siik.org

if you’ve been following me for some time, you might gather that i enjoy photography a great deal (read: hella much). i’ve been shooting stuff since around 2003. first with some simple canon point and shoots, and then i moved into the dslr arena in late 07. however currently, as of december 08, i’ve been completely in love with shooting film. a lot of people on flickr still shoot film, and i used to tell myself ‘why shoot film when you can just treat the image to look film-esque in photoshop?’ – well, now from experience, i can say it’s just a totally different method and mindset when shooting film.

when i shot/shoot digital i ultimately fell/fall prey to a number of habits that are telltale of digital photography:

a) checking shots immediately after shooting them (urbandictionary will have some arguments about this term);
b) obsession over shot quality-blurry or OOF or bad white balance etc;
c) caving in to the instant gratification of immediate deletion;
d) fixation on new technology and upgrading along with the yearly ebb and flow

i’m not necessarily saying they’re bad or good, it’s just that these type of things lend themselves to shooting digitally. i was getting interested more and more with film over the past six months, even bought the film cameras that i’m using now, but never really had the time to start shooting – blame that one on school. i started shooting film right around christmas, and i probably haven’t touched my 10d since. i love getting the off comments about it all the time(“what the hell, is that a film camera?”, “old school!”, “i thought those all broke when y2k happened”), i love the twang of the shutter, i love not having to post process any of the photos, and i absolutely love grain. i love not knowing how my shot turned out, i love being surprised by it once i get the pictures developed. also since i can’t see how my shot turned out, i will care less if the shot is in focus or not – sometimes even accidents will look great in film. it’s just a change of pace in comparison to digital.

however, it can get expensive. i tend to go through rolls per week so i’m always buying more film, and while developing is still pretty cheap at target, they don’t do special film like b&w or slide film – where i’ll have to get those done somewhere else. it’s not as hassle free as having a cf card with all your shit immediately. i also just bought a scanner for the sole purpose of scanning negs so i dont have to have them on photo cd, which is more bills. but currently, i’m still feelin film hard (NH/NG/TWSS) and will continue to keep using film until i turn enough tricks to get a 5dmk2.

me and my friend pauline have started a photo blog where we’ll be posting purely black and white images for a 400+ page book we’ll print later on. we’ll use lulu so it’s gonna be mad cheap, and they’ll be for sale.