We watched Moneyball last night. A great movie by the way. Brad Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, said several times, “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.” For me the same can be said for film.
When I decided to get more into film for my personal photography it was because I loved the look. The color palette was beautiful and something I couldn’t recreate with digital.
It’s like the difference between listening to a MP3 file on an iPod compared to listening to an old vinyl record. The digitized product is so “perfect” that it comes across sterile and lifeless, while the analog product has a warmth and organic feel to it that makes it more real. Film, just like vinyl, has soul.
I saw this in other people’s work and wanted it for my own.
Once I began shooting film for myself, I realized that there was something else special about the photos that I hadn’t anticipated. It felt like I had actually captured something that couldn’t be recreated. In one shutter click I had documented a one-of-a-kind representation of that moment. With digital you can machine gun the shutter button and it doesn’t matter. Hard drive and memory card space is cheap. Digital is disposable. I threw away shots without a second glance. But with film you have to think and really see what it is you’re photographing before you hit the shutter. You’re more connected and invested in the work, and each end product is unique and special in it’s own right.
My first few rolls were just to get the hang of the different processes over digital, but then I took this photo of my wife, Alix. She was 33 or 34 weeks pregnant with Avery.
And I started falling in love with film.
