From the course: Analog Photography: Shooting & Processing Black-and-White Film

Understanding why you shoot film

From the course: Analog Photography: Shooting & Processing Black-and-White Film

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Understanding why you shoot film

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I think one of the first questions you might ask yourself is, why film? Digital is so convenient, most of us are walking around with a digital camera in our pockets that records wonderfully acceptable images. And heaven knows there's a host of apps out there that provide filtration effects that can duplicate almost anything that's ever been done with film. All that being said, it's not the same. Perhaps you get your first motivation is going to come from finding an antique camera. This was my grandfather's camera. He took pictures for Stereopticon viewing with this. It's a fascinating piece of equipment. It opens doors to a whole new area of creativity, exploring 3D old school. Maybe you've heard about the romance of a plastic camera. These lenses are just cheap molded lenses put into inexpensive camera bodies, each one with its own unique properties that might fuzz and blur the edges in the frame. All of a sudden your images become more interpretive, a little bit more exciting. Maybe a high speed film is interesting to you, where you get chunks of grain that add really interesting, almost sand-like texture to your images. One of the things I find personally, digital photography as far as an interpretive method, I feel like I'm using other people's tools a lot of times when I manipulate an image. Or when I'm in the dark room when I'm working with the actual chemical process that involves film, you can alter that very simply by changing the temperature of the chemistry, by changing concentrations, by changing particular chemical combinations to manipulate the results you get from the latent image you've captured on film. To me there's also a romance associated with it. It's kind of old school. There's craftsmanship. It's a hands on operation. And I think as we go through this course you're going to find that it is really exciting to work with it. And there are a lot of options that you might not have realized were there.

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