A straight copy and paste from the Digital M forum! I do post a lot of film there... haha
Hello guys
Making my monthly visit here... I'll share with you a photography-related story:
I began talking to Miho again (shown above). We were never really that close, she was just that hard working girl in my class... we hung out a little during our first year, but that was about it. She has a passion for silk ropes, you know... the circus (like not clown circus, acrobat circus!) performers that tangle themselves in silk to climb high above the audience. In first year, she would travel back to Toronto every weekend (almost three hour round trip) just to attend practice. But second year got a little too intense and she gave it up so she could keep up with architecture school. She always looked tired, a little depressed, and really stressed out.
Near the end of the second year and the beginning of our first co-op/internship term, I asked her where she would be working next term, and she told me quietly that she'd be taking the term off, training, getting fit, and apply to circus school. She wasn't planning on coming back.
I messaged her a week ago to see how she was doing... and she seemed to be doing much better: she moved to Montreal, found a job at a ceramics studio, and practices at the local circus school every night
She told me never to give up photography, and to take my dreams seriously. Said I had a lot of potential, I just had to chase it, and make something out of it.
If you want to read her story, a Journalism student wrote an article on Miho.
Read it here!
It got me thinking that I've neglected photography for a really long time... I used to post here everyday, I used to take a photograph every day... but now it's maybe.. once every two weeks I produce one photograph? Kinda sucks, really. I've neglected my flickr, tumblr, facebook... I've been so overwhelmed by my work life. I think what I really want is just maybe... a week or two to fully dedicate to photography, catch up on my flickr/tumblr/getdpi, start a new blog/database (500px, maybe?) and really push my work out there. Enter a few contests, submit a few articles to blogs.
I began shooting a lot of film this term, and I didn't quite know why. I use my lunch break to wander around a 6 block radius from my office with a film camera, taking photos of the people I converse with. Many days, I'd come back without a single shot, some days I'd come back with one... others I'd come back with 3-4. I've also turned my bathroom into a darkroom and began developing film at home. I also picked up a 4x5 large format camera (a Crown Graphic, for those interested) and some sheet film. Shooting large format and developing my own film sort of helped me realized why film was my medium of choice.
It sounds ridiculous, but I shoot film because it forces me to return to photography. With film, there's no distraction of a screen or a meter (at least on my cameras... I took the battery out of my M5), there's just you, the machine (not a camera, a machine), and a medium. You see something, you operate the machine as if it were a part of you, and you capture on the medium, that's that. Nothing to tell you your exposure is wrong and you need to adjust before shooting, nothing to look at after you've shot, the process is clean, simple, and pure. During the hour I spend each day walking around the city, the camera becomes an extension of me, and I'm immersed in the process of photography, regardless of whether or not I take a photograph.
In the darkroom, you dedicate about a half hour of your time to the photograph... there are no distractions, just you and the photograph. The photograph relies on your movement, attention, and care in order to exist. You produce a tangible image at the end of the process... you've, in someways, created something.
It's these two things, film and the darkroom, that still keep me connected to photography. It sounds like a whole lot of bull, but that's what keeps me going
(I AM in architecture school after all... it's 4 years of bull...).
Here's what I've produced with my silly film stuff: