Rollei IX

This is how I roll-ieflex:

Rollei VIII

This is how I roll-ieflex:

Rollei VII

 Rolleiflex Wales Rolleiflex Wales Rolleiflex Wales Rolleiflex Wales:

Rollei V

Another dribble of random photographs from the lens of my Rolleiflex:

Rollei VI

 Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex Rolleiflex:

Rollei IV

They say no news is good news, I’ve never been so sure about that. Here’s one last batch from the Rolleiflex before I disappear for two weeks. With my bags packed with cameras, film and Russian novels I think it ought to be a good fortnight. In other news I just coughed up six grand for my course fees. My account was looking healthy for the first time in years and now it looks how I imagine it will look until I retire (or given my intended career more likely die). On the plus side I don’t have to worry about bank staff asking if I want to see an investment adviser anymore…

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Adox

Since Ilford-Harmann responded to the rising price of silver a couple of months back by jacking up their prices considerably, I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement brand. Breaking with Ilford was not an easy thing to do, apart from a brief stint shooting Tri-X and Tmax when I was first learning to use an SLR, my cameras have almost never contained anything but Ilford films. I’m particularly fond of HP5 which I find staggeringly flexible and endlessly forgiving of my often epic stupidity at all stages of the photographic proccess. But change I must for my wallets sake, and while I haven’t yet found a replacement for HP5, I have at least found an alternative to Ilfords lower iso films like the venerable FP4.

Adox CHS 100 art is a Czech made film (also sold under the Efke brand in the past), avaliable in a wide range of formats, and with a bulk thirty metre 35mm roll retailing for about a third less than a comparable Ilford roll. Grain is fine, despite being developed in Rodinal, and latitude when scanned seemed really good. It was a little tricky getting it on to the film spool, some research suggests that the emulsion is thicker than normal. There are also 25 and 50 iso variants avaliable.

I was also somewhat perturbed by the softness of the negs, which isn’t particularly obvious in these sample images. Usually anything deved in Rodinal at 1-25 comes out sharp enough to cut yourself on, however some FP4 I did the same evening came out similarly soft, so I think it probably has more to do with the half bottle of wine I had drunk before I began rather than a problem with the film. The emulsion is meant to be quite delicate when wet, and not particularly tolerant of small variances in tempreature. Anyway I’ve now bought thirty metres of it, so time will tell.

All photographs taken at Nunhead cemetary.

More on my Flickr.

Analogue Intolerant

When I first became interested in photography my dad gave me his old 35mm SLR and told me to get on with it. This was about five years ago, when digital camera technology was just becoming really viable for amateurs, and using a film camera was basically an indicator that were behind the times or poor, or in my case, both. It’s been interesting to watch over the years since as people have somewhat rediscovered film as a medium. Of course there were many people for whom it never stopped being the weapon of choice, but for my generation at least there has definitely been a gradual, curious return to the darkroom.

During a recent wander in the Whitechapel area ofLondonI stumbled across a shop selling nothing but Holga cameras, those little plastic blur boxes beloved of this generation of casual film photographers. The shop was rammed with young people playing with bits of equipment and cooing over books of the blurry, oversaturated pictures these cameras tend to be favoured for. The only other time I’ve seen a camera shop so busy was a flagshipOxford streetstore during the sale season, and yet here there wasn’t a digital camera in sight. Spend a little time exploring cyberspace and you’ll find the intertoobes are bursting with growing numbers of young photographers shooting film, particularly favouring these and other toy cameras and going after the quirky effects you can achieve from techniques like cross processing.

So is this renaissance for better, or for worse? I think for the better in the utterly selfish sense that anything that keeps film manufacturers profitable and producing is good news. The day that Ilford or Kodak totally abandon producing film will be the day I retreat to my darkroom with a bottle of whiskey, a revolver, and a single bullet, never to return. Also though I think for the worse in the sense that for many of these people ‘discovering’ film it will never be a serious medium and will never go beyond being a rather queer oddity.

Nothing incapsulates this better in my view than the use of the term analogue. Sure its just a word, so why do I find it objectionable? Well as any dictionary will tell you it’s an antonym to digital, and just as digital is current, advanced and amazing and serious then film must be old, backwards, a bit cranky, kooky and funny. Analogue and its connotations encapsulate (or you might even argue define) the way people regard and use film photography. Ok, so most people don’t think about the words they use, they just pick them up, but I think there is something in the idea that words effect you. Without going too far down this post-structuralist highway to linguistic hell, language and reality are not completely isolated from one another.

Maybe its also the unpleasant associations the word Analogue has for me, specifically posing hipster wankers with film cameras they don’t really know how to use but just think are an embodiment of the superficial retro-vintagey-geek anti-techno-coolness they so desperately aspire to ( while of course also owning a Macbook, iPod and any number of other consumer fad items). Such associations are mainly the result of three years involvement in a photographic society while I was at university, when I would (thankfully infrequently) encounter such people, and (even more infrequently) have to show them how to actually use aforementioned cameras or develop their poorly exposed, blurry photographs.

So I can’t help but feel this renaissance is a mixed blessing. I know people shooting film and marvelling at how crap it looks (because they don’t how to use it) is really not something I should be devoting so much thought and time to, and that ultimately it may well benefit me. I just feel frustrated at what I’ll call the analogue movement because it feels like they’ve moved on a patch of territory some of us have been on for a long time, and have treated with care, and these newcomers are now setting fire to the grass, drawing all over the walls and playing jungle music at high volume. I guess what I’m trying to say is that film is a medium to be treated with respect. Or maybe I’m just intolerant.