A couple of years into my wedding photography career I was hanging out with a friend. He had a Mamiya RB67 medium format film camera that he wouldn’t shut up about.
I told him I was a digital guy, I didn’t understand why people still shot film, and humoured him as he waxed lyrical about film stock, film cameras and kept berating me about the fact I just didn’t ‘get it’.
He said let me take your photo – and he attached a polaroid film back to his RB67 and took my photo. After he took it, he scanned the negative on a flatbed scanner, and this is that photo:
It’s still to this day my favourite ever photo of me.
In that 20 minutes of having my photo taken, seeing it develop on the instant film (Fujifilm FP3000B if you’re already a film nerd) and then scanning it, I suddenly and soulfully understood the magic of film
Later that afternoon (no joke) I went to a vintage camera shop in Manchester, bought my own Mamiya RB67 and kicked off my own obsession with shooting film.
I don’t shoot any film any more, but I think shooting film helped me develop feelings about, and an understanding of photography that I would never have had if I’d never shot any film.
I’m going to tell you about it hopefully inspire you to shoot a bit of film too…
The Mamiya RB67 is a medium format, completely mechanical camera. I loved it because it was so far removed from a digital camera – no electronics, no light meter and a waist level finder you had to look down into.
You have to load the film back of your choice, attach it to the camera, remove the ‘dark slide’, cock the shutter, line up your shot in the waist level finder which moves the opposite way to the way you’re moving the camera, then when you’re definitely ready, hold it steady and press the shutter.
There is no shutter sound in the world better than the loud slap of the shutter in the Mamiya RB67 and you can’t convince me otherwise!
There is nothing instantaneous about using a camera like this. And knowing you’ve got 10 shots per roll of quite expensive film, followed by paying a lab to quite expensively scan it, you agonise over every detail about each photo before you finally click the shutter release.
That teaches you something that absolutely makes its way into your thought processes as a digital photographer with almost infinite shots per memory card available.
It connects you to the craft of composition and the patience of waiting for a moment.
I’d have never learned this level of patience without shooting film.
I started shooting film around the same time as I realised that there were actually ways to use the light in my photography.
Because I’d bought a completely mechanical 1970s camera, I chose to get a completely mechanical light meter just to go maximum nerd about it.
I carried that light meter everywhere with me. I’d use it to check the settings at 400ASA/ISO whenever I was out and about and thinking about photography.
It got to the stage where I’d guess what the settings might be, then pull out the light meter to see how far off I was. I got pretty good!
I did give up on the manual light meter in favour of a digital one as my film obsession grew, but I carried on carrying it most places with me as well as at least one of my growing collection of film cameras.
As a completely manual digital shooter, that stuff around light and settings sticks in your head and it made me infinitely better at reading light and guessing settings.
After the Mamiya RB67, my obsession grew and I had a Mamiya C330 twin lens medium format camera and I borrowed a 35mm Canon A1 from a friend. These are all manual focus cameras.
Later I also had a Contax G1 35mm camera which had a light meter and autofocus, and a Leica Minilux 35mm camera which was basically a very expensive point and shoot automatic film camera.
Shooting a roll of film in any camera is a magical experience of luck and patience. Picking a film stock, shooting it hoping you loaded the film properly and the settings you dialled in were in the right ball park at least… and if it was manual focus just praying that you nailed that too. Often I didn’t nail many or any of these things!
Then opening the back of the camera hoping the film wound back properly and you aren’t about to kill it with light and then just waiting, so so impatiently, to see how it all turned out.
And even the shots that don’t turn out so nicely are somehow special because of this process of craft, trust and patience you went through to get there.
Digital has shortcut a lot of that stuff out of photography obviously but the artistic process is and can still be the same. We see a thing, we capture a thing, that thing now exists as a photo, for eternity. Film or digital that’s what it boils down to. It’s just quicker and easier now.
It’s up to us whether we keep that commitment to the craft, that innate trust in our artistic instincts, of reading light, and of striving for composition before we click that shutter release.
I personally think we are better photographers if we focus on those things and I only got that belief from shooting film.
And as photography becomes less respected thanks to phone cameras, it’s these things that will mean we continue to stand out as professional photographers, which I think is going to be vital over the next decade.
But back to film.
Film is special.
Film is magic.
Film is good for the soul.
Try it.
Thanks for reading!
Adam
PS – I’ve had film scans come back all black because I obviously didn’t wind on the film properly. It was so nice of them to still go through the process of scanning them even though they could see that the negatives were all blank after developing! Must’ve been an amusing one for the lab!
PPS – One of my biggest regrets is selling all my film cameras. I’ve not owned any for a few years now and I’ve always sold them on too cheaply! I’m just an all-or-nothing kind of person though, so once I decided I was done with film I sold them all.
PPPS – I did keep the lens from my Contax G1 and bought an adapter to use it on my Sony A7iii. It was the cult 45mm Zeiss Planar f2 lens, but the results were so disappointing from it on the Sony so that eventually got sold too.
PPPPS – Yes I did shoot film at some weddings. I made a point of making it quite experiential for them, and making quite a big thing of it. Turns out people don’t really care about that, or care enough about it to make me want to do it for them anyway, so I knocked it on the head pretty quickly!
PPPPPS – The final straw for me was when, to try and get around expensive scanning costs, I bought a flatbed scanner and tried scanning my own negatives. It was hell. Truly. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
