My first footsteps into film (part 1)

Photography in one form or another has been in my life for many years, but it was not until I got into the medium that I became aware of this. My father like most used to take pictures when ever we went on family holidays or trips out, but strangely I never took much notice at the time as I was too busy being a kid. Only years later and looking at old photographs did I realise how much I was surrounded by photography. It turned out that my father was a bit of a keen amateur photographer. Its strange how things effect us without us even consciously knowing.

Skip forward some years now age 17 and I take the path towards the graphic arts where I would be surrounded by photography even more on a daily basis but still never picking up a camera. It was at that time that I was introduced to the Apple Macintosh computer and for years that had my full attention. It was amazing to me that I used to draw everything by hand but now I had this tool that could create such rich graphics, something we all take for granted now. Photography was always there though, as I would use it daily in my college design work and still do to this day.

Graphic design and photography go hand in hand and I have always kept up with technology, so when digital photography came out it seemed like it would make my life easier. But for years though on big projects I would still ask my design agency to book a film photographer, I knew the colours were richer, thicker with had more depth and they didn't have the colour fringing that effected digital shots for years.

Years later one day after being asked to design a brochure and being supplied poor web quality photographs I finally thought, aim sure I could do better! By this time the digital world had been with us for some time so not having the first clue went to John Lewis and bought my first DSLR which was a Canon 550D. Four and a half years later living in the digital world and something strikes me, the images that I seem to be drawn to all have a certain look and feel. I keep seeing these names like tri-x and portra and finally discover that what I have been drawn in by was film images, they were so different to digital. I told my father that I wanted to try film, he went away and came back with his old camera (a Canon A-1, pictured above) I was used to Canon as I had a digital Canon or so I thought.

My friend gave me a couple of black & white films to try and off I went with my model. Knowing nothing about film photography I soon discovered how little I actually knew. It was quit a strange but fun experience, like many digital shooters I suspect, I kept trying to look at the back of the camera expecting to see my captured image lol. Excited and nervous I sent off my first film for development, on return I discovered that the film had been shot before and I had a whole roll of double exposures. Unknown to me at the time, the film had been rewound leaving the leader exposed just looking like a film ready to use.

Strangely though this didn't put me off and although things didn't start out smoothly I wanted to learn more... but I was hooked and it kick started the fire to know more!