I was brought up on film photography (was given my first camera when I was 11). I was very lucky that when I did my photography degree (2009-2012) I had access to fully working film cameras (35mm, medium format & large format) as well as darkroom & developing facilities at the university – this was when a lot of universities were getting rid of their darkroom & developing facilities. It wasn’t until then that I had even thought of using digital cameras – I’ve been shooting digital since 2009 but have recently come full circle back to film.
What I have come to realise about digital photography is that it can make you lazy – “Take enough shots and surely one of them will be ok right?”. I spent a day at a motor racing circuit (a few years ago now), I took 2 DSLR’s & 4 lenses (which weighed a ton), when I got back to my hotel it took over 4 hours to transfer all the RAW files I had shot onto my laptop (I had a shower, went to dinner and they were still transferring when I got back). The sheer amount of work that goes into editing, storing, backing up files not to mention the cost is getting out of hand now. Digital cameras also keep evolving, 5 years ago 4K video was cutting-edge tech in a DSLR/Mirrorless camera now it’s expected as standard. They keep getting more powerful, bigger and unfortunately more expensive.
Example - You could buy a Fuji GW690 (version 1,2 or 3, comes with a fixed lens) for £400/500, now you only get 8 photos per roll of 120 film (6x9 negative size) but the resolution is the equivalent to a 250 Megapixel sensor (yes that’s not a typo). Now, lets say it costs £25 per roll of film to buy, send to a lab to be developed & scanned – that’s 380 rolls of film before you reach the cost of Fuji’s GFX 100 medium format digital camera (100 Megapixels) and that doesn’t include the cost of a lens (cheapest is £950) so that puts it past 410 rolls now.
So the cost of film photography as to digital photography is at best hard to compare and at worst totally misunderstood.
When you combine this digital technology with social media & the modern cell-phone what you get is what I call “Instant gratification photography”. We now live in a society of instant consumption & highspeed attention spans
Now I’m not saying that Social Media is “Bad”, if anything combined with the camera-phone photography has been re-democratised like film photography was in the early 20th century when mass market cameras become available to the majority of the populous.
Pretty much everyone has a camera on them now, flooding the internet with millions if not billions of images every year.
The challenge for photographers & photography today is how to make yourself stand out from the crowd. Simply making beautiful images just isn’t enough anymore, you have to engage with the world, promote your work, make yourself standout and dare I say it have “vision” of your work.
I rambled through my BA degree experimenting & discovering various aspects of photography & photographic practice. However now that I’ll be starting a masters degree at the end of September, I have taken that experience as well as my wider experiences and zeroed in on what my photographic practice is.
By turning back to film photography, I have found that I take my time thinking a lot more about what I’m shooting, how I’m shooting it & what outcome I want to achieve. Now I could go back to shooting just digital with this experience but it won’t feel the same.
So, I have come to the conclusion that film photography is the way to go, the best way for me to fully express my vision & artistic intent. I will however still use my DSLR as well, I have obtained a number of manual focus prime lenses that I will use with my DSLR but I also have 35mm & medium format film cameras which will be my primary cameras.