Without a Safety Net

Today I branched out a little.

I borrowed a film camera from a friend (Nikon F90x for anyone that cares), put a roll of black and white film in it and put it in my camera bag.


I'm a keen photographer and I like to think of myself as entirely non fundamentalist when it comes to media. Amongst my friends I can count exclusively digital, exclusively film and "a little of what you fancy" photographers. Until today, my "serious" photography has all been digital.

CJ says he likes B&W film because of the range of greys it can represent (in the digital world, we'd call that colour depth...and there is always a finite number of levels. In the analogue world that gradation is likely to be as near as dammit continuous and that's a good thing). It was following a conversation with CJ that got me thinking about my disregard for film.

DrP likes film because it's fun to play with. He switches between a high quality digital SLR, a film SLR, and a few less fancy cameras. He'll play with slide film and process it like print film just to see the weird colours happen (aka XPro). He encourages me in my experimentation.

DM raises a metaphorical eyebrow indicating he's not sure why I'm doing it since I've got a perfectly nice, high quality digital SLR. On my Flickrstream he indicates that he takes a dim view of playing with weird film processing stuff like XPro.

DrC shrugs non-commitally and indicates it's neither a good nor a bad thing but a matter of choice. Then pinches his dad's old film SLR and plots to run a couple of films through it just to see. He also tips up at the pub today with a handful of B&W film for me that he'd been given a while back.

TD hasn't expressed an opinion...well not yet, anyway. If he does, I predict it'll be "I can't be arsed with all that but, whatever". If he stumbles over an internet article that's relevant he'll likely send it because that's just the sort of thing he does.

MMcC positively encourages the experimentation and urges me to think about medium format if I really want to fall love with film.

These are all the people whose photographic opinions I trust most...but they don't concur. So what do I think?...ultimately, that's what really matters after all.

It scares the hell out of me. There's no way for me to check that I've got the exposure right immediately so I have to pay real attention to the settings and then work out, in my head, whether that's the exposure I expect. No more sloppy point, shoot and check the shot and then fiddle with settings.

Each shot I take will cost real money to get processed...so suddenly, there's a good reason not to approach this in my normal scattergun fashion.

Now today I took my D300 out with me and used the metering on there to double check what I was doing with the film camera. So I had a little safety net but I was still anxious every time I took a film picture.

So with all this stress, did I enjoy the experience?

Hell yeah. I slowed down. I used my technical knowledge to ratify my approach - not something I normally need to do all that much. I took about half the pictures I normally would, even though I was carrying two cameras and duplicating shots for testing purposes.

In the near future I'll take the film camera out on its own from time to time.

Time will tell whether the film enjoyed the experience...hopefully not too much time because I'm now excited to see the results.

Watch this space