Why I love film photography
Today our phones are filled with photos of our children, of what we eat, of our travel destinations. We take picture after picture, hoping one will be good enough, before we put on a filter, publish them on social media and forget about them. Even with our digital cameras with great technical possibilities, we’re used to just snapping photos, checking the result afterward and taking a few extras just to be safe
In our digital era, there is a romantic shimmer over film photography. The interest in film is constantly growing. Photographers speak of grain, feel and the ”look” film gives. If you dig a little deeper you will see that there’s more to it than that. Something more profound. When you slow down, start working more consciously and limit yourself in terms of the amount of photographs you can take, something changes within. Perhaps it is the feeling of truly creating a photograph, much like a work of art, rather than just snapping a picture.
The contrasts, the dynamic width, the colours, the grain, the softness - it is difficult to replicate these in digital photographs. Perhaps the most vital part is what happens when a photographer uses an film camera instead of a digital one
When you are forced to slow down, feel, plan and set everything manually without being able to control the result directly afterwards, and instead having to go with your gut - perhaps that’s when the real magic happens. When the photographer focuses all their time and energy on taking the photograph and not on the editing.