Shoot Em Up Film
Boone Southern
I can honestly say, without a shadow of a doubt, that medium format film changed my life. In 2011, after a few years of working to grow my photography business and shooting solely with digital cameras, I hit a wall. The wall was built from both exhaustion and artistic frustration. I was exhausted from the countless hours spent behind a computer editing my digital work. Each wedding took days to perfect, and even after more hours than I ever thought necessary were put into each shoot in post-production, I still felt deflated when I analyzed my final product.
shoot em up film
As artists, it is important that we are constantly evolving, growing, and improving. Without the constant ebb and flow of artistic growth, we risk becoming stagnant, uninspired, and indifferent about our craft. For me, shooting film gave me a better platform for continuing to grow, adding more value to my final product and injecting new life and inspiration into my artistic process.
To be clear, many digital photographers have the talent and capacity to self-edit and slow down their shooting process while using only a digital camera. Personally, I found it nearly impossible to slow down and shoot as intentionally using a digital camera as I do when using film. When I shoot digitally, I keep and deliver roughly 20% of the images I shoot, whereas with film I keep and deliver well over 90% of the images I shoot.
I got my first 35mm camera at age 10 (1973) but did not really learn the technical stuff until I was in my mid teens. Having shot digital for the past thirteen years, I found myself wanting to go back to the discipline that film brings to photography. The calm. The thought. The length of time to consider composition and settings as if it were the only one chance that I had to take the shot. Now I have a selection of 35mm point & shoots and SLRs to choose from and I mainly shoot Ilford film. The Darkroom offers a great service, one that I am happy to keep using for my film needs.
Whilst many of my favourite cameras are electronic and require batteries to do anything, not just meter (hello Contax 139 Quartz, 159MM and 167MT!), I own half a dozen others that are fully mechanical and either require a battery just for the meter, or have no meter at all.
So for a day which is slightly overcast, with ISO200 film you want to shoot at ISO125, set the shutter speed to 1/125, and the aperture to f/5.6 (two stops under the min f/11 for bright sunny conditions). Then put the settings out of your mind and go and enjoy photographing.
Most consumer colour negative films I use like AgfaPhoto Vista Plus 200 (rebranded FujiColor C200), Kodak Color Plus 200, Ferranis Solaris 200 and Fuji Superia 100 have a very forgiving latitude.
With the basic starting point taken from using Sunny 16 (or in my case Sunny 11) and the confidence the -1/+3 latitude of colour negative film gives me, I can set my camera up before I start shooting, then virtually forget the settings and enjoy the pure, simple pleasure of using a camera in the same way it was used a generation or two or three before me.
Even if you ignore the needles and the lightmeter, the dial is very handy to use shooting Sunny 11 (the Zenits are fully mechanical so this is possible) so you can start with your default of say 1/125s and f/8 and quickly see what other aperture and shutter speed combos give the same exposure, without having to count up and downs the stops and numbers in your head.
I realised long ago that one of the joys of photography for me is escaping everything and getting out into nature. It seemed to completely defeat the point to spend two or three hours scanning and tweaking images for every hour I spent actually using the camera. So I started to just go with the CD scans, warts and all, and mostly they come out pretty good.
I found that in my experiments too Richard, with the latitude of colour negative film especially (typically -1/+3 stops) I tried to just aim for one stop overexposed and let the latitude absorb any errors, and most of the time the exposure was good enough.
As I said in the post, using a film with -1/+3 latitude and leaning towards over exposing means you can usually get away with adjusting the shutter speed across an even smaller range of stops, and in consistent weather/light could probably just leave it on one that was a stop or two over exposed compared with what your light meter recommends.
Hi,
I'm just getting into Film Photography and bought a 35mm film camera. I was wondering if I could use one roll of film over a few days? Would the pictures go bad?
11:14PM, 10 June 2020 PDT(permalink)
Yes you can shoot film over a period of days. Most films you can be quite happily shot over a period of weeks or months may be even years. Pictures do fade a bit if left in a camera but it tends to take a long time to occur. I wouldn't worry about days. Some very slow films may degrade a bit faster like Ilford PanF+ but even then I wouldn't worry about a few days, if you are going to send it off for processing, it will take a few days in the post anyway.
Paul
49 months ago(permalink)
My understanding is that a latent image will shift colors/tones faster than the film itself, but I agree with the earlier posters that a few days/weeks, even maybe months, will not make a difference for most purposes. The exception would be if you are shooting a bunch of related images for a book or catalog or something where the tones have to match, but that is not the case for most amateurs.
49 months ago(permalink)
You'll be fine. The idea is to process the film as soon as possible after exposure for the best results, yet you could leave a film in a camera for a year and still get acceptable results.
49 months ago(permalink)
I keep film in several cameras at the time. That means that it may take 3 - 4 months before I finish a film (well, more usually it takes a few days). I have never noticed any deterioration.
49 months ago(permalink)
vynguyyen11: Those of us that can remember the 1990s can attest that back in Ye Olde Days of photography, family cameras often had a "two christmases" roll of film. The first half of the roll would be shot one year, and the rest of the roll shot twelve months later. And to think that one of the selling points of digi was the supposed limitation of "only" 36 frames...
I posted here a few years back about an old roll of film I had shot back in the early 2000s and developed after it had sat in a box of junk for about fifteen years. It turned out just fine.
49 months ago(permalink)
When looking for places to buy film, you are guaranteed any camera store to supply it. Be careful to always look at the expiration date because film does expire and causes images to have uncertain results.
The internet is full of personal manifestos about why people shoot film. I could certainly write one for myself - referencing the special joy of holding a 50-year old camera to capture beautiful images. But here at Analogue Wonderland we are uniquely placed to take a wider view of the question: every year we hear from thousands of film shooters about their persistent attachment to analogue technology in a digital world.
And the reality? There is no single answer! Instead we see a mishmash of complementary themes and motivations. So I have canvassed our community to pull out the key trends, themes and topics to provide a comprehensive overview of the eternal question: why do we still shoot film? Enjoy ??
Let's back up for a second and think about how we got to the question of why people shoot film. For the first century of photography, film was the only option for hobbyists and professionals alike. Then the technology of electronic image sensor chips hit a tipping point and in 1990 the launch of the 'Dycam Model 1' - the first consumer digital camera sold in the USA - heralded the start of a revolution in the photography market.
But as time passed and new models were released it became clear that digital's technical abilities were quickly overtaking film, and these days it's not even a contest. The Canon EOS 90D has a 32.5MP sensor, and an ISO range up to 25,600. The cost of SD memory has dropped to allow more than 300,000 images on a single card for under 20, and the iPhone has been advertising its capability as an effective pocket-sized camera since 2014.
When the balance first moved in the favour of digital the debate evolved (devolved?) into accepted wisdom that said digital was technically better for commercial work but film had an indefinable quality that you could just 'see'.
Then Instagram arrived, exploding the popularity of digital post-photo effects - filters - which in turn lead to countless tutorials on YouTube and blogs of 'how to get the film look' using advanced Photoshop tools. Those tools became easier to use, packaged and sold with the promise of removing analogue photography's last unique benefit: the look of film.
And yet...here we are. Kodak has increased its production of 35mm film every year since 2015, Harman Technology invested in developing 'Phoenix' as the first colour film to ever be produced on their Ilford site, and Pentax are making promising noises about a brand new film camera. Tiktok accounts showing people loading film cameras - and the results they receive - reach millions of views, and the profession of 'analogue sports photographer' is a thing once again!
After diving into the thousands of answers on our annual survey, gathering responses on our Instagram posts and speaking to hundreds of individuals I think we can safely say that there is a powerful set of forces at work. And these forces are not unique to photography - there is a wider digital backlash happening in society at the moment.
If I had just 20 seconds to explain the most common reasons people give for shooting film then I'd say: "my photos look better", "it's a fun thing to do", "it slows me down" and "I love the supportive people I meet".
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