Career Space E-zine

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I spent the last couple of weekends shooting some film of different areas in Kitsilano but I will usually bring my digital along as a backup. There have been a couple of time where I had run out of film and it was quite handy! In another case I finished up my film roll and it only rewound itself halfway as it lost power from my batteries. Ack! It was a trip to the L&S store to get them to get my film out in their black box. It was a scary moment as I was shooting for an assignment.  

I truly love shooting with film and I’ll never completely give it up. I think that it’s going the way of the vinyl record. Even though it seems that everyone is going digital there is a lot of popularity with the older style cameras and some cool techniques that you can do with film that you may not beable to replicate with digital:

• Polaroids: Not only can you process within moments after taking your photo but you can use this medium for creating some cool effects. My fave is water emulsion where you pull apart the papers before they process, take the papers and “float” the image on water and then make a print by laying paper or fabric on it (Langara College I believe has a course on the polaroid). I also heard that if while processing you squish the photo with your fingers you can get some cool and wacky effects. I haven’t tried this yet but I’m dying to!
• Toy cameras: some of my best photos were taken on an old toy camera with a film cartridge that snapped in. Some of the shots I took when I was 10 rival the shots that I take now. The russian lomo camera also takes cool effects and has quite the following on flickr.
• Cross-processing: buy expired slide film and when processing get them to do it with C41 (print processing chemicals). The photos have a crazy blow-out effect on colours.

I feel that there is a lot to be said for the “art” of photography which is “painting with light.” To have an understanding of light/balance, shadow and form and to pull together all of this in the field is exciting and more time economic. Why sit on your butt using photoshop to fix your photos when you could be out in the field taking more shots?

Other reasons to not give up on film:

• It’s too easy too delete digital photos when you’re in the field. Once you’ve deleted it’s gone permanently. There is a loss of the photographical/historical record. I’ve also found that even with a shot that didn’t seem to work out I still may be able to use a portion of it in a derivative work.
• It’s difficult to tell if I’ve gotten the exposure correctly unless I can look at the slide through a lupe.
• I would miss the excitement of picking up my film at the shop. I can barely handle the anticipation!.. (although they do process it way faster than they used to). I love going through the pics to see what my hits and misses are and what I can learn from them.
• I can pretend I’m tres cool like the photographer from the movie “Blow Up.”

Any photographic film buffs out there? What do you like most about using film?