Shooting film: a progress report by Mahesh Balasubramanian

As a follow up to Steve’s post about using film yesterday, here are my initial thoughts on my year using film. Like Steve, I’m devoting 2015 to shooting film instead of digital. Even though it is too early for me to understand the change in my photography, it is definitely impacting my photography.

I love the experience of shooting film and the whole process of making pictures. It helps me to concentrate on making pictures rather than gadgets. It slows down and concentrate on what should I shoot and how to frame the picture, what elements to be included and what to exclude.

I get really worried by some people asking “what camera do you use?” and “Your post processing is good. How do you do that?”. I don’t want my photoshop skills to be visible in my photos, or the features of my camera either. It is not really a camera / post production makes the actual picture. It may enhances the final picture. So, I bought very very inexpensive film cameras (i.e. a Canon SLR for $25 and Yashica GTN from eBay). I am shooting only on these cameras currently. I use Kodak T-Max and Ilford HP5 Plus film. I like the results of these less expensive camera and the film combinations.

I can see improvements in my pictures. I mean, out of 36 exposures, I can easily get 5/7 good pictures. This is good compared to my digital photography. I would like to improve on this of course. So, hopefully I will be shooting on film until the end of this year. This will definitely help me when I go back to digital in future.

I have attached few of my pictures taken recently with film. These may not be ‘great’ pictures but, personally I am satisfied with the results after moving to film.

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