By way of an intro...

Deliberately Digital

 

The move back to film photography after many years of digital has been interesting in that it has made me much more deliberate when I do pull out the digital camera.  

 

After two decades of shooting exclusively in digital formats, the spray-and-pray approach had become ingrained in how I shot: pixels are free, so keep shooting, and there will be a good shot in there somewhere.

 

Re-adapting to film two years ago, initially to 35 mm, meant I had to be more deliberate and stingier with my shooting. After all, I no longer had near-unlimited capacity to record images, going from a couple of thousand images per SD card to a maximum of 36 images per roll of 135 format. So the old habits of decades past came back, treating film as something scarce. Take the time to frame the shot, calculate the exposure, and nail the focus. 

 

Then came the Hasselblad, with 12 images per roll, and the RB67, with 10. 

 

Lately, with the move to the large format Tachihara, there are two sheets of 4X5 film per film-holder. Often, I will go out to shoot in large format and bring along two film holders for a grand total of four sheets of film, which is what my developing tank can hold in a single batch of film processing.  I may spend a couple of hours getting those four shots, compared to hundreds of images captured a few years ago, doing digital spray-and-pray.

 

What I have found since my return to film photography is that the old film habits have come to influence me when I do shoot digitally: taking the time to think about framing, making conscious choices about depth of field, and getting the exposure I want in the first try. In short, more visualizing of what I want the image to look like before taking the shot.

 

I don’t know if returning to film has made me a better digital photographer, but it certainly has made me a slower and much more deliberate one. 

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