This is the start of my film photography project.
I have been really interested in creating photographs for over 5 years now. I love photography, I love creating images and sharing them but I am a photographer that came about in the digital age. That is in part why I wanted to start this project. Granted, my first camera was a 35 mm film camera, and with that the first year or so of my photographs were made on film. Learning manual settings and aperture rings. After that first year I moved to digital; I began working with Nikon DSLRs, being a very technology minded person I loved the flexibility of the digital work flow. That is what I learned and that system is what I developed. I can take a photograph from a shoot, edit the RAW image in lightroom and print enlargements of the final image all in the same day. The fact that I can do that now is why really resonate with technology and new media. But with the lack of restriction and the lack of scarcity in the process I think I am missing something.
This all starts to come back around to why I am returning to film photography (at least for this project). I will of course continue to shoot a huge amount of my work in a digital format, but for this project, for my personal photos, I want to practice. I appreciate the value that comes from scarcity, knowing that I only have 24 (or 36, but i’m cheap) frames in the camera at a time, knowing that each one will cost me. All of this reminds me to slow down (really it forces me, I can’t pull focus worth a darn).
The 7/24 project is simple : shoot 24 frames in 7 days… each 7 days.
My collection can be found at http://7-24photo.tumblr.com/
other than that, I really don’t have many guidelines. Some weeks there maybe a specific focus. More so the project is really just to encourage me to create. I still intend to scan my negatives after they are developed, make adjustments and post crops (as few as I can, but a successful image is more important to me than a pure photograph… I am no ‘film purist’
So I will be still be posting to billynewmanphoto.com but I will be posting only film images on my film blog . It will be a way to make a collection of my film photographs and to share them. So many of us shoot and shoot and shoot, only to have hard drives and tupperware boxes in the closet full of photographs we never see. I think that there is a lot of power in the artifact of a photograph existing where it can be seen.