The last time I photographed using 35mm transparency film was in 2013, and that was while traveling through Java and Sumatra, Indonesia, where 97% of what I shot was with digital equipment. Eleven years is a long time for someone who spent forty years shooting with film equipment and was late convert into digital.
Somehow in those eleven years I manage to keep one roll of Fuji RDPIII film in my refrigerator, a roll that had long since passed its expiration date. However, I never lost sight of it and nor did my wife discard it. Then a couple of weeks ago I took out the camera that accompanied me on that trip to Indonesia and aspired to shoot with it again. It is the Leica M6 rangefinder equipped with a 35mm Summicron-M f/2 lens, a camera where one has to manually advance each frame by thumb, not by motor drive. And with that I resuscitated the expired film.
With no plans of what to shoot I carried the camera to a family gathering and on a short trip to St. Augustine with my wife and dog. Even though it can be like ridding a bicycle I had to readjust to photographing one frame at a time and manually setting the exposure and the focus of each frame. At first, I instinctively ‘chimped’ at the back of the camera looking for an image to appear. Feeling embarrassed with this digital habit I soon realized that I needed to concentrate on the shot and not the immediate validation and rectification of any misdoings in composition, exposure, lighting, focus or anything else that might make for a better photo. (Like a golfer, the second shot seems to be always better after duffing on the first swing.)
Soon the experience of visualizing an image, composing, adjusting exposure settings, focusing, pressing the shutter button and then moving on to the next one lead to a more serene and reflective mind set where the immediate result was not what mattered or what you even thought of but rather it’s the process that takes precedence and where the effort lies.
So, how was the experience and would I shoot with film again? I must say that 36 frames of expensive film (adding the cost of processing) can lead to saying yeah this is a good lesson in slowing down one’s photography, not in the number of shots taken but in the manner in which the shots are made, leave it at that and go back to digital. However, as I learned, or rather re-learned, is there’s much more to the discipline than I remembered and what I really enjoyed was the experience of examining the results.
First, I loved looking at the frames one by one and feeling that there’s a story to each one. There were no ten shots of the same thing, as in digital, but just one, or maybe two or three to allow for tricky lighting, and that as I went from one frame to another, I was looking at an entirely different image. It felt like a slide show. Secondly, I couldn’t get over the natural grain of the film and how it affected the feeling of the photos adding texture and a dimension that I miss with digital, where it’s called noise. Thirdly, and this may have been due to the expired film and that I shot it at ISO200, not the native 100, but the contrast was punchy with lots of depth and that the highlights, even when overexposed, didn’t seem blown out but just bright, like looking into a white sun and being blinded for a second, it was natural. With digital photography, HDR (high dynamic range) is a term often talked about. It’s where you strive for maximum details in both the highlights and shadows. I understand its allure but at the same time I see now what we easily lose and how it can feel very unnatural. Finally, I loved the colors I got from this film. They seemed natural, balanced and, honestly, better representative of the scene. I found myself examining the picture not the colors and contrast.
These aren’t perfect images by any stretch of the imagination but they have a painterly effect which I love, or maybe missed, and felt like they could be construed as art, and since when is art meant to be perfect?
Honestly, I can’t wait to do this again, probably on my upcoming trip to Iceland and Norway, though I dread having to carry film and deal with impatient security personal and passengers as I beg for the film not be put through the x-ray machine. The other factor I dread is that there’s no backup, as with digital where you can back up the files to numerous sources. Carrying film on overseas trip can feel like carrying gold. You don’t dare want it stolen or lost.
I will continue to shoot digitally 97% of the time but what this excursion into the past taught me is that the feeling I got from the process of shooting film, the anticipation of it waiting to be developed, the first excited look at each frame, the dejection in those that didn’t meet what I envisioned and the elation with those that surpassed it, I’ll never experience in the digital realm. Fortunately, the opportunities still exist along with the perfection that can be attained digitally.
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