All too often, I feel lost in my own camera roll. A confusing blur of faces and places I half remember amassed over eight years of owning a phone. The thousands of photos virtually weightless in my pocket.
But what if I told you there was a different way, something that could give weight back to your photos and give them the meaning they deserve? Well, let me introduce you to the world of film photography.
Photography has been around in some form for almost 200 years, with the first widely available photographs being expensive copper-plated daguerreotypes introduced in 1839. Since then, photography has come a long way. With the 35mm film everyone knows and loves which Kodak introduced in 1934 and gained popularity in the 1960s as the primary way to take pictures.
The first thing that always strikes me about film photography is the beautiful physicality of it. How the shutter of each film camera has its own distinctive clack or the telltale crackle of a winding spool loading film into the next frame.
The second thing that always hits me is the raw, imperfect nature of film. The vibrant palettes of any given film stock and the subtlety of the film’s natural grain give each photo a unique, dreamy quality that could never be replicated on the precise machining of a digital camera.
There’s something within that imperfection and natural fuzziness that I think appeals to a lot of people on a base level.
We as humans often tend to gravitate towards nostalgia, a rose-tinted interpretation of the past, and with film photography that feeling can be had in the modern day too. It allows us to relive our favorite moments in perpetuity, captured in a rose-colored frame of film.
There’s something to be said for working for your photos as well. Because each roll of film only offers a maximum of 36 shots, each and every shot counts. The limitations of a roll of film are what breed the creativity that can be found within.
Switching to film allowed me to think about each and every photo I take, it required conscious effort each time I held the camera up to my face, carefully metering and compositing before each shot, trying desperately to make each frame count.
It’s a satisfying experience, following your photo from birth to completion, eagerly awaiting your scans to finally see how something turned out. It’s truly an addicting and magical process, and something I sincerely hope you get hooked on too.
Where to begin?
One of the questions any budding film photographer might first ask is “where do I even get a film camera?” The answer is simpler than it might seem.
Ebay can be a great place to start if you want something on the cheaper end that is guaranteed to work. With prices ranging anywhere from $5 to $500, though, it can be an intimidating place to start.
If you want a more local option, you have two alternatives. While pretty hit or miss, Goodwill and St. Vinny’s often have old film cameras lying around that can be had for very cheap.
Otherwise, if you want to support a local business, The Camera Company with locations on the West Side and the East Side of Madison, offer a range of great, professionally refurbished film cameras to choose from along with selling and developing film.
But my advice to anyone staring out is that as long as the camera works and it’s in your price range, what brand or lens it is really doesn’t matter!
Once you have a camera, what then? Well, if you’re looking for a good beginner film stock I recommend Kodak Gold 200. It’s cheap, can be found practically anywhere and, most importantly, it looks beautiful.
Film photography is a medium that connects us back to our photos. The physical action of metering, framing and shooting grounding us in the moment of time we took that picture. After all, isn’t that what photography is all about? Capturing a moment in time, capturing us in a physical freezing of history.
And film connects us to more than just the action of taking a photograph ever could. It freezes that moment in our mind too, holding the feelings, emotions and sounds we experienced along with it in our memory.
