Taking up Photography

For the last 2 years I’ve taken up photography as a replacement hobby to programming. Though I still program at home, I still don’t do nearly as much as I did before I got a job writing code. Most of the programming I do is playing around with front end frameworks and elixir and golang, but I don’t have any active projects I’m working on, I mostly just do little challenges or proof of concepts. I’ve also taken up Linux Academy which I highly recommend.

A few months ago a friend of mine lent me her Pentax K1000. She knew that I was into digital photography and she had purchased a film camera in the 90s hoping to learn how to use it, but it never really stuck with her. Around December last year I took it the camera to take some pictures of the Chicago River near the loop and even though I found some really good spots to take pictures, I wasn’t used to manually configuring exposure without a light meter and the light meter in the camera was definitely off.

Not discouraged by the first failure, I took another roll out and downloaded a light meter app for my phone. I tried some Superia 800 film which was actually expired and out of production from Fuji Film. One of the rolls I failed to load correctly and was a bust, but the 2nd roll did load correctly and I got a handful of good images out of it. Including a photo of the Berghoff sign which ended up having colors render very well. Since then I have been hooked on film and have actually been shooting significantly more film than digital. I picked up my own camera a Pentax MX and a couple lens, a quirky sears 125mm macro lens, a kind of mediocre 28mm vivitar lens and a fairly solid 50mm Pentax SMC manual lens.

As I was taking more and more photos the cost to my pocket book was pretty hard, with the costs coming to be about 20$ a roll to develop and scan I started feeling like I need to pull back shooting film. However the subreddits I was following and the youtube accounts I was watching I saw some people talking about developing film at home. First I thought it would be impossible to do in my small apartment. I barely have enough rooms in my apartment as is, I couldn’t image making an entire darkroom. I also saw Chicago had a darkroom community, but it was 70$ a month and out of my way. So I had forgotten about developing for a couple months until I saw a video where someone was talking about using a changing bag. A changing bag is a light proof bag you can use to get your film from the canister to the developing tank which is light proof itself.

I watched a few more videos walking through how to develop film, both color and black and white. Despite being someone who really loves capturing the right color of photos, I decided to take up black and white developing since it was very beginner friendly and a lot less dependent on getting correct temperature of chemicals.

Black and White photography has been great for me, without pretty colors to rely on I am forced to focus on composition, especially texture, rule of thirds, negative space, rule of odds ( thought I personally think it should be the rule of Fibonacci numbers, I should probably write an article on this at some point).

Also Developing Black and White photography is fairly simplistic, there is a develop step that you basically dilute your chemical in water and the amount of dilution has a fairly direct relationship with how long you need to develop the film and also the more diluted your developer is the more contrast your photos have (big win because I can use less developer and get the contrast black and white photos I want) The stop step is just water, and the fixer step I use TF4 which is a reusable fixer that is pretty straight forward. I also picked up an epson scanner to scan my negatives.

So far its been a great experience, being able to go outside take some photos and go develop them, scan them and post them to social media has been a great use of weekend time. Taking photos gets me out into the city and exploring different parts, critically thinking about composition and creating something intriguing. Developing is almost meditative, I use my cell phone for tracking developing times so I don’t spend much time staring at my phone interacting on social media while I am developing. Scanning is probably my least favorite step, I spend a lot of time wiping negatives clean and then they still will have random dust or hair that I will edit out later. But I must say the look of film is so unique, especially when you get a good grainy look going on your film, I don’t think digital ever looks as organic as film does and I am glad that I was able to reduce my cost of developing a roll of film from 20$ to a dollar fifty.