Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.”― Ernst Haas
Once upon a time, there were such things as print photo magazines and they had travel budgets allowing them to send Contributing Writers, like myself, to the photokina show in Germany. At one of the last film-based photokinas, I was in the press room talking with the legendary Joe Meehan along with several other photo magazine editors and he asked each of us, “How many cameras do you own?”
A (now) former Shutterbug editor that was sitting next to me said he owned somewhere around two hundred cameras. I couldn’t top that but did a few mental calculations and came up with 25, although that might have been a little low. When digital imaging became more practical and popular, I pared down the number of film cameras that I owned. Oh, was that ever a dumb idea. To this day, I regret selling my Contax rangefinder, SLRs and other film cameras. I kept a Hasselblad XPan with two lenses, a Leica M6 TTL and 50mm Summicron, a Zeiss SW with 21mm Biogon lens, a Minolta Prod 20, a Nimslo (that I keep forgetting I won) and a gold-trimmed Seagull TR that Mary gave me as a birthday gift. If you’ve been following these Film Friday posts you know that I’ve added five new (old) 35mm SLRs to that number.
Flashing back again:There was a time when Shutterbug produced special editions twice a year and I suggested they produce one about film photography and another, now former editor told me, “My bosses would fire me if I suggested that.” Later when I wrote about film photography in my annual trends column in the former print edition of Shutterbug magazine another, different but also now former editor said, “You almost have me convinced.” I wonder what he thinks now?
You see: Sales of Kodak professional film grew more than five percent between 2013 and 2015. More recently, Ed Hurley, general manager of film at Kodak said, “We are making more than twice the amount of rolls in 2019 than we made in 2015.” Demographics are on film’s side: Ilford Photo confirmed this trend when a survey found that 30 percent of film users were under 35 years old, and 60 percent had only started shooting film in the last five years. Sales of Fuji’s Instax cameras have risen steadily since 2013 and they’ve sold more than 50 million cameras, including 10 million in the 2019 business year. A Google search for “film photography” produced 5,570,000,000 hits.
How I Made the Above Portrait: I photographed Kim Goetz in the dining room of my former home using mostly available light with (maybe) a reflector placed at camera left. The camera used was my original Contax 167MT, not the one I recently purchased from Japan, and a Carl Zeiss 85mm f/2.8 lens. Exposure on the Kodak Plus-X film was unrecorded. Scan of the negative was made using Kodak’s now-defunct Photo CD process.
So what about you? Are you thinking about going back or starting to shoot film? My own plans for 2022 are to shoot more film. Let me know what your own film plans are for next year. Click the Contact tab above and let me know.
PS: I love me some divas, especially Celine Dion and when I saw this black and white cover of her album The Essential Celine Dion with her shooting a film-based Hasselblad, it just made me love her more.
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