S1a camera with three lenses and a camera-top light meter. I was bowled over and spent the evening cleaning and cooing over it.
To say this camera is in stunning condition would be an understatement. In all likelihood it was manufactured in the 1960s, but apart from the odd mark, scuff and slightest of dents, it’s immaculate. Inside, the film chamber looks like it’s never been accessed; it’s that clean.
For several months now I’ve had an inexplicable craving for a basic, no-frills, fully-mechanical camera. No batteries, no lights, bleepers or anything which could break or fail through old age and lo and behold, my amazing neighbour just gives me this utterly scrumptious camera. It has no instructions, but then it’s got nothing to learn beyond the theory of photography. It’s as basic as a spade.
It’s weighty for sure; it’s solid metal, but everything seems to work. I’ve put a film through it and will get it serviced soon because I suspect the seals around the film door have probably deteriorated, but I bet it’s still light tight. I just want to be sure and I want to have the shutter serviced too. Of course components on this camera could fail, but they’re all almost certainly repairable.
One thing I can say for certain about my current digital cameras is that as fine as they are, I (or more realistically, my descendants) won’t be able to get the batteries for them in 50 years time. They will at best be nostalgic, novelty doorstops, at worst landfill.
At the same time I’m having a look at a medium format kit he’s selling because I also want to have a go with a larger film format. One thing is for sure, my adventures in film have only just begun. Obviously I’ll be keeping you updated here.
You know if you’re going to travel to Nova Scotia in Fall the trees will be spectacularly colourful. So when I went over a couple of weekends ago for the wedding of a couple of friends, I chose to take black and white film.
Let’s be honest, if you want to see great pictures of anything, anywhere, taken at any time of year, you may as well look online. I chose to take my old film camera and some rolls of black and white film so that I would avoid clichés like the plague (nice cliché).
For the most part I took pictures of the friends there, and some new friends I made, but the shot I wanted to share this week is of Cape Split, the very tip of a spit of land which when viewed on a map resembles the swept-back ears of a racing hare. From this point you can look across the Bay of Fundy and at certain times of day you’ll see the colliding tide swirling around the isolated rocks which jut up from the sea off the end of the spit.
My photo can’t compete with an Ansel Adams masterpiece, but the use of grainy, black and white film on such a dramatic, craggy subject adds I think a certain extra texture to what could have been just another tourist shot.
My adventures in film will continue, but as a side-project to my main work. I’m finding it invigorating and exciting to recall old techniques and try new tricks and tweaks and I’m sure it’s refreshing how I approach my corporate work too, but I’ll probably be keeping it under wraps a bit more until it evolves into something more like a coherent body of work.
Cape Split, Nova Scotia, Canada
Last week I told you about my new adventures in black and white film photography, well here’s a selection of the results. I need to work on my digitisation process a bit more because of course this is all still a bit trial and error.
I’ve owned a scanner in the past, but the results were never more than “ok” in spite of it being quite a high-end Nikon machine, so I’m using a digital camera and a copy box which I constructed myself.
As much as possible I want to preserve the beauty of the negatives (and they are quite lovely) and while this might only be truly possible by making direct prints from them, that’s not so practical when it comes to showing them on my blog.
But away with all this technical talk, what about the subjects of the photos?
There’s the shopfitter in Bath who didn’t mind me taking a few frames while he was on his cigarette break, but wasn’t going to pose. That’s ok, I just wanted an interesting face and some half-decent light for my test photos. He was the perfect candidate.
Then, back in Frome, I met Bad Rasta who travels the country selling balloons and novelty toys at carnivals. He was on a break before the start of the evening carnival in the town and was great fun to chat to and was very happy to pose for me with his van and balloons.
Finally Geoff, a Frome local who I met while wandering around the funfair in Frome. Full of interesting reminiscences, a face full of character, and a pig skin jacket that belonged to his father.
There are more photos of course, but some were just tests to check the camera metering and to see how the Kodak Tri-X film would handle different lighting situations. I wanted to make sure I had a few engaging portraits to share.
Of course the question has to be is this worth all the effort and expense? And of course the answer is yes. Ok, I could have taken these photos digitally with better technical quality for web, but these negatives would print beautifully well, and even if I never get the pleasure of doing that, it does give me satisfaction.
There is also the fact that knowing how to do this improves my work as a digital photographer. I’ve always firmly believed that having a background in processing and printing my own film work back when I started has always been a big advantage over photographers who didn’t get that grounding. So to continue it now is helping me keep in touch with the basics.
And besides all that, getting out and about to discover personal stories and just talking to people I wouldn’t otherwise get to photograph makes the whole exercise utterly, utterly worth it.
For the past 16 years I’ve shot exclusively digital images for my clients which is brilliant for client work.
Deadlines have reached a stage where pictures are sometimes needed for social media even before an event has finished, and even for more polished work the turnaround required often needs to be pretty rapid. It’s also fair to say that on a purely technical level, digital has matched or exceeded that which was ever possible with film.
And of course I can do so much more with digital than I ever could with film, but whatever my medium I work hard to keep things “honest”. I don’t use filters or add grain to my digital images. My style is in the lighting, composition and final presentation of my work. Anything else risks dishonesty in my view, and even when I’ve shot digital and converted to black and white, it’s not the same as shooting a black and white original.
Ah, but film. I spent the first 13 years of my career shooting film; the first couple of years shooting only black and white. In recent years I’ve had a real itch to get back to film one way or another. I doubt I will ever have another client request that I shoot film, though I’d be delighted if the opportunity arose, so it has to be a self-motivated project.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago I could take it no more. I started to research what I needed. I still had my old film processing tanks, measures, thermometer and bits and pieces, so just needed film and chemicals to get started again.
To be fair, it had been so long that I had to remind myself of exactly what was required – vague memories of Ilford ID-11, stop bath, fixer were all very well, but I needed to refresh my memory of the specifics. As an initial competency test I found an out-of-date roll of colour film that had been languishing in the back of my fridge which I sacrificed to practicing loading film onto a spool in the dark bag. It all came back like I’d never stopped, so that was a good start.
Of course film is no good without a camera. I still have my Canon EOS 1N which must be 20 years old, but works with all my current lenses so I dusted that off, popped a new battery in and it still works perfectly. I confess I spent a while lusting over old Nikon and Leica mechanical SLR cameras on eBay, but collectors have turned these into objects of fetish obsession and the prices are ridiculous for anything which hasn’t been dropped in salt water or run over by a bus.
The EOS 1N isn’t a “refined” camera, but it’s solid and dependable and I could spend £450.00 on an old, mechanical Nikon (not including a lens) or replace mine (if it ever dies) for about £90.00 because it doesn’t look cool and retro enough for collectors to lust after it.
Now this is the point at which I’m going to tease you to death because I have already shot and processed my first two rolls of Kodak Tri-X film, but they’re not yet digitised (oh the irony) for display here. Looking at them on my old Cabin light panel they look pretty damn lovely. Film really does have something digital lacks; the difference is greater than that between vinyl and mp3s in the music world and it’s just a shame that short of mounting an exhibition there’s no getting away from digital if I want anyone to see the photos. I guess I’ll just have to mount an exhibition then.
Seriously though, in an ideal world I would get myself into a darkroom with a Durst enlarger with a Schneider Kreuznach lens and make beautiful prints on fibre-based paper, but if I can manage that ever at all it’s unlikely to be in the next few weeks. In the meantime I’m working out a system for achieving the best possible digital versions of the negatives.
When that’s done, I’ll definitely update you with images here. I honestly can’t wait. It’ll be interesting to see if the conversion to digital retains any of the character of the film. I do hope so!
This isn’t another article about whether film is better than digital. There are plenty of those out there and I’ve never read one which came to any kind of concrete conclusion. No, this is about the realisation that I’ve now been shooting digital for more than half my professional career. In fact I crossed the 50/50 threshold a couple of years ago and didn’t even realise it.
Let’s chart my film/digital timeline then. I started freelancing in 1988, went digital in November 2000, and pretty much committed myself to digital ever since.
With film I’d started with developing and printing black and white in the darkroom at the Bath Chronicle. When I became a staff photographer on The Portsmouth News I had to switch to colour, processing using a minilab in the office and having my work printed by darkroom technicians. Then with the march of progress, newspaper production got computerised and the photo department lost its print technicians.
Photographers then had to process their films in the usual way, but we then scanned the negatives on a Kodak scanner, captioned them on a Mac and stored the images on Zip drives, which were slow, unreliable and couldn’t store many photos. I remember the digital archive getting very quickly out of hand.
I left The News in 1998 before they went fully digital, but while I was there I did get to try a Canon EOS1 with a Kodak digital back at Wimbledon one year, so that really was my first experience with digital SLR photography. But digital SLRs back then ran to something like £15,000 just for the body, so I couldn’t afford one as a freelance.
At first I was shooting film and scanning using a portable Canon scanner and wiring pictures via my Nokia 6310 mobile phone connected to my Apple 1400c Powerbook. It was slow and unreliable to send data back then, but it mostly worked ok. I even got the odd scoop with that setup.
Then in 2000 the Canon D30 was released. A 3.4 megapixel SLR which could just about do a news job, but which cost a mere £1,600 for the body. It wasn’t really up to the task of fast news, but it was fine for features and objects that didn’t move, like the exterior of a country house I shot for a News of the World story. Thankfully my current digital SLRs are far better, far more responsive and the images produced are a world away from the early models and the price, while not cheap, is far more accessible.
I’m glad I started my career with processing film and printing in a darkroom. It taught me so much that you can’t learn if you start with digital. I still carry the lessons I learned back in the late 1980’s and it often helps me work faster by knowing what’s going to result from a particular set up even before I put the camera to my eye. I do sometimes use digital like a polaroid to check settings and lighting, but I’m usually pretty close to what I want before I even do that.
I’m keen to get back to shooting more film though. It does remind you of certain fundamentals and makes you work in a different way so I’m going to look for clients or projects which will allow me to get back to film once in a while.
Whether that will actually happen depends on many factors, time being a critical one, but I know the vast bulk of my work will be digital for the foreseeable future. As ever, watch this space because you’ll be the first to see if I shoot film for anything serious again.
Last weekend I had a sudden urge. I dug out my old film camera, found a roll of Fuji film in the fridge (three years out of date, but what the heck) and headed out into miserably wet weather to see what I could find.
To my astonishment, having shot the roll, I discovered Frome Photo Centre still runs a one-hour service, so I headed off for coffee and cake at Paccamora while my film was being processed and printed.
Now I no longer have a film scanner, so had to use a slightly Heath Robinson arrangement to digitise the negatives, and even then they don’t come out as positive images. A bit of work on them in software is required to achieve positives, and the colours aren’t perfect, but it’s a chance to be experimental. See what you think…
The exercise was fun, despite the fact I was soaked by the end. The portrait of Anthony pleases me because it was literally a frame to finish the roll and I used a 30-year-old flash gun to light him, yet it looks so natural. At some point I’ll organise a decent scan of this shot.
I’d like to get back to shooting more film, if only for personal projects, but will probably do black and white rather than colour because I know I can process this myself and get exactly the quality I want. Of course if a client wants a job shot on film, I’ll jump at the chance. For all the benefits of digital, film still has a certain quality about it which digital can’t quite replicate. It would be interesting to talk to a client who wants that difference in their marketing imagery.
As if this wasn’t enough, I decided to pop out on Sunday evening with my friend Nik Jones, a graphic designer based in Frome, to shoot some long-exposure pictures. This time in digital. Nik wanted some pointers on getting photos of trailing car lights, so we headed to a bridge over the Frome bypass.
As a result of that little adventure, I turned a series of still images into this GIF animation using gifmaker.me.
So my weekend spanned everything from old-school film to new-school animation, and while all this might seem to serve little purpose beyond a weekend’s entertainment and a blog post, exercises like this get me thinking about new approaches and techniques which I can apply to client work. It would certainly be interesting to speak to anyone interested in having either film-based photography on their website or even a GIF. I can think of interesting applications for both.
Getting rambly and nostalgic in my middle (going-on-old) age…
Remember film? I do. I remember hand-processing black and white film in the Bath Chronicle dark room. I remember chemicals that stained my clothes and made them disintegrate. I remember the beautiful, shiny strips of cellulose hanging in the drying cabinet, fluttering ribbons of potential Pulitzer prize-winning images awaiting the lightbox, the loupe and the enlarger.
And now I’m getting all nostalgic again because for some strange reason I went from preparing to sell my last film camera (a Canon EOS 1N) on Ebay to buying black and white film and shooting some photos with it the other week.
This change of heart/mind came about partly because having seen some of the feeble prices the 1N commands on Ebay I knew I’d get more than 90 quids’ worth of fun from using it again.
I hadn’t used the camera since the year 2000 when I went digital, but it still works perfectly, and going back to film has re-informed how I shoot digital.
As an example, because I was shooting film that I didn’t want to waste I decided to be extra careful with the metering, so I used a hand-held light meter instead of relying on the built-in one. Seeing the consistency in exposure across the negatives, and thinking of all the times I’ve had to override the metering on my digital cameras, I think I’ll use a hand-held meter a lot more often when shooting digitally.
Now as tempting as it is to go back to processing my own films, and I do still have the tank, bag and reels for doing that, I don’t think I’m going to go that far. At least not yet.
For my first outing with film in 12 years I opted for Kodak BW400CN, which is black and white film you can process in a colour lab, which means that having shot my film I was able to drop it into Boots and have it processed and printed in an hour.
The next stage was to choose a couple of negatives and have them scanned by the lovely folk at click2scan who by amazing coincidence have just expanded into a premises in Frome. The photo here is my favourite from the roll of 36, which was mainly test shots for metering, contrast and the like.
Smokers, Apple Alley, Frome
I’ve put another roll of the 400CN in the camera and might shoot colour after that. If I do, I’m sure I’ll keep you updated here.
In the meantime, why not dig out your old film camera and try some shots (instead of taking snaps on your iPhone and trying to make them look like old timey Polaroids, Kodachromes or sepia prints) But be prepared for something that took me by surprise; at first, every time I shot a frame, I’d find myself looking at the back of the camera where the digital preview would be. A slightly embarrassing tic I need to deal with.
