Thirty-five millimeter craft work
I’ve been shooting photographs on film. For the past year or so I have been talking in an offhand way about learning photography. I’d been researching digital cameras, and was building up the energy to buy and learn to use a Fujifilm X100T (real sexy). About a month ago, my mom gave me a beat up old canvas lunch bag. Inside was the family camera from my youth, a Minolta X-700. An SLR, 35mm film camera purchased in 1984.
This thing takes actual film. Like, the little canisters you buy and load into your camera and wind and advance after each shot. And you only get 36 pictures per roll (or 24!), and then you have to rewind it and take it out and drive it to Western Hills Photo and give it to the lady and she mails it somewhere and two weeks (2 weeks!) later you get the negatives and super high quality digital versions, and prints if you asked her for them.
Just to take the photos in the first place you have to think about the light, and your aperture, and holding real still, and the shutter speed, and what kind of film you’re using because that makes a difference… Also you have no idea if your photo came out for probably weeks.
But when when you get them back, it’s so worth it. Even if a roll of film is $10 and getting it developed is like $20, so every time you hit the shutter you’re spending almost a dollar. Just look at these beauties.
Those are completely untouched — just developed and scanned and uploaded to the internet. They aren’t perfect. There was no cell phone camera deciding for me what the focus of the picture was, what the lighting levels should be, what the blur should be. I chose all that with little knobs and with the camera lens.
What I like about the process is the intention behind each shot. I need to frame it up — what’s going to be in the photo and where? I have to look at the light meter to see how exposed it’ll be. Sunlight matters. I have to decide the depth-of-field — how blurry things that I’m not focused on will be. I have to hold really still. Sometimes you just miss shots. A lot of the shots are ALMOST EXACTLY RIGHT but aren’t.
You can see the subject’s near hand is blurry, and face is blurry, but distant hand is crisp. That’s not really what I was going for. Wanted that face crisp. Oh well. I just turned the lens focus a hair too far. On my iPhone I’d have just tapped her on the face and blammo.
Anyway this hobby is perfectly suited to me. One day I might get a DSLR so I can take a billion photos, and use some auto-focus, but for now this is the right speed to learn the craft of photography. Forcing myself to actually compose shots is significantly more interesting to me than snapping cell phone pics. Both have their place, but this one is making my brain work.
Soon I’ll be bankrupt from this hobby, but until then, I’ll be shooting.
