I’m probably giving my age away with a title like that. Anyone who knows immediately what I’m referring to is likely either around the same age as myself and has said the same thing as well, or is a photographer with experience in analog photography, aka film. As I’ve mentioned somewhere before on this site, I’ve been a photographer in some form or another for over thirty-five years now and grew up shooting film when it was the only option. That said, back in ’99 I picked up my first digital camera during the infancy of digital photography and prior to my foreign study trip to Japan. I thought it was a revelation in that I could take as many pics as I wanted with basically zero cost apart from the initial investment. From that point on I shot primarily in digital and eventually in due time digital quickly caught up to and surpassed film photography for quality under most circumstances. Nonetheless, jump ahead about ten years or so and I had been shooting digital exclusively when I got the idea that I wanted to shoot some of the vintage cars I came across in my area with film; the idea being that it would provide an authentic vintage vibe to the images seeing as it would have been contemporary to the subjects at the time. Jump ahead again to where we are now, and it’s been about another ten years or so of shooting a mix of digital and film images, with all of my editing for both being done exclusively in digital using Lightroom and Photoshop. I still have to wet develop the film as always, but after that it gets scanned immediately and handled in the digital realm for everything else. Nowadays, this is called a hybrid film workflow and it has its share of fans and haters. For various reasons, I’m the former.
Which is the very long-winded way of saying I still shoot film for a lot of my work, for many reasons, although for this site it’s been exclusively digital up to now. That brings us to this post, which is pretty much what it’s titled as – I wanted to develop some film over the weekend and to do so I need to finish off a roll first, so I jumped in the BRZ and headed to a local parking garage to blow off that last handful of frames. The results are what you see here. For me, even when processed digitally, film still has that certain something to it that just adds so much character to the images and is not readily available in digital, even with extensive editing. Digital still can be beautiful, but film’s character just lives in the myriad of imperfections it has by its very nature, and those can come together in such a wonderful way that the images just shine with life and energy.
Anyway, just a couple new shots for you to enjoy along with a bit of background as well. Hope you like them, see you again soon!
