Tag Archives: prints

Prints, Part II

Because I shoot film, once in a while I’ll choose to get prints done of a particular roll. Not because I hang onto some form of outdated media (I always get scans irrespective of whether I’m getting prints or not), but because I like to have some physical record of how my film photography is going.

Getting prints done isn’t some egotistical thing, either — I mostly use it as a way to remind myself that shooting film has a cost that’s not associated with digital photography, a real cost both in terms of taking the individual frames and work that has to go into the final roll. I still don’t develop my own film and probably ever won’t, but getting printed copies of my film photography gives me something I can hang onto.

I got back the two rolls I wrote about the other day, and they look pretty good. Taken as a set of 38 frames they’re mediocre, but there are some standouts in the two sets, like any roll. I feel as though I waste anywhere between 5 and 10 frames per roll of 38, just because I’m taking multiple shots of the same thing. There are one-time deals that work out amazingly well, and then there are those that take 2-3 shots and still don’t turn out right. That’s where digital still has the edge over film photography, and always will.

As much as I like some of the photos, and as much as I’m happy with how the shots I did take turned out — there’s this one that is an almost perfect shot of the front of the National Library of Australia — I’m still not content with the kind of photography I’m doing. If Monte Carlos are the only Arnott’s biscuits I’ve ever loved1, then street photography is the only kind of photography I really enjoy. Which kind of sucks, because I’m only average at it and almost never work up the courage to take the shots that I want to.

It’s honestly one of the worst things about street photography. You can’t just walk up to someone and take their photo, and while you can try and catch people in their natural — staring at their phone, waiting for the bus, leaning against a wall — as soon as you stick a camera in their face the moment is gone. If the second hardest thing about street is taking photos of people in their natural habitat, the hardest thing is working up the courage to do so.

But hey, that’s half of what makes street photography so thrilling. Thrill of the chase, and all that.

These words part of Blogvember, a thing I just made up right then about getting back into blogging. You can read more words about Blogvember right over here, but the gist is that I'll be attempting to post something up on the blog every day in November 2014. Read other Blogvember posts.
  1. See https://twitter.com/bdyling/status/531385411742863361 ↩

Prints

Shocking photo, let down by my iPhone.

It intrigues me that in a a world where the entire process is digital, there’s still intrinsic value to be had from a distinctly analog concept; the concept of prints.

Film is so unique in that traditionally, people have just made prints directly from their negatives or slides. But then the digital revolution happened, and people started digitising their negatives so they could view them on their new-fangled computers. Prints kinda, sorta, fell out of fashion as costs for developing and printing soared with the digital revolution. For many people, digital was all about convenience — being able to instantly view photos and share them to others was a huge plus. Having to wait an entire hour before photos could be viewed was a thing of the past. Our time grew more valuable, and film was all but forgotten.

Not so in the film industry, apparently, where film still holds a special something over digital:

No wonder, then, that directors like Christopher Nolan worry that if 35mm film dies, so will the gold standard of how movies are made. Film cameras require reloading every 10 minutes. They teach discipline. Digital cameras can shoot far longer, much to the dismay of actors like Robert Downey Jr. — who, rumor has it, protests by leaving bottles of urine on set.

There’s something about film which makes it command a certain amount of respect, a certain reverence. Digital is cheap. Film is not:

“Because when you hear the camera whirring, you know that money is going through it,” Wright says. “There’s a respectfulness that comes when you’re burning up film.”

I do quite a bit of shooting for my youth group, and while I’m definitely getting too old for a “youth group”, no one really seems to mind, or at least they’re not telling me about it (a topic for another time).

At youth, we have this wall that shows off photos of the youth. Photos from past events, photos from trips to Planetshakers, photos from previous Relay events, and things like that. It’s pretty cool, but the photos are a few years old now.

I was recently approached by the youth leader, to see if we could put a few new photos up. As I was the one who had been taking photos for the better part of the year, I was the one who would provide the photos. It made complete sense, and yet, to be asked of such a thing felt like a huge honour. I know it was probably inevitable and just common sense, but still, this was a Pretty Big Deal for me.

I had already uploaded a few photos to our Facebook group, and I already have a collection in Lightroom that has all the best shots from youth, so choosing which shots to print was a non-issue.

Numbers kind of were, but I ended up being ruthless and culling mediocre photos from the ones that were worthy of being printed. There were a few exceptions to this rule, and they were mostly photos that were good in terms of subject/composition/emotion, but perhaps technically flawed (slightly missed focus, limbs cut off weirdly, etc). It was interesting finding a line between choosing photos that were interesting and showed the “right stuff”, and photos that were perhaps not that good in terms of subject, but were still interesting, like the photo below. One night we played with a strobe, and that made for a cool photo, even though you can’t make out anyone in particular.

Anyway. 105 photos later, with about 7 enlargements of the group shots, and I’m happy with how the photos turned out. It was interesting seeing the difference between how the photos looked on-screen and how they looked when printed out, but for the most part things were pretty good.

All in all, a good experience. It’s kinda funny, because photography enthusiasts and hobbyists don’t really print out their digital images all that often, but mums, dads, and grandparents do it all the time.

Funny how things work like that.