Another from my Mamiya 7 test roll. Looks a bit red up in the clouds to the right, but there’s something about this that pleases me. Not sure what.

Didn’t even go and get one, though. Sad.

I had given up on my moral compass ever permitting me to use film until my dad gave me his old AE-1. This is a camera I lusted after as a kid. He kept it in this big, leather briefcase and he had lenses and cloths and an air puffer thing I could use to annoy the cat. I wanted that camera. When he said that I could have it, something inside me just changed. It’s hard for me to rationalise because, plainly, this is hypocrisy. I’m not going to try to sugar coat it or present an argument that gelatin is a by-product and not using it would be a waste or any of the other things people have used to try and help me come to terms with using film. The fact is, film contains gelatin. I wouldn’t eat a food that contained it but I would, apparently, use a product that did. Hypocrisy.

It’s awkward, I don’t like it and I think about it every time I release the shutter on a film camera, but there it is. My passion for taking pictures appears to outweigh my passion for animals (looking at Sudo, it’s like he knows and he’ll never forgive me).

With the crappy hypocrisy out of the way (although, not really), I do hope I can make something relatively worthwhile with film. It presents a totally different way of approaching creating an image. Digital processes are almost entirely a crutch that can actually get in the way of creating a photograph. You don’t compose properly because you could fix in Lightroom (OK, I cropped and straightened one of these, but it was totally necessary). You don’t expose properly because RAWs are pretty amazing a lot of the time and you can fix almost anything in Lightroom.

Film takes all that away from you, and it’s terrifying and liberating. Because you can’t get an instant preview (and a single exposure of 35mm roll film ends up costing about 50p; medium format is over £1), correctly framing and exposing an image is an investment both financially and mentally (oww, I thought that was going to come out is quite horrible!).

There’s also an element of serendipity to film. It might take the conservative individual a week, two weeks, a month to finish a roll (especially if they have a few cameras), so by the time you see the results, there’s no way they remember everything that’s on that roll. It can be quite magical to flick through your prints (or, let’s be honest, the scans you imported into Lightroom) and come across something you completely forgot existed.

So, with the above in mind, I embark on a new journey into film. It’s not ideal, but I’m going to try to use that negativity to push me to create better, more meaningful things emphasis on try.

This is the introductory post to a set called f1lm: the first two rolls of film I received from a fifteen year break shooting film. If you’re reading out of context, please consider looking at those images as well. You’ve got this far, so I’m going to presume you’re interested in that!

Sudo loves to watch scary movies, no matter how terrified he gets.

The two things in this photo are completely unrelated, but they fit together OK, I think.

Dat white balance

Presumably, this girl’s about to wreck herself.

It’s important to lock your bike when you leave it somewhere.

It appears that auto white balance isn’t something that the FM2 has an easy time with. Something pleasing about the results, though.

This camera’s pretty temperamental. Only managed to get 23 of 36 exposures because it had a bit of a panic attack mid-roll and the auto-focus is a bit iffy. Still, I do like the colours it makes and the flash seems to not completely ruin things like it does on a lot of point-n-shoots.

I’m so fucking pleased with how that photo of Christopher from Closure in Moscow came out.

I think the Leica M Monochrom might be my favourite camera. I’m glad I don’t have to give it back.