The Hype Around Film

It must be really tough to have a job that requires one to produce content in the photographic space on a regular interval, given that there is no innovation happening and that new gear is the same as the old gear with at best minor upgrades that could not be justified by a sane person. Same pigs, different lipstick. As for the paid influencers, they might need to get a real job.

I do understand that shooting film is new to some folks and good on them for giving it a go, but if you were to believe some of the hip deep BS coming out of some of the online publications, written by people who couldn’t spell film a year ago, you could be locked up for being nuts. Contrary to a lot of these shills, film is not the second coming of whatever.

I shot my first roll of film on my own in 1969. In 1974 my first image was published in the town newspaper. I was photographing for the school yearbook at that time, and a couple of us got published. Two were of a soccer game, and while mine was good, the shot by my peer Les was far better, giving me something to aspire to (better timing and a 135mm lens). I was shooting Tri-X at the time, loading my own cannisters from a bulk roll and processing it with the other photographers in an unused classroom at night. No one had motor winders and every one of us recognized the cost and the value of each shutter squeeze. We became better photographers by thinking about each shutter squeeze and then deciding to make the shot or to let it go.

That is a great thing about film. It teaches sensibility and that volume has no relationship to photographic value. Today I see people with their digital cameras burning off over a thousand shots in a day and I regularly wonder if there are 36 of them worth anything at all. Certainly the majority die alone on some hard drive somewhere instead of being trashed immediately, or better yet, never snapped at all.

Contrary to the hype artists, aka liars and idiots, shooting film does not inherently make you a better photographer. Nor does it make you more professional. It doesn’t automatically give you better pictures or better colour or greater resolution. That is all as they say, bullshit.

The only things that any photographer can do to become more accomplished is to use that greyish blob in their skulls behind the mark one mod zero eyeballs BEFORE squeezing the shutter release. Learn about your subject, your genre, your own style and work on it. It’s often said that it takes ten thousand hours to build a level of expertise. If you believe some of these alleged writers, ten thousand clicks gets you there. I’m sorry,(not), if this hurts someone’s feelings but it never has and never will.

What film does do is teach discipline. It teaches seeing and it trashes the lazy picture taker’s excuse of “fix it in photoshop”. You cannot fix crap. Film builds the skills to get it right in camera. It can also be a refresher and a cure for digital laziness and sloppy behaviour.

I shoot mostly digital these days, in the 35mm sensor space and the medium format sensor space, but I still shoot film, albeit almost entirely in medium format and large format and always in Black and White, because good B&W images are much harder to make because there is no option for colourful lipstick.

Film is just a tool. A very old tool that stopped its evolution a very long time ago. Much like digital is today. Smartphones make it easy to take pictures, but they are so limited that you cannot actually make a photograph with them, all the hype, lies and misrepresentation notwithstanding. Smartphones are today’s 126, or 110 cameras without the requirement to be aware of light. The lazy choice. Film had that too. No need to keep rebuilding a mousetrap that couldn’t catch anything.

Sadly interchangeable lens digital cameras also encourage the decision not to develop skills. HDR removes the requirement to understand how to expose for your goal. Built in focus stacking obviates the requirement to understand aperture, depth of field, primary focus poitn et al. Pre shooting, that function that starts storing images before you squeeze the shutter eliminates the development of photographic timing. Automation can be useful but if it makes for sloppy and lazy work, it has failed. AI is the solution for people too lazy to learn to use a smartphone, a pox on it and all its users.

Maybe film is the cure for digitally enabled ineptitude. Then again, maybe I believe art comes from the human brain and not some piece of technology.

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