Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“My kind of promises, Can lead to joy”—Bacharach and David
Facts: Vinyl record sales grew by 17 percent last year, bringing in $1.2 billion in revenue. CDs made $483 million, a drop of 18 percent. Even so, both records and CDs made up only a small fraction of the music industry’s revenue in 2022.
According to Luminate, which recently published its Top Entertainment Trends for 2023 report, “50 per cent of consumers who have bought vinyl (records) in the past 12 months (don’t) own a record player.
Much as been made, including by me, of the increased popularity of analogue media, with the rising popularity of vinyl record often cited as an example. For photographers this translates into the renewed popularity of shooting film. According to the CBC: “The film photography industry was brought to its knees about a decade ago, but it’s experiencing a rebirth. ‘I feel like I can attach more emotion to a film photo,’ said Jasmine Orr, who owns about a dozen cameras and enjoys taking photos of urban landscapes in Edmonton. Instead of pulling out a phone and snapping dozens of photos, a photographer using film has to be much more mindful and intentional because of the limits of a roll, Orr said.”
How I Made this Portrait: This portrait at right was made back in the film era when I used to photograph many model portraits at Barr Lake State Park, where this image was made. This particular model was referred to me at a time when I was working with a local modeling agency. At the time, my techniques and technical prowess were not as refined as they would later become, at least in my own mind. (Look for a post about one of the reasons, in the coming weeks.) Those modest skills produced, what I would consider, “pleasant” results. The camera used for this portrait was my original Contax 167MT, similar to the one I purchased from Japan last year, and a Carl Zeiss 85mm f/2.8 lens. Exposure on the Kodak color negative film was unrecorded. Scans were made using Kodak’s now defunct Photo CD process and the file opened using Lemke Software’s Graphic Converter that is not without its quirks and features when used with my older operating OS and 27-inch 5K iMac.
So with that comparison with vinyl records in mind, do people buy rolls of film and not shoot it? I’ll plead somewhat guilty to that because recently I’ve accumulated several boxes of interesting film emulsions that I haven’t shot yet. You can read about them here. But I plan to…
My excuse has been the weather—tornado warnings and big hail yesterday, for example—and OK, I’ll admit to not liking to shoot until the light and ambience, as well, are “right.” I prefer to have a nice sunny, warm day to make photographs. And here in Colorado we’be have had a longer than normal winter with lots of really cold days and snow. Mea Culpa. If I’m shooting outdoor portraits, I want the subject to be comfortable too because it will make for better photographs. And I’ll need to wait not just for a sunny day but also for the leaves on the trees around here to burst forth to shoot that roll of Rollei’s Infrared 400 film I just got from B&H. I was also hoping to shoot a roll of Ilford HP5 Pus black and white film during my last model shoot in my home studio, but while the film remains loaded in my Canon AT-1, the model canceled the day before the shoot . (It happens) Or maybe all this is just excuses for being as the song goes…”a sleepy bozo.”
Since it’s National Photo Month, so I’ll make a promise to you, I’ll shoot some of this new film I bought and get back to you with the results. I promise.
If you would like to send a roll of film for me to review or other stuff for these posts and my videos, click the CONTACT tab about and drop me an e-mail, I’ll send the email back toy you as quickly as possible.