Susan Sontag wrote in her essays On Photography (Penguin Books, 1977) that as cameras became more sophisticated in the 70's, some photographers preferred to submit themselves to the limits imposed by older cameras. Working with a cruder, less high powered machine was thought to give more interesting or emotive results, to leave more room for creative accident. Forty years later, her words aren't any less true. In times when digital photography has made everything just a bit too perfect, there is something magical about the non-perfection of shooting on film.
A few posts ago, I wrote about my newest acquisition, a medium-format film camera Pentax 645N, which I haven't been able to put down since the day that I got it. The whole learning experience of shooting with a camera like this one is a reward on its own. It's a slower process than on digital, you have to think more and shoot less, and to take photos blindly without a preview screen can be very intimidating at first. That, and the few days that you have to wait to get your photos back from the lab to be able to see what you have shot, can be a real test to your patience.
On top of that, If you also take into account how expensive film, processing and negative scanning are, you understand why digital photography came to be. But, when you get those photos back from the lab, and you get to see the textures, the lovely colours, the imperfections, and the rawness of it all, it makes everything else completely worth it. Below, you will find some of the images that I've shot with that camera so far.
Photo credits: behind the scenes images by Andrzej Gruszka.
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