As you may have noticed reading my previous blog entries I'm a fine art photographer who really, I mean, REALLY likes film photography or as I call it: Chemical Photography.
It's not because I'm an hipster; this is really one of the very few "retro" activity I'm doing. In fact I'm a very geeky early adopter. It's also not because I'm following some fad and it's not because I'm trying to cover my weaknesses with some grainy film look.
It's because... well, you'll see :)
For a starter here are my top five reasons why I use film so much for my production.
5 - I enjoy the silence
Watching my prints still wet while nobody bothers me: priceless
When I'm developing film or printing, there is only silence around.
The only noises are those made by the running water and the paper sheets hitting the border of the tray while I agitate it. I LOVE this kind of silence.
I also a love the Depeche Mode but that's not the point. I guess.
So yeah, I'm and introvert guy. I don't like having many humans around and most of the time I don't know what to say when I'm among other people.
For this reason I developed a taste for loneliness that makes me really enjoy those long nights spent developing dozens of film rolls or printing my photographs on fiber based papers in the red light of the darkroom safety bulb.
My girlfriend knows that when I'm in my lab I don't want to be bothered with anything else unless it's a life-threatening emergency. She respect it and this is one of the reasons I love her.
I turn off my phone and I take my handwritten Moleskine to start working.
Even if I have almost all dilutions, times, and agitation schemas fixed in my memory after all these years I still love browsing through my old notepad where I keep all the formulas, procedures, notes, memos, and doodles I made in more than 12 years.
It comforts me knowing that this is the oldest thing I made that I still have and I still use. Any other thing is gone at some point.
My black Moleskine is still here. It's my legacy to my future self.
4 - It keeps me focused
Here it's me so focused that I focused myself while shooting
Film, papers and chemicals are really expensive these days and I'm not rich so I can't waste money or time adn I want to hit the correct exposure and composition on the highest number of frames that I can.
The most challenging thing for me is to shoot 4x5 large format sheet film frames. I only have 8 film holders which means 16 frames and my entire shooting outcome is determined by how good I am at exposing those 16 frames.
It takes time and this forces me to stay focused.
When i shoot and when I work in the darkroom I'm in some kind of trance. Photography is the only thing that matters and I literally have to keep track of time by placing alarms every 60 minutes to let me know that an hour passed.
No other non-vital activity fills my mind so completely, but this doesn't happen when I shoot digital.
Only film does the tick.
3 - It lasts
The Coommodore VIC 20 - Picture By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38582541
I'm a nerd and I love technology; I would not write on SteemIt otherwise, but I know that modern technology is transient and ephemeral.
Everything changes so fast in technology and is often hard to keep pace with it.
When my dad bought me my first computer (a beautiful Commodore VIC 20 like the one depicted above) it looked like I had some Sci-Fi item in my bedroom.
Few years later it was gone. Forgotten. Replaced by the newer Commodore 64 and so on.
Every year something new pops in and something old dies. Applications and file format are subject to this fast renovation process too, and it's a very good thing (mainly) because every step implies faster performances, better quality etc. But this also means that something I'm proud of, my photography for example, can suddenly disappear or become obsolete.
This is why I always print my pictures and this is how I got into the Fine Art world.
It just happens that chemical prints, if well preserved and correctly treated, lasts for much longer than any file will ever be able to endure. Also, we don't have evidence that pigment digital prints can last as long as silver based prints.
Not to talk about the negatives. If suddenly software houses decide to drop support for my old .raw files, then I'm pretty much fucked.
My film negatives, all stored in a dry and dark place will last as long as I'm able to keep them that way and much more.
2 - I can touch it
Had a lot to touch that day
It's nice to open Adobe Lightroom and start working on a file 10 minutes after the shooting or even having tha camera tethered to the PC while taking photographs and set the software to apply some basic tweaking to it in real time. It saves a lot of time and money and for some kind of work this is mandatory.
Photographers who work for clients have to deliver a certain number of pictures of a certain quality, size, etc. They can't even think about film. Sometimes I can't too!
But it doesn't matter how convenient digital photography can be, how better the resulting quality is, how powerful digital post-processing is; nothing will ever beat the sensation of holding your first "homemade" negative in your hands.
It will probably be pretty shitty, almost unusable, because you need a lot of practice and time to master the art of film and paper development, but once you start, the idea of touching your pictures with your own hands is priceless.
This is why I almost always print my work even if it's digital. A photo is something that I want to hold, to smell, to hang on a wall.
And if the print is chemical the sudden realization that there will never ever be an exact copy of it is mind-blowing.
1 - I can make it mine and mine only!
This is how bad I can write with a marker, but it keeps the negatives organized
The best thing about film photography is that with time you become more and more expert with what you are doing and you start deviating from the standards, from the rules.
This leads to a result that is ultimately and truly yours.
For example, when I use Kodak HC110 to develop my film I tend to use higher dilutions and to agitate the tank a little more vigorously than what is recommended.
But this works only with some kind of film and for some kind of scenes.
Give me another film and/or another scene and I will use something else.
Why?
Because I know that the result I will get (if I don't fuck it up in some way) is the result that I want and I like!
Someone else will do something different.
Everybody creates a personal method which involves some kind of ritual form the moment you load your film in the tank to the moment you print your photo on paper.
The smell of certain chemical that you don't like but you use anyway, the grain that you get with that film and the shades of grey you get with that other one, the way you cut the film strip, the way you archive them, the way you handle your photo, everything is completely yours with film.
The result is YOU.
So here we are. These are my personal five reasons why I love film so much.
What are yours?
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