Film as death
Film as a medium killed me, and it took me many months to find out that I was dead.
It’s all the rage, everyone is shooting film, and my tiktok videos that do the best are all film related. Then I get the people who comment or send me a private message and say “you inspired me to shoot film!”.
But it is at times hard to tell the difference between loving the art and loving the process. Film is all about the process. It’s fun, it’s a little addicting, and can be nostalgic even to those who did not essentially grow up with it, and I began to doubt if it was benefiting me artistically in any way. Which I know that for many people it can be, but was it for me?
For so long I was so caught up on the film craze that I think it brought me a big number of questions. Am I shooting for fun? Am I shooting for content? Am I shooting to keep memories? And the unfortunate true answer to all this is that I shoot to make art. This epiphany came to me during my six month “seasonal depression”, in which I was rarely shooting because I was worried about being so broke. And the idea that I couldn’t afford film stopped me from shooting entirely.
As an artist and creative individual I was dead.
So I took a new approach, beginning in May. I began exclusively shooting on my Fujifilm Xpro-1 with a vintage Voigtlander 35mm I had just bought and adapted. It gave my digital images a more soft and “film-like” look. Not to mention the sensor of the Xpro-1, now considered a “vintage” digital camera, became legendary for its film-like colors and overall look. Then, I began shooting for two months without looking, editing, or in any way touching my digital images.
I was doing everything digitally but took a very film approach to things, which I enjoyed. But in the editing room I found out that I wasn’t going for the “film-look” that most of my images tended to look like. I was looking for more contrast, more sharpness, more saturation, and more natural looking colors. I was going for a look that could only really be achieved on digital. And eventually, I loved it.
My spark was back, my purpose was back. And everything was right in the world after. The End. I wish.
Truth is, it helped me find something about myself but it is far from what I want to achieve in my images. Months later, I bought a new film camera with a lot of digital functions and took some incredible images on that. I still use my Fujifilm but film wasn’t the problem. I had to find something to blame.
