Thoughts on analog photography


Analog photographs have a charm of their own. They are unreproducible, each is a unique creation, and even when several are printed from a single negative, no two are exactly the same. A high proportion of personal creativity goes into each photograph. Every picture is different – produced by a different process, on different paper, with different tonality. I love the emotion that film captures and the tonal qualities that are created by silver reacting to light. By using film I am required to contemplate and compose a portrait or landscape more thoroughly due to the limited amount of shots I can take, because every picture costs money. The cameras I use have only manual focus lenses and I need to set the aperture and the time I will expose the film. I actually decide and preconceive how the picture will look like. I prefer to shoot one or two images just right than 25 and then not even worry because I can use Photoshop later. There’s also the added benefit of having 70+ years of camera equipment to choose from.


The magic of the darkroom


In the age of Photoshop and instant digital imaging, it may seem futile to spend hours in the darkroom printing test strips and adjusting settings to find the right exposure, contrast and color balance for a single photograph. But there is something magical about the alchemy of photography and the tactility of handling the paper, mixing the chemistry and making prints by hand.


^