I tried looking for that quote just now, but -of course- I couldn't find it. I'm sure I read that somewhere though… Maybe it wasn't Capa and I was just subconsciously justifying my deplorable habits of leaving exposed rolls on a drawer somewhere for months? Who knows.
At any given point in time I have a backlog of around 4-10 exposed rolls ready for development (there's 6 B&W and 6 color exposed films awaiting for me right this second, btw). I would be lying if I said the reason for that was purely artistic. Bottom line is that I'm lazy. Really lazy, and developing, scanning and retouching films is quite time consuming… Specially when you get something like 2 or 3 keepers a roll if you are lucky.
Why do it then?
Well, the short answer is that I really like film. I like the look I get with it, I like how it forces me to think twice before pressing the shutter (after all every picture is directly translated into money spent) AND I like the way it makes me feel when I pull out a roll from the tank and get that first look at the negatives. When you have NO idea what the hell it is that you are developing you can be very pleasantly surprised. Film is a bit like vinyl, its adherents swear by it citing all sort of "technical" and "romantic" reasons while the detractors have just moved on and enjoy the convenience of mp3s and jpgs. Maybe it's not a coincidence I like both vinyls and film? who knows.
Anyway. Back on topic: film. I'm posting this because of a picture I scanned yesterday. I'll get to that in a while.
I usually try to keep a marker with me and try to write as much as I can into the actual rolls after exposing them, things like the ISO used, the place, camera and lenses used. Of course, this is usually not the case and I get to stare at a series of almost completely unmarked rolls and end up deciding on which to develop in a quite random fashion. I did just that yesterday, I wanted to develop one specific roll I knew I had exposed in Madrid at the beginning of the year and had a free spot on the tank…. so I went for the only other roll shot @100 ISO.
I said this before but I'll say it again. I love taking a first peak at a negative. It is an amazing experience. We are too used to seeing pictures instantly in the back of our cameras. Pictures just become irrelevant. We loose every connection we had with them.
We shoot and review. When reviewing we decide to keep or delete and we go on with our lives, shooting even more pictures. Maybe even variations of the ones we already saw. We use the previews to experiment and change. We KNOW how the picture looks and we can keep on trying until we get the effect we desire. When shooting this way, pictures are something that happened just 10 seconds ago. We look at the final image while still immersed in its context. We have no perspective, we delete pictures we should have kept and keep pictures we should delete.
By the time I get home and dump the images into the computer, I've seen those pictures so many times that I've become desensitized to them. There's no surprises. Everything is as expected.
But with film, there is no experimenting. At least no recursive experimenting. Everything is done blindly. And because each frame costs me money (and time) I tend to think twice before pressing the shutter. I cannot explain it, but I take different pictures with film and with digital. Not better or worse. Different.
Which brings me to my point: Images left on their own, undiscovered for months, and their effect on us when we discover them.
So there I was yesterday, patiently scanning 2 rolls of mostly boring Madrid pictures when I came across this frame:
I said it before: this is not a blog for amazing pictures. It's for pictures that move me. And this one did.
I had NO recollection at all of ever taking this shot. I didn't even realize where the hell that was…. but there was something about the pic that interested me. can't put my finger on it though….
That's stockholm, I later realized. I thought I didn't use any film there… It was so dark so early that the high ISO of digital seemed like the only way to go there… but apparently not. I cannot explain everything that happened to me in the fraction of a second that took me to realize this was stockholm and later to actually remember that I had indeed taken the picture. When I finally did, it was magical. Not because the picture itself is any good (btw, there's something I like about the pic, but it's not a remarkable image in any sense) but it literally transported me there. I replayed everything about that amazing swedish weekend in my head. Images started pouring into my mind: the cold, the 3 o'clock sunset, the fire alarm going off in my room (long story...), meeting one of my all time musical heroes and asking him if his new record was any good (seriously… I actually asked him that), the swedish dude that wouldn't stop practicing his spanish on me (Damn you, why where you not a hot blonde swedish supermodel?).... whatever.. it all came back. It was... good.
Could I have gotten the same effect from the digital captures from the same trip? I seriously doubt it. I mean, I love some of the digital pics I took in Sweden, but they are just that, pictures. By the time I saw them on the computer screen I had lived with them for a few days already, examining them repeatedly on the camera monitor.
The film shots, on the other hand, where completely off the radar. They were forgotten for 4 months, waiting for me to discover them. And when I did discover them it was amazing.
On the other hand though… this waiting thing can be a bit unpleasant. I had pictures of
Too bad, cause some of them were really pretty pictures. :)
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