A small per­mière — here’s my first “ana­log” image on this blog. Yes, “ana­log” as in taken with an old ana­log cam­era on black & white film (Ilford XP2 Super). Noth­ing too spe­cial, just a nice, moody photo I took down in the snooker hall of the col­lege.

I recently star­ted tak­ing film pho­tos again for a num­ber of reas­ons. First of all, it’s kind of cool. Second, press­ing the shut­ter but­ton costs me roughly 50c each time, so even though these are not huge sums (com­pared to medium format or even large format pho­to­graphy) you don’t just go simply snap­ping away like you were using a digital cam­era. No, you end up slow­ing down a lot. Double and triple check­ing everything, com­pos­i­tion, cam­era set­tings — espe­cially shut­ter speed as there’s no “sensor based” image sta­bil­isa­tion on film, so I have to be very con­scious of the 1-​over-​focal-​length rule, see here for example — and if the per­son I’m about to shoot is about to blink her eyes. Third — not that I think my pho­to­graphy will be any more rel­ev­ant in 50 years than it is now — people will always be able to do some­thing with a film neg­at­ive, but not neces­sar­ily with a file in an ancient film format, if it sur­vives that long any­way and doesn’t get lost in a hard drive crash.

At the moment I’m just get­ting the film devoloped down at the chem­ist (3 EUR for a roll of 36), then “scan” the images using my digital cam­era on a self-​built light table, together with a macro lens and flash gun from below. For­give me, but I’m really proud of the set-​up — you can see the proof of concept set-​up here, and the cur­rent ver­sion here. Obvi­ously a flim scan­ner would be bet­ter at han­del­ing dust and other types of air­born dirt, but none of the afford­able ones give you 25 Mega­pixel scans ;-)