I started with my first camera around age 8 and was quite a shutterbug! I shot with that same Kodak 35mm kid-camera all the way through high school, mostly photos of people and places. I left for college just as digital cameras were still taking flight and before smart-phone cameras. I mistakenly thought I'd outgrown my kid-camera, but didn't yet have a great solution for replacing it.
During college I met the one who would become both my life-partner and a talented professional photographer: Benjamin. He got me started with my first digital camera in 2006, a compact little pearly pink point and shoot. Having a camera in hand that provided real-time feedback via the display screen accelerated my learning dramatically and helped me further develop my eye for composition.
In 2011, I graduated to a micro 4/3 Olympus, my first camera with exchangeable lenses! It was compact and lightweight, but allowed me to experiment with the building blocks of photography: shutter speed, aperture, ISO and varied focal lengths. This helped me grow my technical skill.
In 2016 I graduated to a Nikon DSLR. I inherited it from Benjamin on 'manual' and didn't know how to change the settings to cheat with auto-settings (and didn't bother looking it up), so I finally forced myself to learn how to shoot manually! This was just the push I needed to help me understand shutter-speed, aperture, and ISO even better.
But the one part of digital photography that I never grew to like was the editing. I've developed a great eye as an editing assistant and can scan through several hundred photos in no time, weeding out the great from the lackluster. But I never developed the skills, confidence, (or more accurately the patience) for taking my photos all the way to completion. It was cumbersome.
By the end of 2016, I was confidently shooting manually with the DSLR, but noticed that I'd started thinking about and really missing my old kid-camera and all the simplicity and joy of it. I looked around at my parents house, but already knew it was long gone.
Then 2017 rolled around and film cameras just started popping up! First a Nikon SLR was gifted to me by my brother who hadn't used it in years, then I stumbled upon a basic point and shoot in a junk pile at a local camera shop. By autumn, I met the Holga, and this past Spring the Kodak Hawkeye. All the while, as these cameras kept showing up, I started shooting film again.
I love it. After being dialed in to tech-based photography for so long, I was astounded to (re)discover that these old cameras require no electricity whatsoever! They're purely mechanical.
Shooting with film is a slow and mindful process. Because I pay for every shot I take (for developing and printing, neither of which I currently have the set-up to do myself), I take more care in deciding on each shot and I shoot more sparingly. I also shoot with different cameras and film depending on the style of shot that I want. So it can take me a while to make it through one role of film, since I’m shooting sparingly across 3-4 different cameras.
I love that it takes so long to get my photos back and that each one is a surprise. I’m still getting to know each of these cameras and how they shoot. I’m also still growing in my skill as a photographer, especially with film. Right now, I’m shooting on vintage film, which lends another unknown quality to how they might turn out.
Film is slow, unknown, surprising, simple, and fun. Film photography gave me my start and digital photography gave me technique and skill. Film gave me back my love of photography and, strangely, led me back to digital, since there are some things I will always turn to digital for (including my awesome macro lens) and instant-feedback for developing my eye.
So, now I do both.
I shoot with the equipment that will yield the result I’m seeking.
I shoot with the mindfulness of film regardless of which camera I have in hand…
…and I treat my finished photo more like film in that I only do basic necessary color correction instead of trying to make it ‘perfect.’
I use my smartphone with a black-and-white filter turned on to help me walk through the world and examine how texture, contrast and tone translates into a film medium that I have no experience with, but want to learn. With digital tech, I can learn how to compose my b&w film shots with real-time feedback and increase my rate of success as I’m learning.
It’s been the best journey. I love photography so much. Having married a talented and skillful professional photographer and artist, I spent many years only seeing my lack of photographic skill in comparison. But returning to film and finding a whole wide world of vintage cameras has reminded me that among other things, I am also a photographer.
My path is different: it’s not professional and it’s not formally trained. But it’s the earliest art form (besides music) that I adopted and one I absolutely can't give up. My path’s been circuitous and I haven’t done it alone (props to my mom, the original shutter-bug! and to Benjamin who’s taught me most everything I know, and continues to repeat himself again and again when I can’t remember technique or terminology). But it’s been unwavering in that I always want a camera within arm’s reach and I love the challenge that comes from practicing this craft.
