Luxury

It sounds odd to say, but it used to bother me a little to think about what I should say when someone asks me why I would be shooting film in this day and age. In truth it's something I've only actually been asked a few times, but it wasn't supposed to be a question I had difficulty answering so it bothered me that it was. The trouble, I think, was that I was trying to formulate an answer in the kind of terms I thought potential questioners would be expecting – something about resolution, contrast range or an aesthetic quality digital can't match. There may be some truth in these things I suppose, but honestly even if there weren't I'd still be shooting film and I suspect the same is probably true for other film photographers who answer along these lines.

One of my all time favorite images from the RB67. When I think back to my
\mindset when this was taken I can't imagine I would have been moved to do
a shot like this if I had been using the old DSLR.

When I think about what it is that brought me back to shooting film though, the answer becomes perfectly clear. It's simple. I shoot film because it's something I have the luxury of doing. This begs the obvious question of course - luxurious how, what's so luxurious about it? We can obviously rule out any notion of luxury in the personal comfort sense, if you got the chance to lug my full medium format kit any distance you'd know that. It's more like the way a classic automobile might be a luxury to drive even though it might lack some of the personal comfort features like MP3 stereo or air conditioning that can be found in the average compact car these days.

That, at least, is closer to the flavour of what I mean, but not very satisfying as an explanation which is probably what took me so long to come round to it. It's easy to imagine engaging in the activity of driving around in a classic car without a care for the idea of getting anywhere in particular, but harder to imagine doing photography without some concern for the photograph that will ultimately be produced. I've been doing this for a long time and have a pretty heavy intellectual investment in the whys and wheretofores of using a camera to get the kind of results I wanted. An ill-defined notion such as luxury didn't seem to have a place within this corpus.

This is coming around to what lead to my own return to film roughly a year ago after shooting primarily digital for the previous seven or eight years. As this blog is in its infancy though, perhaps a wee bit of personal history would be in order here.

Somewhere back in the early 80's or so photography began to transform from that weird thing my parents were so preoccupied with to something I couldn't get enough of. By my early 20's I blacked out the windows in the bedroom of my first bachelor pad to accommodate a rugged if more than a little rough around the edges 4x5 enlarger of unknown manufacture with exposed fibre based prints being shuffled off to the bathroom (thankfully windowless) for development.

Life happened, a marriage and kids, and passions were inevitably tempered by necessity, responsibility and the fact I was sharing my life with someone who wasn't going to be happy with a combination dressing table/enlarger stand, but never were they in any danger of being extinguished. Somewhere in the mid-naughts (or whatever you prefer to call that decade from 2000 to 2010) I took to digital as did nearly everyone else, feeling satisfied it was the perfect way forward. No more film to purchase or run out of, no more limitations because of the darkroom I no longer had, no more committing to shooting a particular stock for the next 36 exposures or waiting to see the results.

An image made with the Contax IIa using the classic Zeiss 50mm f/1.5 Sonnar.

I could never tear myself away from film completely though. Despite the rationale I set for myself said I could save the money I'd spend on film and get images that I could do more with far more easily if I would just shoot everything with digital, there was no extricating myself from the mystique of film. At one point I even got caught up in it enough to buy myself a classic Contax IIa, though I sold that a few years later in light of the facts that a) I really preferred using my 35mm Nikons and b) it had appreciated to nearly double what I paid for it. Still, film remained a sideline and I figured it always would. I'd turn to it now and again. You know, the occasional luxury.

Something was bugging me about digital though. I'm a black and white guy at heart, but most of my final images were still colour. Make all the arguments you want about the final results being the same, shooting a colour image then converting in post processing is not the same as shooting black and white, and setting the camera to monochrome mode is just a placebo that loses its effect when you know you're still shooting in colour then turning all the conversion decisions over to the camera which it performs before showing you the image. The more I learned about the digital sensors the more of a compromise they seemed and soon I could barely stand the thought of shooting colour digital in order to get to a black and white final image. True monochrome digital is possible but the only options seemed to be the stratospherically priced Leica M Monochrome or an online tutorial I found from a guy who was scraping the colour Bayer matrix off digital sensors allowing nearly full monochrome capture on those occasions he managed not to completely ruin the chip. Film had remained an occasional indulgence for me because digital seemed to make more sense logically, but that logic seemed to be crumbling.

This was enough to get me poking around to see what various film cameras were going for on eBay. At the time I had been weighing my options for the next DSLR upgrade (the third time in eight years I was feeling hopelessly behind the times and there was nothing functionally wrong with the DSLRs I was using) but when I realized I could put together a whole medium format system for the price of some of the cheaper DSLRs I had been looking at I just couldn't bring myself to look at digital bodies any longer. Thinking I would probably regret it (I may never have been so wrong about something) a Mamiya RB67 complete with lens, 120 back and waist-level finder were soon on their way to me.

Since it arrived I've only ventured to use digital for what I'd consider creative work once, but I'll save my thoughts on that illuminating experience for another day. Suffice it to say that the DSLR I once thought of as ripe for replacement is now a perfectly satisfactory utility camera, good for auction photos, blog illustrations and maybe a quick grab shot if the dog does something really funny. I really thought I was just putting off updating my digital equipment when I succumbed to the urge to pick up the medium format package, figuring at best I'd end up shooting a 50/50 mix of film and digital. It didn't take long to realize that wouldn't be the case.

Photography has been important to me since about my mid teens but since the live-in darkroom days had passed it's usually taken a back seat to other interests and obligations. While there were periods when I gave it more attention, it was never with the same passion I felt for it back in the day. I figured I had just gotten older, taken a more mature view of things and to some extent moved on. It turns out I was wrong about that. By the time a couple of rolls had made their way through the Mamiya it was clear it wasn't me that had changed, just how I was doing photography. The passion had been there all along, patiently waiting for me to come to my senses.

This is just the path I took, but the realization it lead to is one I'm sure I share with countless others. It's worth while, I believe, to ask ourselves just what it is about shooting film that should make this so, but it's nothing that needs to be analysed or justified. Seen in this light all those film versus digital debates with their MTF charts and bean counting tallys seem pretty silly.

Silver and Gold

Silver is literally what the images of the great masters of photography, names like Stieglitz, Strand, Adams, Cunningham and Weston (you can take your pick of Westons). The essential alchemy of photography, known by the middle of the 19^th century, uses tiny grains of silver too small to shine to form an unbroken scale of tones from the barely discernible to the richest black. Transformed by the light projected through a lens these tones can be made to form themselves into an uncanny likeness of the world we experience.

Golden Ages are supposed to be times harkened back to. They are rarely recognized for what they are until they have passed. What a thing it would be if we could only recognise a Golden Age while we were still in the midst of it. That is what this blog is about – not a wistful attempt to relive the past but a recognition that we are still living in the Golden Age of Silver.

A section from a contact print I pulled from my archives dated March, 1995.
The dark streaks at the edges of the frames above and below that match up
with the sprocket holes in the film is bromide drag caused by too little agitation
in the developer. We live and learn.

There is, I must admit, a whiff of irony intended in the title of this post (and sorry for the Burl Ives ear-worm.) It's directed at those who still hold on to the notion that the age has indeed passed. This is owing, of course, to that substitute for the alchemy of photography has come on to the scene over the past couple of decades, bringing with it speculation about how long it would take for digital technology entirely replace traditional silver based photography. Now that digital photography has attained that maturity it seems there are those who take it as an article of faith that those speculations must have come to fruition by now, therefore film must be dead. In the current photography literature I regularly see phrases like “back when film was used...” as though doing photography using film is a practice firmly and permanently relegated to a past age.

As is so often the case in the history of human endeavours however, expectations and the actual course of events turn out to be two different animals. Several years ago it was common to assume that if someone was still using film that, for economic reasons or maybe just pure stubbornness, they just haven't gone digital yet. They would eventually of course, everyone would, it was just a matter of time. But several years on it turns out that not only didn't everyone follow the script and switch to digital, the plot started veering off in other directions entirely. People with no investment in a film camera system were choosing to go with one instead of digital. Then there was the growing phenomenon of people like me who had switched to digital earlier choosing to switch back. There are still others who shoot digital but have either never been able to let go of film entirely or have discovered film and want to explore it more. It is for any film user in any of these categories (or maybe a category I haven't thought of here) that this blog is being written.

I should say a few words about what to expect in future posts:

• I like to write but I don't do this for a living, and it's really just an adjunct to a hobby I have too little time for already. Therefore I'm not committing to any update frequency.
• I write about what I know and though I've been at this for a long time I don't know everything. I respect colour photography but don't do a lot of it myself, so I will be writing mostly about black and white.
• There will be technical stuff and how to's. If I do an expose on a particular camera or piece of equipment it's because that's what I own and have access to, not because I think brand X is better than brand Y or that I'm so smart you should make the same equipment choices I do.
• I can also wax philosophical at times and many posts will be about my thoughts on this or that. Not everybody's in to that, and if that includes you I understand. It should be pretty obvious without reading to far what I'm on about and if you decide to skip those posts I won't hold it against you.
• As this blog is about film photography it's inevitable that there will be times (especially when I get on a philosophical bent) there will be comparisons and contrasts drawn with digital and speculations about why one would chose film instead of digital. It pains me to know that, especially in the general culture of today’s internet, this will be taken by some as laying the gauntlet for a particular kind of debate. While I can hope that won't be the case among the kind of readership I hope to attract, this is the internet after all. Thoughtful disagreement with anything I or anyone else may say is welcome of course, but I have no interest in any kind of smack-down “you're wrong and I'm right” debate, most especially when it comes to analog vs. digital photography. Let me state it once right at the beginning then that, while it's not for me in my creative pursuits, there are plenty of good reasons for some people to chose digital over film.
• On a related note, I'm no purist. While (“utility” shots such as photos of my film cameras aside) on the capture end of things I work exclusively on film, like many people these days circumstances force me scan and print negatives. I am hoping this will change over the next several months as I have started the process of putting together a darkroom space, but for now some portion of producing an image involves sitting down at a computer. I have more distant plans for alternative process (I'm thinking carbon transfer) printing that will involve digital negatives for contact printing. Digital technology will probably be a part of what I do photographically and I'm not going to beat myself up over this.

If you've been in photography for any length of time you know things have changed, and of course not all of those changes have been for the better. Products have disappeared or become hard to find. The local camera store is all but a thing of the past unless you live in a relatively large urban centre while photography publications and websites are overwhelmingly about digital. Maybe it's just human nature to get caught up in all the great things that are no more and miss the fact that it's not all bad news. There's no need to wait until we can look back on these times to recognise the renewed appreciation for the real, tangible photographic print as a valued object. And maybe we've started getting too used to the fact that there's still a flood of excellent used film gear out there at prices that would seem like a miracle in decades passed. It's true things aren't like they used to be, what ever is? But if film photography really means something to you it's still possible to look around and see that, right now, you're living in a Golden Age.