I follow a couple of photographers on Youtube, and one fella has begun experimenting with shooting film. He’s finding it quite the challenge. Each video, I easily spot why he’s getting the results he is getting, and I leave comments explaining what is happening.
You see, I started during the age of film. I cut my teeth as a photographer becoming an expert in B&W photography and Kodachrome color photography. Digital is SO MUCH EASIER than film photography.
I started photography in the early 1970s. All we had then was film. When you shot film, you had to wait until the processing place delivered the film and prints. I was about 14, so I had to mow lawns to afford film! My father had a small film processing kit from the early 1960s, so I learned to process my first film at 14 as well.
I cannot begin to describe the feelings I had while washing the film and about to unroll my very first roll of Tri-X I processed. There were two issues, and I had let the film touch during the reel loading, but MAN!! I did not have an enlarger then, so I just made “contact” prints until my mom got me an enlarger for my birthday that year.
So, step two in all film photography was making physical prints of the negatives. Except for when I’d shoot slides. It was hard to get prints from slides back then. In the late 1990s, a new technique was available that created medium format negatives from slides, so printing was finally easy.
I was at a Technology and Showbusiness Expo in Los Angeles in 1990 where I met up a Kodak R&D guy I knew from CompuServe and he showed me a new toy – the Kodak Rapid Film scanner. The first glamour image scanned by Kodak’s Test team was one of my images I’d shot during a model test for (reacted) magazine. Soon after that, I began having my images featured on CompuServe’s Go Graphic group, and money REALLY started rolling in.
So, since analog is making a comeback (as it should) I’ll be posting an occasional blog entry about shooting real film, and how it can bite you in the ass if you make a mistake.
The first mistake made?
Thinking it’s just like digital!