I often find it hard to explain- the qualities of film and why I prefer shooting with my Olympus OM-10 compared to any digital camera. Maybe its the fairly mechanical process and the slowness, maybe it's the wait to see your compositions.
There's no better feeling than imaging how a photo will turn out and then seeing it come into fruition. Seeing the negative, attempting to realise it as a positive before scanning it and being over joyed with the fact that it is even better than your initial perspective of the foreground that was in front of you.
Of course there is always the flip side of this, the realisation that you didn't load your film correctly or someone saying 'what happens if you pull this up' before opening the back of your camera and exposing most of your perfectly shot roll.
But for me handing my film to a lab and then it magically being delivered back to me via the dystopian waves of We Transfer or Drop Box felt like an enigma. What happens behind the walls of the labs that process our films?
Being curiously inclined I asked and that’s how I began working for a local mini lab: Kirklees Photographic. It was here that my love for film photography was nurtured and I became obsessed with learning the process of the journey from canister to composition.
Previously only working with developing black and white film I assumed that the process of developing colour C41 negatives would be as laborious but I was pleasantly surprised with the automated process of the Noritsu V50 film processor.
Really the handling of the film came down to preparation before it going into the V50 and then from the processor into the Noritsu LS-600 Scanners.
Preparing the canisters included retrieving the end of the film strip so that this could then be taped onto a leader card before twin checking each roll with a code so that the negatives and the scans could be paired together.
Because we don't know what images are on the film and all of the canisters look virtually the same (besides stock and iso) it was vital to secure this twin check number on to the rolls to ensure that each customer got their own images sent back to them.
In terms of pushing the film through the processor this was done via the leader card. This leader card would be pulled though the machine ensuring that the film would be lead through the chemistry for it then to be developed. Within the processor there are 4 chemical baths- Colour Developer, Bleach, Fix and then Stabiliser before it would come out of the top and be dried by the heater. The process would be complete in around 10/15 minutes.
After this, the film strips would then be hung up in order for them to be scanned. Scanning the film was my favourite part of the whole process: being able to have a small insight into peoples perspectives of life via a camera and chemical process was so interesting.
Being able to have this experience has greatly improved my ability not only in an analogue practice, but has also influenced my decision making when using digital cameras. This is because I have become accustom to focusing primarily on light- with film (and photography in general) light plays a huge role in how a composition looks this is through how colour is reproduced and thinking about what camera settings to use is important. When using film you can instantly see the result, you can't test which aperture or shutter speed looks best and your restricted in what iso your using (unless pushing the film), so instead I was taught the method of Sunny 16. This is a trick to get a round about perfect exposure without using a light meter. The method follows that if you are shooting on a bright sunny day then set your aperture at F16 and work back from this, so if your film speed was iso 400 then you would be looking at around a shutter speed of 1/125. This changes for different lighting conditions but the same method follows. Having this tool at my disposal has allowed me to think less about settings when shooting digitally and have more trust in the imagery I am making. Of course it is still good to have a look back but I don't become too obsessive over getting different versions of the same image just in case the exposure is slightly off.
I am very lucky to say that I have developed everything from high end editorial fashion, commercial products to weddings, births, house parties, music events, festivals and have seen imagery from countries I didn't even know existed- all from behind the walls of a photographic lab in Huddersfield.