Film Photography Pt. 1: The Joy of Unnecessarily Hard Things

Or, how I learned to shoot on film

I can’t exactly say why I love to do unnecessarily hard things. Maybe it’s because my life has been so easy, relatively speaking. I was born in the 1990s and have lived in the most technologically advanced age in human history. Every day something new is introduced that takes the hard work out of life. Think about how difficult it was to do certain tasks even 15 years ago, before smartphones. I used to make fun of my friend because he had a Tom Tom GPS in his car and used it to get everywhere. I couldn’t imagine having to use a GPS to find basic places. Now, I plug every destination in my phone before I leave the house. I can’t even remember how we used to know how to get to unfamiliar places before that.

Sometimes, though, I like to just get in the car and drive and see if I can get somewhere I go often without looking at my phone. I get in the car and drive and make turns that I think I should make. Often when I do this I miss my destination by a few exits, turn around, and I’m five minutes late. But the next time I want to go to that place, I have a core memory of which exit I should have taken and I don’t miss it. Doing the unnecessarily hard thing taught me something in a way that I could never have learned while using advanced technology.

It’s not just with something like driving. This also applies to physical items too, like a vinyl record. Yes, it’s significantly easier to pull up an album on Spotify, pick the exact song I want to hear, and listen to it. To be honest, it sounds almost as good as it does on vinyl. And I can take that song with me around the house, to my car, or on a walk. But a vinyl record requires me to take it out of the record sleeve, place it on the turntable, drop the needle on the first song of the record, listen all the way through one side, get up, flip the record over, drop the needle again, listen all the way through that side, and at the end get up and stop the record, pick it up off the turntable, put it back in the sleeve, and return it to the shelf. It’s a significant amount more work. But it’s a whole different experience. I have a deep love and appreciation for the work of the artists when I play a record. I slow down. I stay in one place. I listen for different things in the record than I do when it’s background noise. And yes, I know I sound extremely pretentious right now.

Don’t worry, it’s going to get worse.

For this month’s Trial & Error I learned to do one of the most unnecessarily hard things I’ve undertaken. Fortunately for me, I had the guidance of a four-time New York Times bestseller.

Something Real

I first got interested in shooting on film when my wife’s grandfather gave me an old Toyoca camera he had owned. I learned how to use it and took it on a trip to Big Bend and a few other places. Honestly, it was terrible. The entire thing was manual. It was worse than if I was using a disposable camera from Walgreens. And the internal mechanism for rewinding the film was broken so whenever I would finish a roll I had to bring the whole camera into Garland Camera and they’d take it to the dark room to wrestle with it for ten minutes before finally getting it out. That said, I got a few cool pics out of it and that whet my appetite to eventually get a much better film camera.

What finally sent me over the edge was following Arturo Torres on Twitter and Instagram. If you’ve followed my career you know that I have interviewed Arturo several times. He’s an illustrator whose collaborations with author Shea Serrano have resulted in four NYT Bestselling books and his work can be seen all over the world. He’s also a super cool guy and the two of us have become friends. Recently he’s gotten really into shooting with film and posts his photos to social media. He also shares other photographers shots and I have become enamored with them.

There’s something about photos on film that fascinates me. They have a depth, a feeling, a soul. Imperfections that would otherwise ruin a digital photo give these photos an endearing realness.

Our lives are being constantly recorded in videos and pictures on our phones. We can take an unlimited amount of photos and pick from the best. If something is slightly off, you can always edit it on your phone or using a more robust software to get everything just right. And yes that means we have so many ways to take amazing, sharp, perfect photos. But it also means that every photo we take on our phone slots in with the other 10,000 photos we’ve taken. They get lost in the noise. Something else to scroll past when we’re bored.

But every photo on film feels like a relic. It’s a piece of time frozen and imprinted onto a physical, tangible object. There was significant effort to get it to that point. The film had to be purchased, opened, and loaded into the camera properly. The photographer had to choose that specific angle to frame the shot, they had to manage the lighting, fix the settings on the camera to match the conditions, and get their subject to behave a certain way and/or capture their subject in the midst of an act. And, unless the photographer is made of money, they probably only took one or two photos of this particular moment. Film isn’t cheap and each shot moves you closer to having to buy another roll. Once the film is developed and printed, that’s your photo. You can’t change it. There’s no photoshopping it to make the lighting appear better or filters to make it more exciting.

In a world where everything is made so easy, so cheap, so disposable, I wanted to try something that felt real. Shooting on film gave me that thrill. The problem was I didn’t know where to even start. So I reached out to Arturo, who was happy to guide me through the process. He found a camera on eBay and told me to get one like it. It being near my birthday, I immediately requested it as a birthday present from my parents. It’s a Pentax Spotmatic-F with a 50mm Takumar 1.4 lens. This post will not get into any nitty gritty details of cameras or film so I won’t break any of that down except to say it’s a popular film camera from the 1960s and 70s with a great lens. All told it was $175 with shipping and it was in great condition. Arturo also told me to download the Pocket Light Meter app for my phone. The app tells you the best settings to use for the camera. Though this camera is significantly more advanced than the first one I used, it’s still a pretty simple tool that requires me to set everything properly. Unlike your iPhone or a modern DSLR, it won’t bail you out with any automatic settings.

I watched some videos on how to use it and I practiced with a black and white roll of film that I had at my house already. Then, it was time to take it for a real spin. Fortunately, there was an amazing photography opportunity happening right next to my house the same week.

Blowing Up

The Plano Balloon Festival is a huge event that happens at the nature preserve in my neighborhood each year. Unfortunately it was canceled the last two years so we had never been to it. This year was the triumphant return and I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to take my camera for a test run. but I wanted to get as close to the action as I could. So I secured a media pass and free tickets because, well, that’s what I do. That allowed me access to the balloon fields while the crews were inflating them, which got me amazing access for photos.

It was super fun trying to figure out how to frame the photos, working my angles with the lighting, and plotting out what would make for the best shot. While other professional photographers were shooting away with their digital cameras, I was stepping back and planning what I wanted to do with each frame. I had to be much more meticulous with my choices. After all, I wasn’t going to be fiddling with switching a rolls of film in the middle of the field in front of thousands of people, so I had to make the most of my 36 frames.

Yep, 36 shots. That’s all I had.

Actually, that’s all I thought I had.

In fact, I really only had 24.

I forgot I bought the cheaper film to use for my first efforts. Weirdly, my film let me keep shooting well after 24. In fact, I kept shooting and advancing the film for at least 7-8 more shots. It got more difficult but it did let me move it slightly forward. This being my first real use of this camera I just thought maybe that’s how it worked.

When I realized my mistake the next day I talked to Arturo about it and he told me that it might mean that I actually didn’t shoot any film. If the camera was letting me advance the film after the roll should have reached the end then that might just mean the film wasn’t actually in the camera properly. I thought I’d lost everything. I took it to Garland Camera and explained the situation to them and they agreed that it might mean I shot nothing. I turned over my roll for development and hoped there was at least one good picture.

You have no idea how relieved I was to find out that I had 25 legit photos. And some of them are awesome.

And the last photo ended up being super cool, because it was exposed more than 8 times so all of the photos I tried to take are overlaid onto each other. Even though I was sad to lose some of the photos I took, I am still satisfied with the result because it looks like I was trying to do something really #artistic.

So now that I’d taken it for a spin and learned from a very stupid mistake, it was time to take this show on the road. And for that part of the film camera journey, you’ll have to read the next edition of Trial & Error.

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