Film photography is having a bit of a renaissance right now, which is just fascinating on a lot of levels. In a time when the cameras in our smart phones are packed with the features of professional-level digital cameras and able to capture images in stunning detail, it’s become trendy to pick up old film cameras from the 80s and 90s and shoot. The trend pushes back against our current clamoring for perfection, opting instead for the nostalgic, gritty and imperfect earthiness of film.
It’s a medium where mistakes are welcome, grain is good and limitations spur creativity.
I can say honestly I didn’t know it was trendy when I picked up my old Canon AE-1 35mm film camera last spring and started using it again. I found some photographers on YouTube who were using film and got inspired to try it out for myself. Plus, with photography becoming a more and more expensive hobby, it was considerably cheaper for me to go with film rather than purchasing a newer digital camera.
When I picked it up and loaded a new roll of film, it took me back to my first photography class in high school. There’s a magic to loading up a camera with a fresh roll, fiddling with the tactile dials and knobs to get your settings, and then having to wait for the roll to be developed for you to know if your photos turned out the way you imagined them.
I’ve since picked up a new(ish) digital camera that’s helped me keep up with my rekindled passion for photography. Still, there’s something so pleasurable about film that keeps bringing me back to it.
With that in mind, I thought I’d share a list of the top reasons I love shooting film. This isn’t really a pro/con list of digital vs. film and it isn’t all that technical, so if you’re looking for that, you might have to go somewhere else. It’s also my hope that even if you aren’t into photography, you will still get something out of this! If nothing else, there are photos to enjoy!
Learning the technical aspects
Using film cameras, especially older ones, really forces you to become familiar with some of the basic, technical parts of photography. You can’t just click a button and let the camera do all the work for you. Just like art students learning the basics of color theory, perspective and shading, film photography requires you to become familiar with your aperture, shutter speed, film settings and focus point.
I think going back to film helped me get a stronger grasp on these photography basics and learn them more quickly than if I went straight to a camera that did all the work for me.
For one, you have to learn what all these dials and clicky knobs mean and what they do in order to control them.
More importantly, you don’t get the instant satisfaction of seeing what your photo looks like. With a digital camera, you can just keep firing away until you get the picture to look like you want. But film forces you to imagine the scene you want to shoot and think about how you want to capture it.
Is this a photo where you want to force the focus on an object upfront and create one of those delicious blurry backgrounds? Or is this a wider scene where you need the image to look sharp from edge to edge? What happens if you throw the focus to something in the background instead of the foreground? Is there some interesting bit that I could bring into this scene to make it more interesting?
With film, these are all questions you have to consider before you even touch the shutter button. You have to be intentional about what settings you are giving the camera. They will dictate, for the most part, what that image will look like in the end and, with film, it’ll be long after you snap the photo that you get to see it.
The art of limitation
I heard a story about an artist who chose to only paint with black paint because the artist wanted to limit her/himself and see what kind of creativity it would birth. A quick internet search reveals there have been many such artists over the years so I can’t tell you exactly who it was. (Who was it that said originality was forgetting your sources?)
All creative expression is subject to the art of limitation. You cannot do everything, say everything, use everything in your creative work. The artist chooses the medium, the colors, the material, and the writer must revise, condense, scrap what is unimportant.
Photography is no different. You choose the scene, what you want in and what you want left out, what conditions you want to shoot in and what subjects are there.
What’s more, film photography has an added limitation. Every stock of film (eg. Kodak Portra 400, Ilford Delta 3200, Cinestill 800T) is made to shoot in certain conditions, and once you load it in your camera, there’s no changing those conditions until you’re done with all 36 frames. It is an inherently limiting medium.
You choose color, or black and white. Are you going to shoot in the bright daylight or at night? Do you want something grainy or sharp and detailed? Once you choose, you are kind of stuck with that choice for the entire roll of film. Like the aforementioned and still unknown artist, you choose what color you are going to paint with and you stick with it.
This again runs counter to your contemporary digital camera or smart phone, where there is almost nothing you can’t do with your camera.
I think great artists thrive when they give themselves limitations, especially more confining ones. And I really appreciate this part of film photography because, like the first point, it really forces me to consider beforehand what kind of images I am going to capture. Before I ever fire the shutter, I have to have a good understanding of what kinds of images I want to capture and in what conditions.
Objective details vs. subjective experience
When naturalist photographer Ansel Adams was capturing one of his more famous images, “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome” in Yosemite National Park, he waited over two hours until the giant rock feature was covered in half shadow and half sunlight. He put on a red lens filter, throwing both shadow and sky into a brilliant and moody contrast.
Adams said it was one of the first times he accomplished what he wanted to do in photography — capture an image that evoked a feeling. When you looked at it, the image wasn’t just a record of the natural world; it made you feel what it was like to stand in the shadow of the daunting cliff face. You not only see it, you feel a sense of awe and reverence.
Digital photography is great for capturing things in all their infinite objectivity. Your focus will be tack sharp, your lighting conditions perfectly balanced, your image bursting with critical detail. You capture a scene exactly as it is.
I love film photography because I find it to be a medium geared toward capturing what a scene feels like as much as what it looks like. Blurred focus, soft edges, grainy details, messy colors — these all come with the territory.
And you can choose what feelings you might want to evoke with the film you use and how you use your settings. One might evoke a nostalgic feeling of a hazy late summer day. Another can help you capture the stark contrast of deep shadows and sharp light, grabbing all the fine details. Still another will give you that grainy, old-fashioned photography look.
These two images are a good example of what I’m talking about; both taken at the same concert, one on film and one on digital. I like both of them. But I like the film picture just a little bit more. It has energy and movement. You can almost feel the music and emotion, and a sense that you’re actually standing in the small, dimly-lit concert hall.
I’m a lazy artist
In photography classes, the process of going from film to a printed image was grueling. We developed everything ourselves — which taught us a lot and had its own beauty, mind you. But then when you actually got to the part where you developed the image, you’d have a zillion more things to consider.
How long do you need to expose the photo paper to get the image you want? Do you need to put in a filter? Do you need to dodge and burn areas to get a better effect?
I often got bogged down by the process and was very rarely happy with the end result.
You’d think when I entered the world of digital photography some time later, it’d be a bit easier. But then you watch photographers using Photoshop, who can manipulate a dozens different variables to make the picture look like anything they want. If you haven’t picked up on it, I get overwhelmed when there are too many possibilities.
I’m a lazy artist (ok even to call myself an artist feels weird but I’m trying to live into it). I want to focus on composing images and trying to get the best result possible on the front end.
Developing and editing just really wears out the part of my brain that I don’t really want to use when I’m trying to be creative.
Luckily, we live in a beautiful, albeit pricey, time for film photography. There are wonderful boutique development labs popping up around the country. They will take your film, develop it and scan the images so you can have them digitally. (In fact, one of the more well-known ones is right in Louisville, where I live — shout out to to State Film Lab!)
With that as a resource, I can simply focus on shooting and they do what they do best by turning out well-developed film and scans.
This isn’t as idyllic or maybe inspiring as the other reasons on my list. One of the lessons I’ve learned at this point in my life, however, is to lean into what I’m good at, grow where I can, and when others are really good at what I’m bad at, let them help me out.
Every photo a meditation
If there’s anything close to a spiritual practice I do consistently these days, it’s shooting film. Something about having only those 36 precious frames and having to think carefully about what I want to convey in each image makes time slow down.
I head out the door without any agenda and with no idea of what I might photograph. I pay attention to the world around me and let it tell me what looks interesting or beautiful or brutal.
As I pull the camera to my eye, I almost feel the world go silent around me as I tune the focus ring back and forth until the image becomes clear. Then the mechanical clink as the shutter slaps open and then closed in a fraction of a second. Finally, I tug the film advance lever to the right and, in a moment of near gratitude, I consider the photo I’ve just taken once more.
It’s almost like a prayer to me.
"I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention," wrote the poet Mary Oliver. Another great teacher once said to look at the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. And so I go about, looking at day lilies and pansies and primroses, and considering if they might have some kind of story to tell through my camera.
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