Grains and Bits: On Analog

Image Source: Adobe

My dad is a camera enthusiast. Has been for as far as I can remember, and so obsessed that we liked to say he was ‘nuts about cameras’. Growing up, he used digital cameras to document my journey of growing up. When I became older, I became aware of the camera’s presence. Later I shied away from the camera and entered an age of looking behind the lens, but that’s another story.

The story I want to tell today is a story of vintage media. Dad kept all the gear in a dry box the size of a medium-sized safe. Once I was old enough to hold the Nikon D90, I went rummaging in the dry box. Amongst the digital oddities, one that stood out was a large camera with a wooden carrying handle.

None of the others had wooden handles. I had to have it, so I took it out to have a look but Dad stopped me before I could drop it. Little did I know, but I was holding the legendary Asahi Pentax 67, a medium format workhorse camera.

It’s a shame Dad sold it. I would kill for one these days.

The wooden handle and the Pentax itself was a relic from analog photography’s heyday — by the time I learned how film photography worked, the medium was essentially dead. When I went to Thailand on a school trip, I borrowed my sister’s toy camera to shoot film for fun. However, it has turned into a real, serious hobby that may also be bringing me to the verge of bankruptcy. I cannot afford to develop the last three rolls of film sitting in my fridge.

So much money, starting on a camera with a lens as blunt as a sledgehammer, using film that offers none of the superior quality that digital offers, and why, you ask?

1. It was funny. When I started, it was to have a laugh at the two ‘serious’ photographers in my grade. No offense, but their Instagram captions were a bit pretentious. I still think so. To shoot on film with a funny camera was the best rib I could think of at the time.
   

2. Authenticity. Anybody can whip out a phone and snap a photo, and slap on filter after filter until it looks oh-so-VSCO-pretty. But that’s pretentious, and lazy! It’s a facsimile at most of the aesthetic that chemical films inherently have. And thus film is unique in the sense that a photo automatically has an aesthetic to it at the moment of exposure. It might not be visible straight away, but it cannot be altered. It’s unique and as far as I can tell, no digital manipulation comes close to the authenticity of film photos.
   

3. Intent. I personally think photography is too easy these days. Easy to manipulate and shoot. On a phone one can take hundreds of photos in 5 minutes. 135 film only gives 36 shots. 120 film; at most 16 and as little as 3. It no longer becomes an act of premeditation, but an act of impulsive documentation. There is no thought given to new photos. On film each exposure is a luxury good, and taking each photo is a cathartic release of composed energy.
   

4. Mechanics. It’s not only a satisfying mental exercise to take a photo, but the mechanics of each camera is also satisfying. No digital camera will come close to replacing the satisfying ‘tchunk’ of the shutter firing off.
   

5. Feeling. Who doesn’t want to feel like Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and Andreas Gursky when they embody the epitome of fine-art photographic practice?

Reasons aside, what have I learned from shooting analog?

It’s hard, and expensive. There are so many times I’ve misfired, composed badly, captured a subject that doesn’t end up looking good on the negative, and cursed myself accordingly for it. But it’s damn satisfying, and I’ve learned so much by taking apart my cameras and putting them back together. The mechanical simplicity (relative to digital) means you can actually learn how they work precisely, and this is how I found out how to shoot manual properly. F-stop, ISO and shutter speed were all funny numbers to me at first. I never bothered watching tutorials, which is probably why I was so slow at improvement.

That being said, digital is also an important crutch when it comes to understanding the manual process. One of my favorite techniques right now is to turn down the f/stop and ISO as far as it will go, and let my shutter open for a few seconds. Long exposures are incredibly painterly, but I would have never figured it out on a film camera, especially when there’s no way to record metadata properly. But hey, when both have their advantages, why not keep them around?