As you may have heard or noticed over the past few months, I’ve undertaken the endeavor of learning how to shoot film photography. It has been a great challenge for me, going against my natural inclinations of learning something new. I’ve become so dependent on instant feedback in life. As I learned how to shoot digital, I would adjust a setting, shoot, look at the screen, and repeat until I got it just right. That’s impossible with film. I have to wait 2 to 3 weeks to see if I totally screwed up a shot or not. CRAZY!
As part of my learning process, I convinced our good friends, Cale + Jessie, to let me do a completely film session with them. I left all my digital gear at home and went crutch free into this thing.
The results from this session were a huge surprise to me. I was shooting with Fuji 400H film. But, when I got my scans back, I discovered that one roll gave me a very different result. I’m kinda digging the faded/grainy nature of those frames though. The main contributing factor for this look was that I underexposed pretty much the entire roll (my bad!), which can do some wacky stuff with film. But, this is also one of the things I love about the organic nature of film. There are imperfections, unpredictabilities and life in each shot. Something about it just tells a beautiful story on its own.
I would love to hear your thoughts about film vs. digital. Do you prefer one over the other? If you’re not an avid photographer, can you even tell the difference?
// Canon 1v / Fuji 400H / developed + scanned by Indie Film Lab
