Jarrett Fuller

I started making photographs at the same time I started graphic designing, which at this point is nearing twenty-five years ago, around my sophomore in high school. (This year continually proves pivotal in the direction of my life!) During those early years, design and photography were operating in the same way for me, I’m not sure I separated them as discrete practices as much as different outputs in the same creative practice. And now, all these years later, photography and design continue to be two parts of my creative practice that I haven’t given up, that keep drawing me back. Unlike design, however, I’ve never been formally trained in photography aside from a semester course in college and a course in high school.

That high school course, which if memory serves, was my senior year in 2006, was the only time I seriously made photos with film. We had a fairly robust art department in my high school and the photography courses immersed you in dark-room techniques. I can’t seem to find any of the prints from that class anymore but the romance of the development process stayed with me. Despite this, I haven’t shot with film since that course but have been itching to experiment with it again the last few years.

Until now.

At the beginning of the summer, I finally stopped into the camera shop near my home and picked up an old Ricoh Shotmaster point-and-shoot and a few rolls of film. For the last few months, I’ve been making photographs almost exclusively on film for the first time since I was in high school and it’s really been a blast. I just got my first rolls back from the developers.

Here are some unordered thoughts and observations on the last few months of this experiment, along with some of my favorite images (I’m posting a larger collection over on my photo blog):

• I took with me to our family trip to the beach last month and then up to Pennsylvania for a quick trip to visit my parents and spend some time in Philadelphia.
• I’ve been using Kodak’s Kodacolor 200 35mm film and am really happy with the colors I’m getting back. It really shines at golden hour in a way I’m enjoying:

• It feels like an expensive hobby but it’s honestly not as bad as I was expecting: a roll of film is ~$10 and development (for these few first few rolls, I’m getting both prints and digital copies) is ~$30. With 36 photos on a roll, that comes out to basically $1 a photo.
• I like the idea of offsetting this with cheap cameras. The Ricoh I picked up was $40. I have a collection of old cameras here, some are still functioning.
• The Ricoh is a basic point-and-shoot with minimal manual adjustments. It looks like the kind of camera my parents had around when I was growing up. I wasn’t ready to jump right into manual settings considering the costs of film. I wanted to see what I could get with little control and then work my way back to fully manual (which is how I shoot digitally)
• But! I’m feeling (over?)-confident and am thinking about moving to some of my other cameras: I have Holga medium format camera that I only shot with once, also in high school, with fairly depressing results. Maybe it’s time to try again? (That Holga was also a $40 camera.)

• When I feel my photography is getting stuck, I’ll switch up my camera to force me out of old habits. Usually, this means picking up the Polaroid so I’m thinking in squares instead of rectanagles but still getting a result right away. With film, I can’t analyze those habits until much later, when the film comes back from the developers. I’m realizing, for example, how often I’ll shoot multiple photos of the same subject, ensuring I have the right angle or composition. Because of costs, I’m not doing that here and am forced to embrace the imperfections of my alignment. (I also realized how often I make little adjustments in Lightroom immediately after shooting, adjusting the horizon, slight edits to correct an angle.) This delay creates a forcing mechanism for me, between creating and editing, that I realized I’d lost over the years of shooting digital.
• I guess I could do post production in Lightroom with these film photos but that defeats the experiment which is to see what I can get in-camera, fully analogue. Everything I’m sharing are directly from the camera, no digital edits.

• I’m not interested in the film vs. digital debates. I’m still carrying my trusty Fuji x100f with me most places (and sometimes making the same photo on both cameras to compare). For me, I’m less interested in which is better and more in how each one forces me to make a different kind of image: what affordances do each offer, what gives me the type of image I want to make in a particular setting.
• But aside from moving between cameras, I think my next step is trying different film. Anyone out there have favorites?
• If anything else, it’s nice to have a new (old) hobby again. More on all this over the next months, I imagine.