The Photographic Mind Trip Workshop in Portugal offered me the first contact with real film. I started off as many other photographers, a digital child, 500 pictures on a shooting, doesn´t matter, I´ll check them later, exposure? sure, i´ll fix it in post. When I got hands on the analog Contax 645 I felt weirded out. How will i know if i got everything right? can I trust the metering, what the hell am I doing here? Loading a roll of film made me feel even more like a retard. How can someone possibly deal with this every 16 pictures? The first look through the prism finder had me though. This. Was. Different. For the first time -having in mind i will only have 16 pictures to shoot- i really, really tried to SEE what I was looking at. Don’t get me wrong, it´s not like I didn’t care what I was doing on digital, but it´s more a warming up, getting everything perfect, taking your favorite shots and going home with loads of material-workflow in digital. With film, every click costs money. So you take a look. You think. You take a look again. You talk to the person you are shooting. You see something wonderful in that person. And you capture it. There is no display to check what you just did. ( it takes a while though to stop that automatic look to the back of your camera) The big advantage: You never leave the person you are working with to have a quick excursion into the “let me just check this-world”. Your subject doesn´t get unconfident by the look on your face when you´re checking the images, which never has to do with the person anyway, but with your own settings and framing. And the promise of the results you will only be able to see after a week or so when you get the pictures back from the lab, leaves you excited like a child before christmas. At the moment, I can´t imagine putting my digital camera away for good, but it´s like a little whisper in my ear, a little promise to myself with every roll I shoot, that this day will come.
Here you can compare Digital vs. Film (Canon 5D MK III/50mm 1.2) (Contax 645/80mm 2.00 Zeiss/Kodak Portra 160)
First, digital with my attempt (as usual) to make it look like Film
And this is actual Film 🙂
Workshop
Photographic Mind Trip with Roland Faistenberger and Pia Clodi
Location
Portugal, Algarve
Film Scans
Carmencita Film Lab