I like to shoot film.
Here is the page where I will post some of my photography for your viewing pleasure.
Warning, it will be 90% clouds.
I'm obsessed with clouds.
I love clouds and my phone has long since been filled with photos of the sky. Since I started doing film photography, I’ve focused more on clouds than any other subject. Especially when I was visiting Hatfiled Point in August, I was always looking out the window for clouds to shoot. But in doing so, I’ve started thinking more about shape, light, angle, and so on, from a photographer’s perspective. The clouds change based on the time of day, where the sun is, and where you are. Every day, every hour, the sky changes, with these puffs of white drifting silently above us. They look so solid, but when it’s foggy, when the clouds fall to the earth, they are immaterial. Clouds, to me, are ethereal in their beauty. It’s hard to believe they are real.
Of course, living in the city, the sky is often blocked by powerlines and the new apartment buildings going up everywhere. This is why many of my shots are focused on obstructions, not because they happen to be there, but because they are standing in the way of all of us enjoying the natural beauty the world has to offer. Civilization doesn’t just pave the ground, manicure the earth into submission, or cram every square inch possible with buildings; it also takes the sky when it conquers wilderness. I’m not against civilization or progress, but if you want to enjoy nature, cities make it difficult to do so and it can leave you feeling disconnected from the natural world. So I leave the powerlines in there so everyone can see that beautiful moment ruined by modern life. Sometimes we are so focused on progress and innovation that we don’t see what is being left behind. We don’t realize we lost something of value.
That’s one of the things that brought me back to film photography after experimenting with it in my youth and abandoning it for digital. I happened to see on Reddit a photo of an Instax photo, and I remembered something I had forgotten for years: sifting through bins and albums of family photographs. The tactile feel in your hands, the grainyness, the look of flash indoors, family members posing together at holidays and visits. How you would look through, and someone older would tell you oh, that’s this person, this was taken here and this is what happened on that trip. I remember getting film developed, and the anticipation of what they would look like. All things that I never felt with digital photography.
I remember shortly after I got my first film camera this summer, I was on the bus. I watched a couple of girls take a selfie together, look at the photo, then take another, better one. I thought about the process, how if you took a film photo together, you would take it, have no idea if it turned out, and so return to the moment almost completely uninterrupted. Taking photos on a phone with an internet connection and social media means the moment is left behind in the distractions that follow. You take a photo, or a few. You can edit it, filter it. Upload it, think of a caption, think about how many likes it’s going to get. You now have something to check on in the following hours and days that further cuts up your days with distractions, and for many, the fixation on perfection, external validation, and curating a marketable image. With film photography, the moment is preserved, only to be returned to weeks, or months, later. You are not distracted by taking a better shot, or how you will explain it to others, or how many likes you will get. You don’t care how anyone else feels and by the time anyone else sees it, it doesn’t matter. Those photos, those memories, that moment, is yours.
Nostalgia in not the reason why I have been drawn to phyisical media and film photography. They are experiences in their own right that I prefer. I prefer the patience of waiting for my film to return. I prefer getting my shots back and seeing some turned out terribly, because nothing is perfect; but I also like that having a cost to my mistakes means I’m a more present photographer—I don’t have the disposability of digital as a crutch. I prefer finding local shops that sell and develop film. I prefer feeling the photos in my hands. I like the grain and I like shopping for vintage cameras. And I hate that I live in a world where marketing makes me feel like I have to justify a perfectly valid preference. We were told digital was better because it was perfect; it was control. Why wouldn’t you switch? But is that true, or was it just what the people selling digital cameras wanted you to think so you would buy their cameras instead?
The photos, for me, are just a side effect of the process. Photography takes me places and brings me inner peace. It gets me out of the house, looking for new places to take photos, when I might otherwise have stayed inside. I stop and wait now, sitting on the local walking bridge or by the river, waiting for the clouds. I hope you enjoy my photos, as much as I enjoyed taking them.
COMING SOON