Shooting Film: Back to the Future

Yashica 635

I started a new photography class with an old teacher last week.  Going into it I knew that he thinks digital is best suited to commercial work while film is the medium of art but I thought I'd be able to win him over.  However, in the first lesson he tricked me somehow into promising to shoot at least one roll of 35mm and one medium format this week. 'No problem', I thought, 'I shot film for years.  Going back can't be that hard can it?' It turns out it is that simple and that hard.

Digging my old Olympus gear out of the closet  and dusting it off filled me with a wave of nostalgia.  The OM cameras are beautiful pieces of machinery.  The Zuiko lenses are, at once both compact and solid.  My first shock to the system was how heavy all this stuff was.  I put a couple of OM bodies and most of the Zuiko lens I owned into an old school, canvas, shoulder bag and set off.  A block later I was back home dumping half of what I was carrying and puting it all into a modern backback.  The tiny, dense, Zuiko prime lenses rattled around on the huge spaces the modern bag has for modern zoom lenses but at least I was getting some feeling back into my left shoulder. 

In use, I kept forgetting that I had to wind on manually so I pressed the shutter many times only to wonder why nothing happened. More than once I looked  at the back of many OM2 spot/program to review the last shot I had taken, only to be greeted by the TriX film box reminder.  I'd forgotten how to focus manually so I was winding my lenses all over the place.  The biggest change, however, was how aware I was that each shot had a financial implication so I was overly careful and ponderous.  It took me 2 hours to shoot one roll of 36 exposures.

If I thought the 35mm SLR was slow I was in for a shock when I took the an old TLR out the next day.  Loading, winding on, focusing, setting the exposure were all slow but framing took forever.  Up and down are alright, but left and right bounced from a mirror get reversed.  Try to manipulate an object, level and into a specific place in the frame was ponderous and frustrating, like the worse hand held video game you've ever played.  I'm beginning to remember why I use to shoot this thing mounted on a 3-way tripod head 90% of the time; at least on the tripod you can deal with one axis at a time.

On the upside, there's something about an all metal, all manual camera that makes you fell like a real photographer.  The shutters make the most wonderful noises.  Feeling that each frame is precious slows me down from my more usual habit of taking 3 frames before I even think about what I'm doing. I'm excited about picking up my shots from the lab in a way I rarely am about putting a compact flash card in my computer.  Of course, I could be in for a huge disappointment but at least I tried to do my assignment.