Analogue love... forever!

One reason is that I can shoot analogue pictures which I cannot make with a digital camera, without spending hours in an image editing application. By cross-processing a slide film or using a redscale roll I can make stunning pictures, which give me great satisfaction when I see the results.

You can use effects on most digital cameras, try them until you are more or less satisfied. But with analogue photography you only have some hope until the results show op after development of the film.

Another aspect is that analogue photography is slow photography. Fininshing a roll, getting it developed or develop it myself, and scanning or printing the negatives to see the results is an elaborate process which can take days, weeks or even months. When I see the results, I always get memories of the moment I made the picture, you are really looking back in time then.

When I shoot in black and white, I do develop my own rolls and print some of them in a darkroom myself. This allows me to make a lot of choices in picking the film, the camera, the lens, the subject (most important!) and how to develop and print the photo. And because of those choices, I feel much more proud on those photos, as I have made the end result really all by myself.

Using various analogue cameras will give you very different results, which makes picking a camera and a film to shoot some pictures a much more deliberate process. Do I take the Horizon Perfect for ultra wide panoramas, or the Diana F+ for low-fi square shots? Or my Minolta SLR for some sharp black and white photos, or the LC-A+ for some colorful snapshots? Decisions, decisions, making analogue photography much more complicated, but also much more fulfilling.

And then you have the pleasant surprises, when the results come out pretty different from what you expected, but much more rewarding than I could have made them on purpose. For example, some double exposures from my last roll with the Belair X 6-12 camera, where I forgot to advance the film a few times.

Sometimes I try to make very deliberate choices when taking pictures on expensive medium format film (with the Belair 6×12 format only six photos on a roll), sometimes I can snap away without much thinking with a half frame 35mm camera (at least 72 pictures with the Superheadz Golden Half or Diana Mini). But every time I get surprises, and that keeps my love for analogue film alive forever!

written by wesco on 2014-07-09