From shooting digital to film to instant
DIGITAL
I had originally been learning to shoot with digital cameras as that's what my university places more emphasis on. I own a canon 750D but had also been using the university's online booking system to borrow out a canon 6D and learn more on aperture, ISO, focus etc. I began to find that I was becoming disenchanted with photography when shooting digitally because I could take the shot 100 times to get it right and then all of the other images were rendered useless. I had thousands of images backed up on my hardrive, moments in time with no purpose. Shooting digitally is really good for corporate work as it's fast and ensures for the best quality results. There is also a sea of media out there and every idea I could think of had surely been done in one way or another and this is when I made the change to shoot with film.
FILM (35 MM)
I borrowed an Olympus film camera from university and brought it to London with me. It shoots in 35 mm and there is no auto function, therefore all elements have to be controlled manually. Therefore, my experience with shooting digitally previously helped me a lot as I knew which settings I would have to use. I shot in black and white and took an induction in the dark room with Andy Thorpe where I learned how to develop my film into negatives for printing onto paper. The entire process was extremely therapeutic and personal because I was commanding the entire process which is relatively complicated with different time frames and different temperatures. I liked how it was a bit of a gamble at times and that the shots I'd previously forgotten came to life before me. However, I couldn't do this for every roll of 36 exposures I shot because I'm quite impatient and so, I had to find a middleground...
POLAROID
This is when I began experimenting with Polaroid. My dad had recently given me a polaroid image system E (Spectra) that he used to shoot with in the 1970s when he was growing up in Leeds. He wanted me to have it because of it's sentimental value to him rather than throw it away. I found that the film was extremely expensive and started with one pack of colour. Whilst I loved how fast the development time was and how I was ending up with a tangible object, the polaroid really is a gamble because no matter how much control I tried to put over the image, the focal length of the subject, the amount of light, I always ended up with something completely different from what I wanted. The lack of setting and control was really annoying to begin with as it was something that I really wasn't used to in my previous practice as a photographer, however, I began to see the beauty in the mistakes and in the fact that my photo was completely unreplicable, which related directly to some reading I had been doing on the function of the 'aura' in Walter Benjamin's 'Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction' (Benjamin, 2010) which I will explain more about in my next blog post. What was interesting was that by being completely open minded about the outcome and allowing myself time for experimentation, meaning was inferred naturally and more authentically than when I was trying to push it in my past images.
REFERENCES:
Benjamin, W. (2010). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. [United States?]: Prism Key Press.
FILM (35 MM)
I borrowed an Olympus film camera from university and brought it to London with me. It shoots in 35 mm and there is no auto function, therefore all elements have to be controlled manually. Therefore, my experience with shooting digitally previously helped me a lot as I knew which settings I would have to use. I shot in black and white and took an induction in the dark room with Andy Thorpe where I learned how to develop my film into negatives for printing onto paper. The entire process was extremely therapeutic and personal because I was commanding the entire process which is relatively complicated with different time frames and different temperatures. I liked how it was a bit of a gamble at times and that the shots I'd previously forgotten came to life before me. However, I couldn't do this for every roll of 36 exposures I shot because I'm quite impatient and so, I had to find a middleground...POLAROID
This is when I began experimenting with Polaroid. My dad had recently given me a polaroid image system E (Spectra) that he used to shoot with in the 1970s when he was growing up in Leeds. He wanted me to have it because of it's sentimental value to him rather than throw it away. I found that the film was extremely expensive and started with one pack of colour. Whilst I loved how fast the development time was and how I was ending up with a tangible object, the polaroid really is a gamble because no matter how much control I tried to put over the image, the focal length of the subject, the amount of light, I always ended up with something completely different from what I wanted. The lack of setting and control was really annoying to begin with as it was something that I really wasn't used to in my previous practice as a photographer, however, I began to see the beauty in the mistakes and in the fact that my photo was completely unreplicable, which related directly to some reading I had been doing on the function of the 'aura' in Walter Benjamin's 'Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction' (Benjamin, 2010) which I will explain more about in my next blog post. What was interesting was that by being completely open minded about the outcome and allowing myself time for experimentation, meaning was inferred naturally and more authentically than when I was trying to push it in my past images.
REFERENCES:
Benjamin, W. (2010). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. [United States?]: Prism Key Press.
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