A Little Film Photography

Some of you who follow my ramblings on Twitter may know that I’ve been on a 10 week photography course at my local college. In my last ‘photography post’ (if you can even call it that), I touched base on my passion for the art of Photography and my particular love for how wonderful I believe film photography is. (How many times am I going to say photography in this post?) Photography, photography, photography.

When my lovely boyfriend kindly purchased me my first DSLR I thought it best that I start to learn the ropes – properly. I didn’t want to be using it on automatic and I wanted to make the most of the piece of kit I had. So I thought what better way, than taking a course that focuses on the basics? Little did I know that it would not only teach me everything I needed to know about digital, but it would also delve into the likes of film, and pinhole.

For my final project, I have to produce 6-10 images around a particular theme (of my choice). Being the morbid little sod that I am, I’ve picked Graveyards. To me there’s something really quite beautiful about them, let alone all the different textures and colours available to snap. I’ve taken the majority of the photo’s on my DSLR, to showcase the techniques we’ve learnt over the past 9 weeks, but I wanted to take a few on film too, just to see how they would come out really. I also took a few snaps of my beautiful friend (nothing to do with the theme), she is ridiculously photogenic (hate chu) and I was pleasantly surprised at how they came out. I may even pop a few of them in my final project!

I haven’t edited or enhanced any of these images, as I wanted to show you how naturally beautiful film can be on it’s own. I had so much fun developing these in the dark room – although it does take an age to get it right! These ones are actually the original negatives from the camera – scanned on to my PC! Pretty nifty eh? I think I’ll pop down to boots on the weekend and get the rest developed properly.

This film camera is ancient, and as you can see has lots of scratches on the lens – but that’s something I really love, it gives that vintage feeling and I think adds character to the image. This was all shot on a standard 35mm black and white film. Although it is expensive to have films developed, and it’s not something we can all afford to do on a weekly basis, I think it’s lovely to have a go every once in a while, and there’s something really quite exciting about waiting for them to be ready, you never know what you’re going to get! Plus you can pick up film camera’s from your local charity shop for next to nothing!

What do you think? Did I do okay for my first attempt at Film photography? And would you like to see my final project when it's done? :)