Film and Polaroids
Posted under: UPDATE: you can see the polaroid photoshoot at Katelin’s post.
Film photography has been in the air recently. Just a couple weeks back, I was told that I should start shooting film and start developing my own photos, (hence I spent my free time looking into F5‘s and Mamiya‘s.) Then over the weekend, I used an actual Polaroid camera for a quick and dirty photoshoot. Finally, today Kodak announced that it is stopping the production of Kodachrome Film.
I’ve never really been big into film. I bought my first film SLR during my freshmen year at university. It was a Zenit 12xp featured below.
(Unfortunately this is the only photo I can find of my zenit. Keep in mind this was freshman year at university, and I think we were trying to create the most phallic looking camera. ’Pimp My SLR’ at its best.)
Anyways…the Zenit was a full blown manual camera with only two dots to tell me if I’m over or under exposing. (they both flash if my exposure is spot on!) I had bought the camera with a whole set of random lenses in a silver case, I remember I use to haul case around town taking snap shots.
After less than 10 rolls of film, I realised a full manual camera was quite a bit to handle and I didn’t know enough to control all the settings just yet. So a few months later, I bought a Canon Eos300 film SLR, a plastic GOLD one too. Fortunately I don’t have any photos of that toy. The little gold Canon was easier to use as I now had auto focus and auto exposure. So I slowly started shooting more again.
Again after 10-15 rolls of film, I realised two things: 1) it is god awfully expensive to develop film 2) I am not learning anything as I see the results of my setting changes weeks after I take my photograph. So I went digital and bought my beloved Nikon D50 right before my 3rd year at university.
Since then, I have neither touched a film camera nor developed a roll of film. But I have racked up hundreds of gigabytes worth of digital photos. Shooting digital was a much faster learning process as I could immediately see the difference between my settings, and I soon figured out what all the settings did as well.
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This past weekend at Katelin’s house, we did a quick photoshoot with her Polaroid camera with less than 10 shots on it (as polaroids have been discontinued). Through those 10 shots, I noticed how much more planning and thinking I did to prepare a shot before I snap the shutter. With the convenience of digital, I have gotten into the habit of shooting 1000 or so shots per photoshoot. The digital message seems to be, let’s start shooting and we will change and set up as we go, I’ll eventually get it. Whereas with film, everything must be planned and set up for that one moment.
It feels I should say something profound to end this rambling…but a bit clueless at the moment to say the least….just keep on shooting I guess.
What’s kind of funny… we use to shoot polaroids to get our exposure for film correct. Now, when we shoot polaroids, we use our digital SLRs to get the exposure correct for polaroid.
Film lives!
[...] with the concept from the polaroid shoot with Katelin at her house party. We all got together for a party of a shoot at Katelin’s [...]