TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
As I was writing an essay for a friend’s upcoming photography book, it occurred to me that we’ve reached a point in the evolution of digital imaging where it’s entirely possible some of you have never shot with film. If we take the year 2000 as roughly the critical turning point, and accept that by the middle of the ‘noughties’ digital imaging was a realistic proposition for working photographers, then anybody who started their careers over the last ten years or so will be purely a product of the digital era.
Have you missed anything by not having experienced film photography? Well, put it this way, you may not entirely appreciate just how fundamentally different were the practices and processes. Different enough, in fact, to influence the creative mindset and even the emotional and psychological aspects of making a photograph.
my friend – let’s call her music photographer Wendy mcDougall – started shooting professionally in the late 1970s (coincidentally at about the same time as me) – which meant the film technologies were sufficiently developed to allow for much more to be done in-camera, expanding the flexibility for shooting with, in particular, 35mm equipment, and in a wider variety of lighting conditions. It was really the start of film’s ‘golden era’ of the 1980s and early 1990s. While my film days were nearly exclusive colour transparency (starting with Kodachrome), Wendy shot mostly black-and-white film and then processed and printed her own work,
which added another element of involvement. Shooting transparency film, especially 35mm, meant you simply had to ‘get it right in the camera’ and that included framing because there really wasn’t much scope for cropping the smaller frame. Wendy opted for the discipline of framing in-camera because she envisaged every shot as a print… indeed, that if a frame was worth taking, it was worth printing. For quite a while she shot with a Hasselblad 6x6cm format SLR because its square frame better matched the format of LP covers, and later, CD cases.
Because so much effort and input were concentrated on the viewfinder – and in the operation of a manual film camera – there was significantly more involvement in the process of making a photograph… it certainly wasn’t just a case of pressing the shutter button and hoping for the best. In the darkroom, an even more intimate relationship with photography was developed, nurtured by what was an experience that involved nearly all the senses.
An essential ingredient of film photography at just about every stage was time, which has now been taken out of the process because digital images are available immediately for review and, subsequently, can be shared mere minutes after the shutter button had been pressed. Time has a refining quality. With only an optical viewfinder to work with, the abilities to frame and compose were honed, backed by an understanding of what could be achieved both technically and creatively with focus and exposure. It was slower, of course, but more carefully considered too. After all, there was the greater scrutiny created by the time lapse between when the film was exposed and when it was processed which created its own unique pressures. Polaroid test prints were the backstop in the studio, but with ‘live’ events (including weddings) when there was no chance of a reshoot, it really focused the mind. This, consequently, had the effect of refining both your technical discipline and your creative competence. You simply had to get it right or you wouldn’t be in business for very long. It required a greater confidence in your own skills as a photographer and, of course, a greater reliance on the camera because even the darkroom only provided limited scope for corrections. In other words, photographers needed to be photographers, purely and simply.
This might seem like the Dark Ages now, and it certainly wasn’t necessarily ‘the good old days’ either. The key attractions of digital imaging are impossible to ignore, which is why we’re all working this way now, but I think that there are aspects of film photography which are worth considering in the digital era. At the heart of this is the unique relationship between camera and photographer which, in turn, means putting more value into each frame in terms of composition, the technical elements and, yes, time. In the end, you’re only actually going to use one frame, aren’t you? And, although the sky is the limit these days in terms of post-camera manipulations, there’s still a lot to be said for starting out with ‘getting it right in camera’… which surely remains the unique skill of the photographer.