Film and the Black and White Medium
In the digital age traditional 35mm film has almost completely died out, and we’ve lost an incredible format. This summer I took a two week program on black and white film photography. While I already knew all about camera stuff and how incredible photography was, I had never experimented with film. I was born in the digital age, I hadn’t even loaded a roll into a camera until the program. In the digital age everything goes quickly, and we spend a lot of our time staring at an LCD screen until our eyes hurt. Film just doesn’t work like that. Getting one good print takes a lot more skill and a lot more time, but I also enjoy it more.
What makes it more fun? The physicality of it. Picking up the undeveloped photo paper in a darkroom with only an orange safety light and carrying it over to the chemistry and watching your photo magically appear out of nowhere. Little things that in Photoshop may have been instant or not even done at all become so much more incredible to perform. For instance, when you make a print you load your neg into an enlarger, which uses a lens to project the image onto photo paper. There’s a special tool for focusing this lens called the “Grain Focuser”. What this tool does is it reflects the light into your eye, basically making you see a super zoomed in version of the print. It was tricky at first to get it right, but once I got it, there was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, and it was worth it.
Black and white is also amazing, often we rely on great colours to make a fantastic photograph, by removing this part of our photos, we need to compensate with the other half to make a great photo. I ended up focusing a lot more on composition than anything else. Contrast in black and white film is also fantastic, and crisp, though beginner’s prints often turn out muddy due to their poor exposures. Black and white gave me great detail when I got my exposure right, and ended up just being an awesome format to work with.
There’s definite downsides to film, and for me, it’s really a bit of a novelty, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great format to work in, so, every once in awhile, I’ll probably be posting a few shots in Black and White film to my Flickr, so stay tuned.