The Film: Shoot Less. Not!

Film costs money. Digital doesn’t. That’s the conventional belief and so it seems to follow that using film would lead to fewer exposures. Slow down. Plan more. Make each frame count.

I thought going back to film would have this effect on me and initially it did. I remember the first roll of Tri-X I burned. Each shot was a process itself. I was slow. Deliberate. This was certainly due in part to the strange camera. But it was also because each shot was costing me about 12 cents, not accounting for my own time to roll, develop, and scan.

After the first few rolls though, I found that I gradually drifted back to my old way of working with digital. Reasons:

I had a quota. Duh. I’d committed to shooting 3 rolls a week and this wasn’t my day job.
I’d already self corrected with digital. I’ve already gone through many cycles of taking way too many digital pictures and then having to deal with the consequences. If I value my time and I care enough about my pictures to do what it takes to manage them properly, it’s clear to me that digital isn’t free.
It’s 35mm. I like to work fast and intuitively with a small format camera. Experiment. Take risks. It’s less about personal expression and more of a discovery process where I learn to see more clearly by making pictures. For me, this approach requires a small camera that disappears. If I’m concerned about setting up the shot properly so I get everything just right in one take, I may as well be using a different format.

So, in the end, using film didn’t change how I prefer to use small cameras. Part of me is a bit disappointed because I believe a much slower method of working could have different but equally important rewards. The idea of going out in the morning with a few sheets of 4x5 for a day and making just one or two exposures really appeals to me for certain subjects. Subjects I discovered first with my freewheeling 35mm camera.

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This is one in a series of posts I’m doing over the next week on using film during the Leica Year project.