Besides my work with the (M Monochrome)[https://decidingbetter.com/?p=783], I’ve shot and developed 10 rolls of film this year. I’ll probably get one or two more developed before the end of the calendar year.
It’s fair to ask why I chose to shoot film side by side with digital. I think if you look through my (Flickr Photostream)[https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesvornov/] you’d be hard pressed to pick out film from digital in the images. I treat them as equivalent except for the incredible low light sensitivity you can now get with digital capture that ASA 400 Tri-X can’t match. Once film is scanned, I treat it similarly in the workflow, so film just has a few extra steps compared to digital. Price is not a consideration when buying bricks of Tri-X and doing the developing and scanning at home.
So why film? Authenticity in the photographic process, I think. At this point, once an image is in the digital realm, the tools we have to alter the image are so powerful that the digital file is a starting point, not the object itself. With the techniques I’ve learned over the years, I can infuse light into a flat image, creating a subjective reality for the viewer that is only suggested by the original scene.
Film provides me with an opportunity to let the chemical photographic process do that manipulation of light to image in its time honored way, providing a starting point that is much closer to the end product. My relationship to a scanned film image is different. I adjust brightness and contrast, sharpen the image back up to what its lost in the scanning process and present it more or less as I found it.
The image above was captured on a gray winter day. I scheduled myself to spend a few hours capturing images on film and came home with two rolls exposed, unimpressed by what I had seen. Shooting film, I lacked the feedback provided by the camera LCD, so its a matter of looking, composing and capturing. This image reminds me how much a scene is transformed by its capture to film. This for me is the authentic experience of the photographic process and its linked to the magic of the chemical emulsion and wonders that D-76 works on Tri-X.
