Tag: film photography

2019 Trends in Film Photography

I’m taking a bit of a break from my review of the book I mentioned in my last post. It is the weekend after all.

Last night I went to the “cage match” at the Harvey Milk Photocenter. Basically, a photographer sends a photo to the @streetfotosf account and then a bunch of prestigious judges brutally and honestly judge the photos on a scale of 1 to 5.

The main lament of the judges was that they weren’t being shown something new, except for one judge who was okay with a “seen-before” photo with emotion or a mood.

We are awash in images seen before, but in film this trend takes a different twist. Americana, or anything basic but nostalgic seems to be the trend. The images all seem to say, “Behold, I can time travel, and look, it’s not digital: it’s film.”

This does not a photograph make, if we define it the way the “cage match” judges define it: Something I haven’t seen before.


Laundromat by u/Blueberry-STi via r/analog

But what do we mean by “something I haven’t seen before?”

Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being is a novel that presents a tension between every moment being unique and never happening again (and thus unbearably light), and every moment as something that’s happened before (Nietzschean eternal return).

Our judges notion of “something I haven’t seen before” is somewhere in between. What is this in between?

If we define a photograph as an image that we have not seen before, we’re hard pressed to recall any film photographs that fit this except for say experimental art in the vein of Irina Chernikova’s abstract experimentations.

Another trend is the use of Portra 400. By far and away it is the most hashtagged film on Instagram just recently breaking a million hashtagged photos this year. A distant second is Ilford HP5+ which as of this blog post is at around 459,000 hashtagged photos. This isn’t really scientific because I’m not taking into account hash crashing, but Portra’s dominance seems to be confirmed by YouTubers like Willem Verbeeck who feels it’s the standard.

There are 3 trends in film photography:

  • More film is being bought at a rate of 5% year over year
  • Very basic shots highlighting filmic qualities, or nostalgic Americana that might be expected of Stephen Shore shooting large format are awash online
  • Portra 400 is by far the most hashtagged film, and perhaps most used or sold?

We still haven’t answered the question of what is something we haven’t seen before.

31 Day project: Wake up Before Sunrise, Photograph until Dark

UPDATE on 3 April 2019: I’ve created a page for the photos that’s easy to view.
UPDATE on 6 January 2019: I’ve put the photos for this project on my blog web site here. https://bracketthis.com/images/31goldenhours/

UPDATE on 5 January 2019: I’ve torched my Instagram account. I’ll go into the reasons why in my next post, so the links to the project won’t be there. However, I’ll upload the project to my flickr account.

I spent December of 2018 doing my #31sunrises31sunsets project on Instagram and on film. I only mention film not for pretentious reasons, but because it was so time consuming. In this blog post, I want to tell you how I made my process more efficient, and the trials and tribulations I faced.

The task sounds simple: photograph something during golden hour for both dawn and dusk for 31 days straight on film. That’s at least two photos a day.

Most folks make their resolutions for January 1st, and most people fail with their resolutions by February. I thought to myself, how much easier would it be to do a December resolution, and have nothing to worry about during the new year.

But lots of things went wrong.

  • My Leica M-A could no longer focus at infinity leading to blurry landscape photos. This happened 5 days in. I sent it to Leica for repairs.
  • I ran out of budget for color chemicals and did days 16 to 31 on black and white film. Black and white is pennies on the dollar cheaper than color.
  • I ran out of budget for gas. This really sucked since I wanted to get out of the bay area.

However, through sheer will power, luck, and planning I made it through. For any future project that will take this long here are a few tips.

  • Always have a back up of everything you need. I had multiple film camera bodies to full back on.
  • Always shoot a scene with more than 1 camera and more than 1 roll of film.
  • Budget for twice as many chemicals as you think you’ll need. You never know if your developer or fixer will mysteriously get exhausted. I’m still trying to track down the cause of this.
  • Try and really expand your notions of what is photogenic. Traditional landscape shots no longer seemed appealing but cliché so I worked on finding new comps and more spontaneous ways of photographing. Street photography is your friend.
  • If your project allows for it, shoot what you feel and not what you see. This lends more personal impact to your project.

To make the project efficient I did the following:

  • Warm up chemicals first and then load film into dev canisters.
  • Just scan what you need. If it’s a roll of 36 and you just need 2 shots, then scan those 2 shots.
  • Be aware of how the sun moves, so you can shoot two locations for just one golden hour. I would shoot at the Embarcadero and then work my way to California Street as the sun rose. This allowed me to have shots in multiple locations. An app like photo pills is good for this.

I can’t say I would do this project ever again. Something in my photographs became very toxic when I photographed like this. It was as if the world was telling me Instagram is a dying platform, and that photography is more than just golden hour and landscapes.