12 Months Of Film

I've been shooting digital since 2004 when I bought the rather excellent Nikon D70. I sold this camera a few years later and now wish I hadn't as since then I seem to have started building a small but rather sexy collection of SLRs, both digital and film. Before 2004, I had been borrowing my dads Praktica BX20 film camera and used it whenever I went on holiday. It took some excellent images even though looking back, I don't think I really had a clue what I was actually doing. For some reason, buying in to the digital system allowed me to understand camera basics in a way that I could never quite grasp whilst using film, and over the years my photography has improved massively. If there's one problem with the new digital bodies however, it's that they're almost too good. That can be fantastic when i'm shooting at a wedding and I just need to capture a candid image with the right exposure and composition then quickly move on. Over time though, I believe this can lead to carelessness and you can inadvertently become sloppy, almost complacent. If you're not careful, sub par, unimaginative images can result. I have found that by carrying an old film camera alongside my modern kit when I'm out shooting for fun tends to slow me down and makes me consider the shot in greater detail. Is the composition strong? Is the light coming from the right direction? Is there a distracting background? With digital this doesn't seem to cross your mind quite as much. One look at the LCD screen after image capture will give you most, if not all of this information, and if you don't like the look of the photograph, just delete it, no cost. Film does cost, somewhere between 30-40p per shot with processing fees, so messing up becomes an issue. Most of the old film cameras I'm using are fully manual with relatively slow fastest shutter speeds, somewhere in the region of 1/750 - 1/1000 sec. This can cause problems if you're running a reasonably fast 400 asa film in bright conditions and want to produce a photograph with shallow depth of field, as the image will tend to overexpose quite considerably unless filters are used. Shooting with a camera that has greater limitations slows you down, you have to problem solve, you have to consider the scene in more detail. This has definitely benefited my technique when shooting digital. I have found that I now take my time a little more, scanning the scene through the eyepiece and checking things like composition, background clutter and looking at the direction of the light before I press the shutter button. I have found that I capture more 'keepers' now, and have far fewer images to trawl through at the end of a session by adopting this new technique. Above all this and perhaps most importantly of all, I'm now taking more beautiful shots than ever before.

So that brings me nicely on to the nature of this post. I've noticed a few blogs feature interesting articles where the author shoots with a different film camera for one month over a period of a year, twelve cameras in total. I have decided to do the same as it sounds like fun. There are no real rules, only that they have to be film SLRs and one film per camera which can be shot across the entire calendar month. The project has just started as of the 1st September and the camera I have chosen for the first month is the Praktica BX20, simply because I am most familiar with this one. The film will be processed at the end  of the month and I will publish some of the photos on my blog as well as my thoughts on the camera, ease of use,handling, picture quality and look, as well as a little bit of it's history.  

Five of the film SLRs ready to go.

Seven cameras are in the line up at present, five of which are shown above. So far I have,

Zenit TTL
Olympus om10
Pentax P30
Praktica bx20
Miranda MS-3
Fujifilm Fujica STX-1N
Pentax ME

Five more to find over the coming months. I would love to add a Nikon FM3a to the list but it is a tad expensive. I will keep a lookout, you just never know. Check back in early October for the first blog post in the series '12 Months Of Film'.