still loving analogue

I have no idea how this happened! But a new love has emerged from a fixed idea that I would have rejected just a few weeks ago.

Now seriously: I spent my childhood and youth in the darkroom. My fingers constantly smelled of fixer and there was a 50 pack of film in the fridge. Later there was a roll of colored paper in the freezer. 10 years ago I sold all the utensils. Analogue was dead for me. Over. No matter how big the hipster hype has been in recent years.

Well, at some point at the end of 2014 I thought again and put in a film FM2. Worked. I just couldn't cope with the Nikon anymore. For me, Leica is the more consistent way to focus manually. So I bought an M6. But that is also another story.

There is not just one reason for my 180° turn. But I thought about how much money I spent on VSCO and derivatives. How much time I spend breathing life into the perfect digital files in post-production. And how much nicer it is to think about aperture and exposure time before taking a photo than to simply look at the display afterwards and adjust your values.

Thanks to the many helpful tips from my long-time photographic companion Marco I got back into the analog world very quickly.

The Sunday before last we used the only hours of sunshine so far in 2015 in Hamburg for a photo walk together. A I've already shown you the result. Right at the beginning of the photographic walk together, I took one of my typical backlit photos. Just hold the whole lotte in the sun and see what happens. Not a picture worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, but I think it exudes a wonderful atmosphere. All those pockets of light between the blades of grass – wonderful. You see it above.

Since I was unsure about the exposure time when using a 6x ND filter, I took the photo digitally again to be on the safe side. And afterwards tried to make it look like the film used. Here is the comparison picture.

In my humble opinion, this doesn't even come close to the charm of the film's image.

What also convinced me in my experiment was the depiction of the details from the film. I have the picture above, which by the way has one Ilford Delta 400 was created, recently on Din A3 Bamboo paper from Hahnemühle printed and then photographed with a light macro. I think that's worthy of all honor. You'll probably never get this close to a Din A3 picture.

What do I actually want to get at with this blog post? Firstly, it's quite good to question your own antiquarian decisions aka why do I care about my chatter from yesterday 🙂 Secondly: I think I've fallen in love again. No software in the world can emulate how film reacts to light. There is nothing between digital 0 and 1, between light and dark there is a whole world with analogue film!