A Year In Film - Part One

It’s December 2023 and I’m in the attic getting the Christmas tree and decorations, and there’s my old 35mm film SLR, lying in the same place as it’s been every other year, unused for a long time. I usually fire the shutter off a few times, just to hear that reassuring and nostalgic ‘clunk’. However, this year it’s different, it sparks something inside.

I’d been around a few film shooters in the year prior, none of whom were born when that Praktica was unboxed on my twenty-first birthday, which at the time was a massive step up from the Zorki that I’d been using for the previous nine years.

I started harbouring notions of running a roll through it, and before I knew it a few rolls were ordered – five to be exact. It initially seemed to be in working order, however the first serious use highlighted the fact that the meter was faulty. No problem, I found an electrical diagram online and started to strip the camera down to repair it, with the film still inside. Then common sense kicked in and I put it back together again, I can meter off my phone or Lumix.

However, I hadn’t properly thought this new venture through. How was I going to get the film developed? Looking online the quotes were around £15 for developing and digital scanning, which although reasonable was a bit prohibitive for something that was really just an experiment, at best maybe a trip down memory lane.

Thankfully the eBay fairy intervened, and I managed to get a brand-new twin spiral Paterson tank for £10, a real saving as they were going for £50. Throw in another bargain changing bag, some cheap jugs and a thermometer and I was ready to go. I’ll worry about digitising the negatives later and if it doesn’t work out then I can always sell the kit again.

So, I shot off a few rolls, bought the chemicals and one Sunday afternoon settled down to develop the first film. First schoolboy error - I had rewound the film back into the cartridge so needed a bottle opener to get the film out. Forty-five minutes later the film was on the spiral, the swear box was overflowing and the chemicals were doing their magic. The resulting negatives actually looked OK – I was quite pleased with myself.

Using a borrowed scanner I digitised the negatives. The results were disappointing to say the least. These looked nothing like what I had been seeing on the various tutorials and blogs that I had been studying. I essentially ended up with monotonous strips of grey images with very little dynamic range. I managed to salvage one image of a merry-go-round taken with a slow shutter speed for effect, but it was way below the quality that I was looking for, even making allowances for the fact that this was early days.

Decision time, do I abandon this folly or continue, albeit with the need for a better scanner of my own? The latter path was chosen when I manged to get another eBay bargain in the shape of a decent Epson scanner. Rescanning the negatives gave me a great deal more hope, although massive improvements could still be made. I continued to shoot more rolls, and eventually managed to produce reasonably acceptable images. However, the lack of metering in the camera was proving to be a major drawback. Having to meter of my phone or Lumix for every shot was tiresome, so back to eBay for a look at another camera, or rather two as it transpired. Over two weeks another bit of last-minute gazumping netted me a Canon compact and a Chinon SLR, both in near mint condition despite being thirty and forty years old respectively. This was more like it; I was able to concentrate on what was in the viewfinder rather than faff about with the exposure settings while the subject vanished.

Four months into this journey and I now have what I consider an acceptable film set up, all for around £100 in total. I’ve made my workflow more efficient, and I’ve separated my use of film and digital too. I still use my Lumix workhorses for the serious documentary work and don’t intend to deviate from that as I find the accuracy and high frame rate are vital for that type of work. However, the film cameras currently handle virtually everything else that I shoot.

So, the next phase of this journey is to see how the photography evolves, how using film and the restrictions that it places on my trigger-happy fingers affect the output. Additionally, online research has led me down a rabbit hole full of experimentation ideas in terms of rating film at different speeds and trying different developers. Given that I’d first entered a darkroom aged twelve, none of this is new, yet I don’t really remember too much about the actual process from back in those days, so it still seems like a journey of discovery. At some point I decided that a year, 2024 to be precise, should be long enough to see this through to conclusion, whatever the outcome. The first quarter has passed and already I feel quite committed, more so than I expected. I can see how film can exist alongside digital, but at present definitely not replace it. The accompanying images are just a visual record to accompany the text, and very much demonstrate something to be improved upon.

One irony that has already came to light is the ideal black and look. It took me years to get that nailed in digital, and now I find myself exploring the same in film, so there is a real possibility that I could be end up going full circle by trying to get the digital look from film!

So, with that in mind let’s see how the next year quarter develops, pun intended. Watch this space!